Harold Morgan

"Given the odour surrounding the name of Alan Bond, it isn’t surprising that when Bond took over Bell Group, and with it the Caterpillar dealership, the parent company in the United States announced that it would withdraw the franchise. Moving with characteristic ruthlessness, Caterpillar gave Bond only three months’ notice to come to an agreement with the newly anointed dealer: a US company, Morgan Equipment. The federal government was far from pleased. The treasurer, Paul Keating, issued a statement saying that the replacement of an Australian-owned with a foreign-owned company was ‘inconsistent with foreign investment guidelines’.20 Meanwhile, the Bell Group managing director, David Aspinall, described Caterpillar’s actions as ‘tantamount to rape’, and Bond announced his intention to challenge the validity of the termination notice in the Victorian Supreme Court.21 Stokes was at the time the majority owner and a director of a public company called Austrim, which was associated with the Nylex Group – manufacturers of clothes, fabrics, hoses and that Australian iconic brand, the Esky. While Morgan Equipment and Bond scrapped over the price for the dealership, Stokes and his fellow director and svengali Ken Parker manoeuvred for position. When the dust settled over the fight between Morgan Equipment and Bond, Austrim emerged owning 30 per cent of the franchise, with Morgan owning the other 70 per cent. Then, in the final weeks of the greedy decade it was announced that Austrim would sell its 30 per cent share in the dealership to Stokes’ ACE. Three weeks later, on 16 January 1990, the news was released that Stokes had bought the lot. He had paid Morgan Equipment’s owner Harold Morgan $50 million for the whole company, including the Caterpillar dealership. The Caterpillar head office clearly smiled on the deal: there was no suggestion of their revisiting the ownership of the franchise. Stokes smoothly slipped in."

"In Perth, WesTrac’s longtime general manager Jim Walker had to fix the problem at long range. Walker was an example of Stokes’s philosophy that everyone in the business deserved a chance to run the show: he had started as an apprentice diesel fitter and worked his way to being sales manager under Harold Morgan before taking the top job for Stokes. He was living proof of what Stokes would say in his Guildford speech years later. In desperation, Walker used his own experience as a guide. He sent two young ‘goers’ who had been apprentices of the year, Mark Hatfield and Peter Kosick, to work in the Tianjin workshop. It was a turning point. Hatfield and Kosick were young, polite and practical, and led by example ‘on the tools’. Their instinct was to work with the locals rather than order them around. They picked up basic Mandarin as their new workmates picked up advanced mechanical skills. The accidental psychology hit the spot. It gave the new Chinese workers alongside them an ideal role model — by showing, not telling. Within months, the difference was obvious. Over the next couple of years, the workshop would become the heart of an import–export business that reconditioned used machinery from all over the Pacific and resold it on the world market."