The crowded Thanksgiving Service at St James, Kings Street, Sydney, for Charles Copeman, the mining executive who died aged 83 on 27 June, began with Bach’s ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ — the organ prelude of which Mendelssohn said to Schumann: ‘If life were to deprive me of hope and faith, this single chorale would replenish me with them both.’ So Michael Copeman in his eulogy of his father was able to say: ‘He never understood the words: Back down!’ Copeman will be always remembered for his courageous, liberating role in the Robe River dispute of 1986/87 when he took on the Pilbara unions that were destroying the Peko-Wallsend (Robe River) mining company, and won. In 1990 he stood for parliament where he could have made a major contribution on industrial relations, but the Liberal party never found him a winnable seat. Perhaps they thought he was too independent to bow to party discipline when it was wrong. (Asked in the 1980s why he did not join the new Business Council of Australia, he said: ‘I didn’t need any more dinners listening to Bob Hawke.’) He laid the foundation for the Australian mining boom. All Australians are in his debt.

Admirers of Nick Greiner, the former Premier of NSW, rolled up in great numbers at State Parliament House during the week to celebrate his parliamentary achievement, his rise and fall and vindication, as recorded in the new biography by Ian Hancock. There were so many that the venue had to be changed to the largest room in the building. Less surprising were those who did not turn up or perhaps were not invited. You had to look hard to find state Liberal leaders who had served in the parliament with Greiner, or party officials from his days of triumph, or federal leaders past or present. Old tensions still simmer 20 years after Greiner resigned from parliament. Yet he is plainly a major figure in the story of the Liberal party and one of Australia’s most respected reforming premiers. Premier Barry O’Farrell, who enthusiastically launched the book, listed among Greiner’s achievements his commitment to radical reform of public services (‘managerialism’), privatisation of government businesses, and ending Liberals’ obsession with socialism, communism and moral conservatism. Greiner also overcame residual religious prejudice (anti-Catholicism) and ethnic bias. (‘Never trust the Hungarian,’ the ABC’s Quentin Dempster is said to have advised Terry Metherell. Labor Premier Barrie Unsworth is still quoted as muttering ‘He should go back to where he came from.’) Hancock devotes several chapters to ‘the Metherell affair’ which brought Greiner down after an ICAC inquiry found him ‘corrupt’, a finding later comprehensively overruled by the Supreme Court (although Greiner hints with a touch of bitterness that some taint may never be expunged). Hancock agrees that the appointment of an MP to the public service in order to create a vacant seat in Parliament was politically foolish, but that the ‘corruption’ case against Greiner now seems ‘risible’.

In his speech to the gathering, Greiner recalled that after his downfall, Harry M. Miller, the showbusiness promoter and media agent, called on him to write a book about his life in politics. He wanted lots of colourful anecdotes — about Metherell, for example, swimming backstroke and naked in the parliamentary swimming pool while contemplating the political situation. Greiner turned the idea down. But although Hancock’s scholarly biography may not meet Miller’s high standards, it has many graphic details. There are weeping politicians and public servants (including Greiner himself and John Ducker, chairman of the Public Service Board); furious speeches in the ‘bear pit’ by Greiner loyalists (including Michael Yabsley denouncing anti-Greiner Independents as ‘offal’, ‘dregs’ and ‘scum’); and Kathryn Greiner boasting she would be a better Premier than her husband because unlike him she is, she insisted, ‘a real shit’. But surely she is boasting? Hancock describes a ‘bacchanalian feast’ in Greiner’s honour hosted by Alan Jones on the evening of Greiner’s resignation. When it was over Kathryn Greiner collected all the table napkins on which frenzied guests had scribbled libellous comments about their triumphant enemies. She would not make the napkins available to Hancock. But one day… who knows?

The Liberal party is lucky to have found Ian Hancock as a historian. Apart from Nick Greiner, he has written a biography of John Gorton and a history of the Liberal party organisation in NSW. One of his best essays is a measured sketch of Premier Bob Askin in The Premiers of New South Wales, edited by David Clune and Ken Turner. Hancock sees Askin primarily as a reformer of both his party and the state. He led the Liberal party out of Sydney’s North Shore and began the process which culminated in Barry O’Farrell’s sweep through the western suburbs. His government’s reforms included setting up a permanent law reform commission and (Hancock could have added) the first Cultural Grants Advisory Committee which became the model for the later Australian Council for the Arts. He also introduced consumer protection and pollution controls. Hancock acknowledges that Askin was a rough diamond, a working-class arriviste.

On the allegations of cash for favours, he notes there is no proof of any of the easily made accusations, although on balance he tends to the view ‘no smoke without fire’. Summing up, he says Askin demonstrated that a Liberal Premier could be a reformer without a university degree or a refined accent, let alone ‘wearing pink hot pants in Parliament’. Hancock’s portrait is of the Askin I knew and, with the obvious reservations, admired.