Political Lives by Chris Wallace

Author:Chris Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
Published: 2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6 Bob Hawke, writ large

Only when they’d read the book did they realise he was actually a great man. Because all they’d seen before was a drunken lout, a drunken larrikin.

Blanche d’Alpuget, interview with the author

No-one has ever been as lucky in their biographer as Bob Hawke.

Bob Hawke, interview with the author

Can a contemporary political biography influence the course of history? The career of Australia’s twenty-third prime minister, Robert James Lee ‘Bob’ Hawke, suggests both the extent and limits to which this can be so. Hawke won office in March 1983 and lost it in December 1991 after being defeated 56 votes to 51 on the second challenge from his former treasurer, Paul Keating. Hawke is Australia’s most successful federal Labor leader, winning four elections and serving a total eight years and 284 days as prime minister, exceeding the previous record for a Labor prime minister set by Andrew Fisher. Fisher won two elections and formed three governments in the early twentieth century, serving four years and 297 days as prime minister. Hawke is the third longest serving Australian prime minister overall, his time in office exceeded only by the Liberal Party’s John Howard who won the same number of elections but served for a total of eleven years and 267 days as prime minister; and by Robert Menzies who won as many elections as Hawke and Howard combined, serving as prime minister for eighteen years and 160 days. The Hawke and Keating governments are remembered as drivers of major economic reform, managers of a collaborative wages policy, a concern with social justice and positive engagement with the world, especially Asia.

Hawke’s career can be divided into three long phases: eleven years as a university student at the University of Western Australia, the University of Oxford and the Australian National University; twenty-two years in the peak body of the labour movement’s industrial wing, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU); and eleven years as a politician, nearly nine of which he was prime minister. During the first two phases, covering some thirty-three years, Hawke was a hard but high functioning drinker, sports lover and philanderer who, in spite of an unusually high level of education for both his times and milieu, came to personify both the industrial wing of the labour movement and a certain kind of Australian man.

In the third phase, during which he forsook alcohol, Hawke emerged as a disciplined politician leading a quality government along traditional Westminster lines – the last twentieth century Australian government of which this can be said. Hawke was the best educated and one of the most economically literate of prime ministers. His ability to match the right talent with the right portfolio and give his ministers scope to act and initiate policy within the government’s broad economic policy framework – largely set during the Labor leadership of Bill Hayden in the two terms of opposition leading up to Hawke’s 1983 election win – was critical to the government’s success. It was complemented

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