When John Hill rose in Parliament to answer in Question Time, I knew that within a minute the Opposition would be rendered silent with boredom.

I nicknamed him the anaesthetist, a role that has been taken over by Deputy Premier John Rau.

It’s a valuable political skill and in this book – On Being a Minister: Behind the Mask – he explains how he did it. To other Ministers he was Mr Clean Desk and he explains how he did that too.

Not that the book is boring. It’s one of the few books I’ve read in one day. It’s a rollicking good read and rates up there with Barry Cohen’s How To Become Prime Minister as a manual for the aspiring politician. Along the way John Hill’s intelligence, wisdom and urbanity shines and it is even self-deprecatory in places. The ending is as heart-warming as Bert Facey’s in A Fortunate Life.

Hill is gracious about his successor as Health Minister, Jack Snelling, as he should be because during Hill’s tenure the rigours of budgetary process were suspended for his Department. Hill’s predecessor, Lea Stevens, was ground down by being required to meet savings targets during a period when demographics, technology and rising expectations were pushing health expenditure so far ahead of CPI and revenue that by 2032 health would consume the entire State Budget (see p. 58 for the details).

How did Hill manage to convince the leadership group to suspend the rigours for him ? Hilly made most of the bad publicity in hospitals go away when his charm was hitched to this largesse. Also, he was a bloke in a blokey government and Lea wasn’t. Apres moi le deluge, but it took Hill’s political skills to get the largesse. Hill objects to being called Mr Teflon by Advertiser political reporter the late Greg Kelton, but I think the moniker is fair.

Hill is right to observe that the Rann Government was so strong partly because there were no leaks from Cabinet – until 2010. Hill writes “In politics the truly successful ministers are the ones who fall in love with their portfolios, because they then become passionate about their responsibilities, making it easier for them to persuade others.” The downside of this is that some Ministers go native in their portfolios and think that their Department is more important than other departments. Worse, they become hand puppets of their chief executive and the interest groups around their portfolio. The Government loses its bearings unless the Premier, Treasurer and Cabinet colleagues can restrain the passionate Ministers.

When I attended one of my first Caucus meetings in 1990, there was blue between a backbencher and Minister Frank Blevins, in which the backbencher claimed that Blevins’ position was contrary to party policy. “Oh, we’re going to fight dirty now, are we ?” Frank replied.

I was reminded of this when Hill recounts how he worked assiduously and unnoticed in Opposition as environment spokesman to make party policies in his shadow portfolio. In Government these policies became unmarked IEDs around which Mining Minister Paul Holloway had to navigate. The whispering Minister could have throttled Hilly and his quietly-crafted policies.

Hill writes that if a Minister gets the policy right, the politics will follow, but then cites an egregious case to the contrary, Keith Hospital, and insightfully concedes that it became a political fiasco because he and the ALP didn’t understand the country and how country people would reason.

Hill presents himself as an Olympian independent in the Labor caucus and touches only lightly on his membership of the Old Machine faction, the Centre Left: a faction as hairy and ugly as all the others. His pre-selection for Kaurna was not the Immaculate Conception; he was conceived in factional sin like the rest of us. Those in the Labor Party whose efforts to get the numbers in the unions and sub-branches secured the pre-selection of John Hill, among others, might reply to Hill’s disdain in the verse of Rudyard Kipling:

“Then it’s Tommy this. An’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy how’s yer soul?’

“But it’s the ‘thin red line of ‘eroes’ when the drums begin to roll,”

Hill says he will be vindicated in the long run by lower financial costs and maintenance being built into the hospital contract – only time will tell

It’s refreshing to read in his preamble a break with the centralist orthodoxy of Whitlam Labor: “Australia would be much better off if he agreed on budgets, settled on national goals, established fair ways of measuring them, and then left the states to work out how to deliver against those goals rather than seeing the States as an impediment to national growth (as every federal politican does, regardless of party). I argued that the states ought to be embraced as a means of experimentation and innovation…all states should be able to learn from each other through a process of competitive tension, about what works and what doesn’t.”

Hill is eloquent in defence of hacks, namely, those who work in ministerial and electorate offices and in defence of having that experience before running for Parliament: “I was amused when Steven Marshall, the MP for Norwood, following his election as Opposition leader said his inexperience was a bonus because he wasn’t a political hack like Jay Weatherill. What spin! How ridiculous it would sound if anyone were to apply that logic to any other role. ‘My lack of experience as a surgeon/driver/furniture manufacturer is an advantage! That other guy who spent years learning and practicing his craft is just a hack!’”

Hill’s wise remarks on government drivers should be compulsory reading for those who aspire to parliamentary positions that entitle them to a chauffeur.

Hill’s monument is the NRAH. His book gives a lucid exposition of South Australia’s infernal health politics and he is right to observe that, at the 2010 election, the strongest opposition to the NRAH was among older women. He says he will be vindicated in the long run by lower financial costs and by maintenance being built into the contract. Only time will tell. He argues that opposition to the NRAH will diminish and vanish like opposition to the tram extension to North Terrace and Hindmarsh.

He relives his traumatic experience of being the target of a privileges committee in 2003. Opposition frontbencher Iain Evans alleged that Hill had misled Parliament. Evans had asked Hill if he had received a recommendation from the Environment Department about a low-level waste repository. Hill answered “The answer is No” instead of the Kevin Foley formula “To the best of my knowledge.” Foley had nailed Deputy Premier Graham Ingerson for misleading the House a few years earlier, employing the rarely-used device of a privileges committee, and the Liberals in Opposition were keen to equalise – they still are.

It turned out that Hill’s 1500-page incoming minister brief from the Department had canvassed a low-level waste repository and Evans had obtained it under FOI and read the lot.

I was on the Privileges Committee and Hilly is rightly grateful to Pat Conlon for dominating the Committee’s deliberations and bludgeoning the other members with his compelling blarney. I couldn’t get a word in.

As Hill told the House: “It would be like giving someone a set of encyclopaedias for Christmas and then 12 months later asking whether they had read a particular page.”

Hill was cleared but, in his book, he describes it as a near-death experience for him and I know that’s how he felt at the time. He writes that it had the effect of making his office sharper in its operations. He writes that he liked hiring lawyers and journalists for his ministerial staff because they are people who are paid to be paranoid.

His valuing and defending public servants was another of John Hill’s strengths as a minister. Although he had Labor Party people in his Ministerial office, he was prepared to trust public servants whose politics he didn’t know – or want to know – but who appeared competent and his trust was rewarded. He dislikes those public servants who, contrary to the conventions, tell the Minister they are supporters of his political camp and affect an intimacy on the basis of it: “What I didn’t like as a minister is that implied conspiracy that someone [a public servant] on your side of the political fence will assume during meetings. It always made me feel uncomfortable.”

He cites examples of Liberal MPs railing at public servants in Parliament and the media and drily observes that there are about 100,000 public servants in S.A. and they and their families vote. In 2002, senior public servants in my principal Department had never got over Premier John Olsen’s reference to some of their number as “servants of deceit.”

Hill writes that Labor’s 2002 sacking of Liberal-appointed Geoff Spring as C.E. at Education was a mistake :“I am certain that if this effective operator had been allowed to continue he would have delivered powerfully for us.”

As a former left-wing activist in the teachers’ union, Hill knows that Labor governments can never satisfy the Australian Education Union.

Hill wisely writes that “you don’t get judged so much on what happens when you are a minister, but how you deal with it”.

“A crisis is what happens when the minister doesn’t deal effectively, openly and completely with a problem. You have to be decisive – and get involved. Generally for operational matters ministers should be at arm’s length, but when problems emerge they have to get their hands dirty.”

I think Hill’s assessments about most of the personalities is correct, such as John Bannon, Mike Rann, Pat Conlon, Kevin Foley, Jay Weatherill and John Rau. As Hill writes about his Cabinet colleagues it becomes plain that the Rann Government worked well because, with exceptions, the Ministers rather liked one another. Hill concentrates on the senior ministers who provide colour, movement and quotable rants, but nothing is heard of Steph Key, Jennifer Rankine, Gail Gago, Trish White or Carmel Zollo, and Jane Lomax-Smith, Chloe Fox and Grace Portolesi are mentioned only in passing.

My only quibble with his assessments is that he seems to think my legislation suffered at the hands of the Upper House and this might have been owing to my combativeness and failure to schmooze the independents and minor parties. On the contrary, summoning the genie of populism often caused the Upper House Liberals to surrender and, if they didn’t, Nick Xenophon, Family First and, yes, I’ll admit it, Ann Bressington, gave my bills a saloon passage. I spent many happy hours canvassing from office-to-office in the red place, supporting their private members bills and sometimes letting a private member’s bill on the same topic replace a government bill of my own and be dealt with in Government Business.

I didn’t bother to lobby the Green or the Democrat, just like it was no use Hill’s talking to the Liberals about his legislation after Liberal Upper House MP Stephen Wade became health spokesman (see p 181). Indeed, when the Liberals are around the Cabinet table again, they will ask “How was all authority removed from the minister and the government in this matter and vested in a freebooting statutory officer?” and the answer will be: Stephen Wade. For, as John Rau correctly observed, our Upper House is forever drawing pirate patches, gap-tooths and goatees on government legislation, especially his.

One can hardly blame Rau for not touring the red side canvassing support; it would be futile in the current makeup of the Legislative Council. But neither is the defeat or amendment of Labor’s legislation in the red place the fault of our Upper House team and its competent and hard-working former leader, Gail Gago.

The 2008 challenge to Rann was real and close to fruition

Hilly cites a Hansard exchange between Isobel Redmond and me and implies that it was disproportionate of me to conclude it with the words: “Yet another smear under parliamentary privilege. You have a reputation for it.” I think Hilly had left Parliament when Isobel accused the Electoral Commissioner of corruption without a substratum of fact.

John Hill seems to me to minimize the aborted night-of-the-long-drinks Kevin Foley challenge to Mike Rann. I don’t know who “laughed it off with the hangover” but it was real and close to fruition, closer than it had been in 2001 when I was pleased to be told by one of my mates who wanted Foley to lead “You are the rotten, rusty peg on which Mike Rann is clinging to office.” This mate is shouting me lunch when the mean season ends.

John Hill is perceptive about the Adelaide media, especially the Matt & Dave show on ABC891 and the advertorial program on Channel Seven, the name of which escapes me. Hill writes that his press secretary would send him to media interviews with the parting words “Try not to be interesting!” He describes the Matt & Dave ‘twist-and-turn’ technique, but one aspect that Hilly doesn’t mention is Matt’s coming at a Minister from one point of view and then, when the Minister has parried Matt, Dave’s stabbing the Minister in the back from the opposite point of view. The Minister who handled this best was Amanda Vanstone, who, as Matt and Dave attacked her from opposite viewpoints on the question of asylum seekers, fell silent. After what seemed a long time of Matt and Dave spruiking their respective viewpoints, they asked if the Minister was still on the line. After another pause, long enough to trigger the ABC’s off-air alarm, Amanda replied that she was “waiting for you two blokes to sort it out among yourselves”.

Hill forcefully illustrates the misuse of photography and film by the Adelaide media to try to fortify pre-determined and strained story lines.

Hill helped other Ministers with their interviews by drawing their attention to the American political manual Don’t Think Of An Elephant, which he summarises in his book: “The title is the key to understanding his thesis. If you say to someone ‘don’t think of an elephant’, then the first thing they think of is an elephant. You cannot help it…The trick is to answer the question without using the negative language and assumptions of the questioner…To journalists everything that happens is a ‘crisis’, ‘scandal’ or ‘blow-out’. I cringe when I see Ministers in interviews using the language of the media to explain the situations they face. The phrase ‘there is no crisis’ screams ‘crisis’ as loudly as if the minister had agreed ‘there is a crisis’. Even worse, not only is there a crisis but a minister is in denial.”

Although he copped a 13.3 per cent swing against him in his electorate of Kaurna in 2010, that wasn’t much above the average swing against Ministers in the general election of that year, and Hill had worked his electorate well, starting in 1992 as a candidate, so it was a fall from a very high vote. Hill canvasses the various campaigning techniques but concludes: “Nothing beats face-to-face canvassing at the front door. People remember it and it helps them believe you are real and seriously want their vote.”

I, for one, hope it will never be eclipsed by social media. His account towards the end of the book of what he and his family suffered from vexatious constituents would put anyone off running for public office.

John Hill should be well pleased with how he fulfilled his vocation. The State is better for his contribution.

Michael Atkinson is Speaker of the House of Assembly. He was Attorney-General in the Rann Government.