Premier Mike Rann appears to understand police, and the issues that plague them. But will his insight favour hard-working cops when it comes to this year’s EB4 negotiations?

Bargaining on a decent relationship

A young Mike Rann used to hear all the gruesome stories of the dead bodies his great-grandfather, a British police sergeant, fished out of the Thames. Whether they were tales of murder or suicide, the details terrified him.

But, by the time he was 12, Rann wanted to be a policeman – and no less than a detective superintendent.

“I was aiming high, even as a 12-year-old,” he says. “But, later on, I kind of changed, and decided at the age of 14 what I wanted to be: a journalist, and a Labor MP.”

Rann, of course, would follow through with his latter boyhood ambition, and so never learn about policing from the inside. For his life in politics, however, particularly as a premier, he would need a better-than-average understanding of the police force – and, maybe, its employees.

In his university days, when he supported himself with bar work, he saw police deal with the drunk, unruly and violent. So he at least went into politics with an image of officers confronting the perils of their job.

But, most cops, cynical by nature, reject the idea that politicians understand anything about the thin blue line. Rann, not likely to their surprise, considers himself “substantially educated about police issues”.

He speaks of a “very close”, years-long relationship with Salisbury police, and learning much from officers such as Senior Sergeant Dave Haebich. And, while individual rank-and-file police access to a premier might seem impossible, Rann says he welcomes cops’ personal input.

“And I get it,” he says. “Quite often police officers will come up to me and talk about the issues they have to deal with, and I think that’s a good thing. They tell me about some of the problems they have in terms of achieving prosecutions, and so on.

“These are people who have been asked to serve us, to save us under the most difficult conditions, and put their lives on the line for us. I care about them, because I know how much we need them.

“I also know how much dedication is involved in being a police officer. So I have an empathy and a sympathy for the police.”

Empathetic or not, Rann certainly had cause to become so one night in his Salisbury home in 1992. The then-Bannon Government minister lay in bed, sensed someone’s presence in his room, and woke to discover two male burglars.

One stood armed with a beer bottle; and in the arms of the other was Rann’s VCR. Downstairs were his son and daughter.

“I was, at that stage, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs,” he says, “and I grabbed a spear that had been given to me. I managed to get both of them (the burglars) out of the house.”

And, in his electorate of Ramsay, Rann twice came up against the infuriating offence of motor vehicle theft. Illegal users took one of his cars from the Salisbury Football Club, and another from the Salisbury Interchange.

“The industrial relations side of things...will be handled fairly, decently and honestly.”

In the lead-up to his 2002 election victory, Rann attended scores of public meetings which, he says, reinforced the tough-on-law-and-order stand he had taken “right through my career”.

Of course, in campaign time, elector demand for hardline law-and-order policies is nothing new. But Rann speaks of the strong inference he drew from every gathering: that the people were “sick and tired of being done over” by the criminal element.

With his well-publicized rejections of some parole board recommendations, and his government’s role in the Nemer case, Rann seems, in some measure, to have met the people’s demands.

“I’m basically tilting the balance back on the side of the victims and the police,” he says. “And, of course, the lawyers hate me. You only have to listen to statements by the Law Society, and people in the Bar Association, who have condemned me for what I’ve done.”

And one might pick up on Rann’s view of lawyers by a quip he makes about his cousin’s son joining the police force in England. “He was going to be a lawyer,” he says, “(but) he’s doing something much, much more useful.”

Clearly, Rann has plenty of detractors among the legal fraternity and civil libertarians. He has not yet, however, made industrial enemies of the police, although the Police Association had to push his government hard last year to fund 200 extra recruits.

Now, with EB4 on the horizon, relations will, of course, have scope to sour. But Rann insists that, so far, he has not had “any bad dealings with the Police Association”.

“The industrial relations side of things has been and will be handled fairly, decently and honestly,” he says. “When it comes down to fair bargaining, that should be done on the basis of a decent relationship between both sides.”

Regardless of how relations shape up through the bargaining process, Rann naturally wants police to see him as on their side. He hopes they get that message from what civil libertarians likely see as Rann Government failings: jail time for shooter, Paul Nemer, expanded DNA legislation, and funding for the 200 recruits.

Moreover, he aims to get legislation through parliament this year to allow for tougher sentencing of offenders convicted of assaulting police.

“I think it is really important for the police to know they’ve got a government that’s on their side,” he says. “That hasn’t always been the case in Australia. There’s been some serious discords between police and governments on policy issues.”

Rann detractors are never likely to bother the seasoned political campaigner or, indeed, steer him off course. He comes with the classic rhinoceros hide, known to cover so many politicians.

In Rann’s case, it likely started to form in his school days on the rugby field. He admits he played badly and frequently ended up flattened into the mud. But one had to “stand up and keep going” – the perfect grounding for politics.

Born in Kent, England, Rann immigrated with his mother and war-veteran father to New Zealand as a nine-year-old, in 1962. Later, at the University of Auckland, he undertook political studies, in which he graduated with a BA and MA (Hons).

He started his working life as a political journalist with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, before a move to South Australia in 1977. From then, he served as a press secretary, speech writer and adviser for three Labor premiers, beginning with the late Don Dunstan.

Rann made his foray into politics proper when he won the seat of Briggs (now Ramsay) in 1985 and served under then-premier, John Bannon. Soon after Bannon’s political demise, amid the State Bank controversy in 1992, Rann took on the deputy leadership of the party – then in opposition.

By 1994, he had become Leader of the Opposition, a job he held until the election of March 6, 2002, when he won the state’s top job.

Dubbed Media Mike, he next faces the voters in 2006, and will no doubt appear to live up to the name. But of the media treatment of police, he seems far from impressed.

“For a long time,” he says, “there were people in the media, and elsewhere, who tried to make their job harder than it already is, by unfair criticisms.

“Police officers have to make judgements on the spur of the moment, and under perilous conditions. It’s very easy for people to take pot-shots at the police yet, when you’re in trouble, they’re the first people you call upon.”