Bob Hawke
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Robert James Lee Hawke (born December 9 1929), Australian trade union leader and politician, was the 23rd Prime Minister of Australia. After a decade as leader of the Australian union movement, he entered politics and was Prime Minister within three years. He became by far the longest-serving Labor Prime Minister, and was second-longest-serving Prime Minister overall until December 2004, when John Howard overtook him. But critics continued to dismiss him as a populist, whose focus on "consensus" resulted in the abandonment of many traditional Labor values.
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Early life
Hawke was born in Bordertown, a small town in South Australia near the Victorian border. His father was a Congregationalist minister. His uncle, Albert Hawke, was Labor Premier of Western Australia from 1953 to 1959 and was a close friend of Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, who was in many ways Bob Hawke's role model. Hawke's mother, Ellie, had an almost messianic belief in her son's destiny and this contributed to his supreme self-confidence throughout his career.
Hawke was raised in Perth and attended the high school Perth Modern School and completed undergraduate degrees in Law and Arts (economics) at the University of Western Australia. He joined the Labor Party in 1947. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1953, he went to Oxford University and completed a Bachelor of Letters at University College with a thesis on wage-fixing in Australia. His academic achievements were probably outweighed by the notoriety he achieved as the holder of a world record for the fastest consumption of beer, two and a half pints in twelve seconds.
On his return to Australia in 1956, Hawke married Hazel Masterton, with whom he had three children. They moved to Canberra while Hawke started studying for a doctorate at the Australian National University. But Hawke abandoned the degree in 1958 when he was offered a post as research officer at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) headquarters in Melbourne. His ambition, self-belief and larrikin nature were already obvious. John Button, Industry Minister in the Hawke Labor government, recalled Hawke holding court in the bar of a dingy pub that served as a Labor and union hangout, and offering him the post of Attorney-General in a future Hawke government.
Trade union leader
Part of Hawke's work at the ACTU was the presentation of its annual case for higher wages to the national wages tribunal, the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. He attained such success and prominence in this role that in 1969 he was encouraged to run for ACTU President, despite the fact that he had never held office in a trade union, or indeed ever worked for a wage.
He was elected to the presidency of the ACTU in 1969 on a modernising platform, by a narrow margin (399 to 350) and with the support of the left of the union movement, including some associated with the Communist Party.
Although a self-declared socialist, Hawke's approach to its principles was pragmatic and he was concerned to make any possible improvements to workers' lives from within the traditional institutions of government, rather that to any idealogical theory. He opposed the Vietnam war, but was a strong supporter of the US-Australian alliance, and also an emotional supporter of Israel.
In industrial matters, Hawke continued to demonstrate a preference for and considerable skill at negotiation, and was generally liked and respected by employers as well as the unions he advocated for. As early as 1972 speculation began that he would soon enter Parliament and become Labor leader. But while his career continued successfully, his heavy use of alcohol and his notorious womanising placed considerable strains on his family life.
In 1973 Hawke became Federal President of the Labor Party. When the Whitlam government was defeated in 1975, Whitlam initially offered the Labor leadership to Hawke, although it was not within Whitlam's power to decide who would succeed him. Hawke decided not to enter Parliament at that time, a decision he soon regretted. The strain of this period took its toll, and in 1979 he suffered a physical collapse.
This shock led Hawke to make a sustained and ultimately successful effort to conquer his alcoholism - John Curtin was his inspiration in this as in other things. He was helped in this by his relationship with the writer Blanche d'Alpuget, who in 1982 published an admiring biography of Hawke. His popularity with the public was unaffected, and polling suggested that he was a far more popular politician than either Bill Hayden, the new Labor leader, or the incumbent Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Indeed Hawke had been the most popular man in Australia for nearly ten years by the time he entered Parliament.
When in 1975, in one of the most controversial political actions since federation, the Whitlam government was dismissed by the Governor General, Hawke was influential in averting national strike action.
Hawke was elected to the House of Representative for the Melbourne seat of Wills at the 1980 election, and was immediately elected to the Opposition front bench. Hayden's failure to defeat Fraser at that election gave Hawke his opportunity. He enlisted the support of the powerful New South Wales right-wing Labor "machine" to undermine Hayden, whom he famously described as "a lying cunt with a limited future." In July 1982 Hawke made his first challenge for the Labor leadership, losing by four votes.
By the end of 1982, however, it was obvious that Fraser was planning an early election, and Labor MPs began to fear that with Hayden as leader they would lose. In February 1983, on the same day that Fraser called an election for 5 March, Hayden was persuaded to resign and Hawke became Labor leader without opposition. He went on to win the election in a landslide, becoming Prime Minister less than three years after entering Parliament.
Prime Minister
The inagural days of the Hawke government were distinctly different from those of the Whitlam era. Rather than immediately initiating extensive reform programmes, Hawke announced that Fraser's pre-election concealment of the budget deficit meant that many of Labor's election commitments would have to be deferred. Hawke managed to persuade the Labor caucus to divide the ministry into two tiers, with only the most important Ministers attending regular cabinet meetings. This was to avoid what Hawke viewed as the unwieldy nature of the 27-member Whitlam cabinet. The caucus under Hawke also exhibited a much more formalised system of parliamentary factions, which significantly altered the dynamics of caucus operations.
Hawke used his great authority to carry out a substantial set of policy changes. Accounts from ministers indicate that while Hawke was not usually the driving force for economic reform (that impetus coming from the Treasurer Paul Keating and Industry Minister John Button), he took the role of reaching consensus and providing political guidance on what was electorally feasible and how best to sell it to the public, at which he was highly successful.
Keating and Hawke provided a study in contrasts. Hawke was a Rhodes Scholar; Keating left high school early. Hawke's enthusiasms were cigars, horse racing and all forms of sport; Keating preferred classical architecture and collecting antique Swiss cuckoo clocks. Hawke was consensus-driven; Keating revelled in aggressive debate. Hawke was a lapsed Protestant; Keating was a practicing Catholic. Despite, or because of, their differences, the two formed an effective political partnership.
Among other things, the Hawke Government floated the Australian dollar, deregulated the financial system, overhauled the tariff system, privatised state sector industries, ended subsidisation of loss-making industries, and sold off the state-owned Commonwealth Bank of Australia - all reforms that in other Western countries were performed by right-wing governments. The tax system was reformed, most notably through the taxation of capital gains - a reform strongly opposed by the Liberal Party at the time, but not reversed when they returned to office.
Hawke benefitted greatly from the disarray into which the Liberal opposition fell after the resignation of Fraser. The Liberals were divided between supporters of the dour, economically and socially conservative John Howard and the urbane Andrew Peacock. The arch-conservative Premier of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, also helped Hawke with his "Joh for Canberra" campaign in 1987, which proved highly damaging for the conservatives . Exploiting these divisions, Hawke led the Labor Party to comfortable election victories in 1984 and 1987.
Hawke's Prime Ministership saw considerable friction between him and the grassroots of the Labor Party, who were unhappy at what they viewed as Hawke's iconoclasm and willingness to co-operate with business interests. All Labor Prime Ministers have at times engendered the hostility of the organisational wing of the party, but none more so than Hawke, who expressed his willingness to cull Labor's "sacred cows". The Socialist Left faction, as well as prominent Labor figure Barry Jones, offered severe criticism of a number of government decisions.
On social policy, the Hawke government saw gradual reforms. The Whitlam government's universal health insurance system (Medibank), which had been dismantled by Fraser, was restored under a new name, Medicare. A notable success for which the government's response is given considerable credit was Australia's public health campaign about AIDS. In the latter years of the Hawke government, Aboriginal affairs saw considerable attention, with an investigation of the idea of a treaty between Aborigines and the government, though this idea was overtaken by events, notably including the Mabo court decision.
The Hawke government also made some notable environmental decisions. In its first months in office it stopped the construction of the Franklin Dam, on the Franklin River in Tasmania, responding to a groundswell of protest about the issue. In 1990, a looming tight election saw a tough political operator, Graham Richardson, appointed Environment Minister, whose task it was to attract second-preference votes from the Australian Democrats and other environmental parties. Richardson claimed this as a major factor in the government's narrow re-election in 1990.
Decline and fall
This was to be Hawke's last triumph, however. A severe economic recession in 1991, caused by a credit blowout requiring the application of very high interest rates, saw the government in considerable electoral trouble. Although Keating was the main architect of the government's economic policies, he took advantage of Hawke's declining popularity to plan a leadership challenge. In 1988 Hawke had responded to pressure from Keating to step down by making a secret agreement (the so-called "Kirribilli compact") to resign in favour of Keating some time after winning the 1990 elections. After Keating made a speech to the Parliamentary press gallery that Hawke considered disloyal, Hawke indicated to Keating that he would renege on the agreement. In June 1991 Keating responded by resigning from Cabinet. Hawke defeated Keating's leadership challenge, but he was clearly a wounded leader.
Hawke's demise came when the new Liberal leader, Dr John Hewson, released a proposal for sweeping economic change, including a goods and services tax and deep cuts to government spending and personal income tax, in November 1991. Neither Hawke nor his new Treasurer, John Kerin, could mount an effective response to this challenge, and a rattled Labor Party turned to Keating. At a second challenge, on 20 December, Keating defeated Hawke in a party-room ballot. Hawke resigned from Parliament shortly after, apparently with few regrets, although his bitterness towards Keating surfaced in his memoirs.
After politics, Hawke entered the business world with considerable success. Hazel Hawke, who for the sake of the Labor cause had put up with the open secret of his relationship with his biographer Blanche d'Alpuget while he was Prime Minister, divorced him, and shortly afterwards he married d'Alpuget. He had little to do with the Labor Party during Keating's leadership, but after the election of the Howard Liberal government in 1996 he became a close supporter of Opposition Leader Kim Beazley. During the 2004 election he strongly supported Mark Latham.
Hawke occupies a curious place in the mythology of the Australian labour movement. He cannot be denied the title of Australia's most successful Labor leader, and by 2004, when Howard won his fourth election, the Hawke years had come to seem like a vanished golden age to Labor voters. On the other hand the left blamed Hawke for betraying Labor policies and traditions for the sake of easy populist success, and of laying the foundations for Howard's conservative agenda.
See also
- The Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies (HRISS) has been named after him at the University of South Australia
External links
- Robert Hawke (http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/meetpm.asp?pmId=23) - Australia's Prime Ministers / National Archives of Australia
- Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre (http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/)
- Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library (http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/library/)
- Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies (http://www.hawkecentre.unisa.edu.au/institute/)
Further reading
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| Preceded by: Paul Keating | Treasurer of Australia 1991 | Succeeded by: John Kerin |