Bob Hawke
obituary
Prime minister of Australia who
won four consecutive elections and ushered in a decade of economic and social
reform
@christopherzinn Bob Hawke, who has died aged 89, went from
being a popular trade union leader to become the Australian Labor party’s most
successful prime minister, winning four election victories from 1983 to 1991.
He energised his country and his party by ushering in a decade of significant
economic and social reform.
By
dint of his charismatic personality, powers of persuasion and, for a Labor
figure, unusually strong relationships with both business and unions, Hawke
forged a powerful consensus that defined his leadership style. With his natural
diplomacy, he navigated Australia into a wider world by building alliances,
particularly with Asia, and he modernised the economy, integrating it into
overseas markets through reducing tariff protection and floating the Australian
dollar.
His government also oversaw stronger environmental controls, overruling
Tasmania’s plans to build a controversial dam in the wilderness. He led the
widespread reform of education and training and even advocated a treaty – still
unrealised – with Indigenous Australia.
Hawke’s enduring success in the polls enabled him to shrug off
criticisms from the party grassroots that by moving to the right and embracing
competition he had compromised Labor’s traditional ideals. He said: “Socialist
is not a word I would use to describe myself.” It was his understanding of what
the Australian people wanted that led to his record re-election. He was
eventually undone in 1991 when challenged by Paul Keating, Labor treasurer since 1983,
after reneging on a deal to step down in the latter’s favour.
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The legacy of Hawke and Keating was that privatisation
and deregulation opened up the economy and set it on a strong course.
The reasons for Hawke’s fall from popular grace are still
contested. In 2015 he claimed he had been dumped by Labor MPs because he had
attacked the “innate prejudice” of some cabinet colleagues in his steps towards
reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. But Hawke was not helped by a
faltering economy at the end of the 1980s. Restructuring the trade unions and
economic reforms had created 2m new jobs but also led to a recession, high
interest rates and the highest unemployment since the 1930s.
Supremely self-confident, Hawke had a well-known love of drink
and women. His second wife and biographer, Blanche d’Alpuget, said in 2015 that
the more intrusive media of today would have rendered him unelectable. In his
memoirs, Hawke speculated that the world record he had set for downing the
equivalent of a yard of ale, while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, probably
endeared him to more voters than any other single act.
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The convivial Hawke was a great celebrator and sports fan. He oversaw the
contentious bicentenary of the arrival of the convict fleet in 1988, the
introduction in 1984 of Advance Australia Fair as the Australian national
anthem, replacing God Save the Queen, and the opening of the new parliament
house in Canberra by the Queen. He was perhaps best loved for a seemingly boozy
assertion on television early in his first term, after Australia had won the
America’s Cup yachting trophy, that any boss who did not give staff the day off
was “a bum”.
His style was summed up by one ministerial colleague who found
him gregarious, confident and without pretensions as he shared his trade union
colleagues’ love of the simple things in life, such as football, horses and
beer. “Hawke as prime minister was corporatist and bureaucratic by instinct and
presidential in style,” said the former health minister Neal Blewett. “He was a
supreme optimist, with an unquenchable faith in his ability to negotiate a way
through intractable problems ... He was also a complete pragmatist, with only a
few passions and less ideology.”
But Hawke had authority with the people as well as their
support. Graduating from Oxford with a thesis on wage-fixing in Australia, he
joined the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 1958 and after a decade as
president, 1970-80, decided to enter politics.He was elected as Labor MP in
October 1980 for the Melbourne seat of Wills. He had already served as
president of the Australian Labor party from 1973 to 1978 and was one
of the best-known and most admired public figures in the country.
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His political views were passionate though not always predictable. He opposed
Australia’s entry into the Vietnam war and campaigned for racial equality in
South Africa. At the same time he was a strong supporter of both the
US-Australian alliance and the state of Israel.
In 1979, the strain of his workload and his alcoholism, which he
admitted in a TV interview, led to his physical collapse. His honesty and
subsequent rehabilitation in his early years as an MP was rewarded with even
higher ratings in the opinion polls, overshadowing both the Liberal prime
minister, Malcolm Fraser, and the Labor opposition leader, Bill Hayden.
Hawke sought to depose Hayden as leader, and succeeded, after a
long and bruising fight, in March 1983. The same day, Fraser, who was not yet
aware of the change, had called a sudden election, hoping to face Hayden
instead of the popular Hawke. It was a spectacular miscalculation.
A dejected Hayden described the public feeling against Fraser as
such that “a drover’s dog could lead the Labor party to victory”. He might have
been right, but Hawke romped home on a landslide – with Labor taking 75 of the
125 seats – to become prime minister, fulfilling an ambition and prediction he
had made as a 15-year-old.
One of his first moves was to call a summit of politicians,
unions and employer groups, to forge a lasting accord around economic policy
and deliver the kind of micro-economic reforms that would define his term.
He used his authority, at first cautiously, to reverse the
traditional party reliance on tariffs to protect industry and jobs from
overseas competition. Those working in textiles and motor vehicles were most
affected.
Despite his background as a union leader, Hawke believed, with
Keating, that the only way to make the structural changes necessary to
competently manage the ailing economy was to work closely with both business
and the workers, and to stress the mutual benefits of consensus.
His government started deregulating the financial system by
exposing it to competition, as had long been recommended but not implemented.
First came the floating of the Australian dollar on the world market, rather
than tying its value to any standard, then the removal of foreign exchange-rate
controls and the entry of foreign banks into Australia. The process accelerated
the integration of the economy into the world and reshaped Australia’s
relationships with Asia, Europe and the US. Hawke was instrumental in forming
Apec, the Asia-Pacific Economic forum, in 1989.
Other reforms with lasting implications were the privatisation
of state-run industries, including the airline Qantas, and selling off the
state-owned Commonwealth Bank. Hawke also increased funding for schools, saw
the introduction of the Medicare public health system and provided more targeted
financial help for the most disadvantaged.
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He was at the helm for Australia’s effective public health campaigns as the
response to the Aids epidemic grew into a major political issue. In 1990 he
quickly supported the UN with armed forces in the first Iraq war.
His close-knit relationship with the ambitious and
confrontational Keating made many of these changes possible, but Hawke’s dream
run came to an end as the good economic times began to sour. At a 1987 election
campaign launch, Hawke’s overconfidence scored an own goal when he mistakenly
proclaimed: “We set ourselves this first goal: by 1990 no Australian child will
be living in poverty.” He should have said “... need live in poverty”, and his
departure from the prepared speech cost his credibility deeply.
Hawke’s agenda had benefited from the disarray within the
divided Liberal party, but he also fought internal battles with Labor’s
socialist factions. One of the bitterest was the pilots’ strike in 1989, when
the government sided with the airlines to end the damaging industrial action
and maintain pay restraint. His close friendship with leading business figures,
especially Sir Peter Abeles, who owned one of the airlines involved, hardly
endeared him to the left.
As the economy deteriorated, the rivalry between Hawke and
Keating increased. In 1988, Hawke had agreed, in secret, to stand down after
the 1990 election, but he delayed and reneged on the deal after taking umbrage
at a typically provocative speech by Keating.
History repeated itself and, just as Hawke had challenged Hayden
10 years earlier, Keating now contested the leadership. He lost, and left the
frontbench. But the damage was done and Hawke, without his powerful treasurer,
was seen as bereft of both energy and ideas, and his popularity declined.
After a lacklustre response to the tax-and-spend policies of the
new Liberal leader, John Hewson, Hawke was again challenged by Keating in
December 1991 and narrowly defeated, in a sure sign that his colleagues had
lost faith. In a tearful press conference, Hawke declared he had known the
Australian electorate better than anyone and, in retrospect, given the
disruption and chaos of the Labor leadership in recent years, few might
disagree with him.
Two months after losing the premiership, he resigned his
parliamentary seat. In a full life after office, he took up a number of board
positions and consultancies which, along with various business ventures, made
him a wealthy man. He largely stayed away from politics while Keating was in power
but later became more prominent at campaign launches and in the media.
In 2009 he became only the third person, after the former prime
minster Gough Whitlam and Whitlam’s wife, Margaret, to be awarded life
membership of his party. At the ceremony, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd,
called Hawke “the heart and soul of the Labor party”. He was appointed
Companion of the Order of Australia in 1979.
Hawke was born in Bordertown in rural South Australia, son of
Clem, a Congregationalist minister, and Edith (nee Lee), known as Ellie, a
schoolteacher. His uncle was a Labor premier of Western Australia in the 1950s.
Hawke’s older brother, Neil, died of meningitis when he was
young, and his mother’s belief in her surviving son’s abilities and destiny was
said to have stoked his resilience. A serious motorbike crash when he was 17
led him to make the most of his talents. After Perth Modern school, he went to
the University of Western Australia, where he gained degrees in law and
economics, and then took a BLitt at University College, Oxford (1953-56).
In 1956 he married Hazel Masterson, whom he had met as a
teenager in the Congregational Youth Fellowship in Perth. She went on to become
a popular public figure as the “first lady” and later in her own right as a
campaigner for charities and Alzheimer’s research. They divorced in 1995.
Hawke subsequently married d’Alpuget, who had written a
biography of him in 1982, and in 2010 produced another volume on his years as
prime minister. Later in life, he thanked Keating for throwing him out of
office and giving him the “opportunity of marrying the woman with whom I’d
fallen in love”.
He is survived by Blanche and three children from his first
marriage, Susan, Stephen and Rosslyn. His son Robert died in infancy.
• Robert James Lee
Hawke, politician, born 9 December 1929; died 16 May 2019
CULLED FROM THE LONDON GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERS
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