Besides the climate, nothing so reminded me of besieged Rhodesia in the mid-1960s, with its sanctions busting business culture and its paranoiac settler society, than my first few days in Perth in 1986, the high noon for buccaneering pirates like Alan Bond and Laurie Connell, working in close communion with a new type of Labor government led by one Brian Burke, with its own distinctive version of ‘public private partnerships’ in dodgy deals as the government’s preferred route to increased union power and continued political dominance.