Robert Hawke

Prime minister of Australia (1983–1991)

• Born: December 9, 1929
• Birthplace: Bordertown, South Australia, Australia
• Died: May 16, 2019
• Place of death: Northbridge, Australia

Hawke, a charismatic and savvy politician with an instinct for mediating differences and creating consensus among rival factions, also had a flair for capturing the nationalist fervor of the Australian electorate. He became the longest serving Labor prime minister in Australia's history, winning four consecutive national elections during the 1980s.

Early Life

Robert Hawke was born in Bordertown, South Australia, a small town ten miles from the Victoria border. His father was a Congregational minister and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1939, Hawke's older brother died. Grief-stricken, the family relocated to the suburbs of Perth in distant Western Australia. The brother's death created in Hawke's mother a protective love that nurtured in her remaining child a sense of his destiny. Indeed, when he graduated from the University of Western Australia with a double major in arts and law in 1953, Hawke had served as president of the university's student council during his senior year.

The charismatic Hawke was a natural campaigner, but his passion was for economics. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, Hawke began postgraduate work in economic theory at Oxford University. His flamboyant lifestyle in England became legendary, most notably his setting a beer-drinking speed record, a feat that would later endear him with his country's drinking culture but would as well foreshadow his struggles with alcoholism. Hawke earned a bachelor of letters degree in 1955 and returned to Perth, where he married and enrolled in the doctoral program at Canberra's Australian National University. Two years later, facing financial responsibilities, Hawke abandoned the degree program and moved to Melbourne as a researcher for the arbitration commission within the powerful Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).

Hawke quickly established a national reputation for labor relations by addressing his country's long-simmering wage issues, mediating through the force of his personality the feuding factions of the union membership, the government, and private sector employers. For ten years (1969–79) he served as ACTU president, even as he weighed a future in politics within the Labor Party. When the Labor Party briefly returned to power in 1972 (the first time since World War II), Hawke worked tirelessly for its initiatives despite his struggles with alcoholism, which led to hospitalization in 1979 and his much-publicized rehabilitation. In October, 1980, a rested Hawke, now fifty years old, successfully ran for Parliament from Wills, Melbourne, and began a meteoric rise within the minority Labor Party, emerging within an improbable three years as its successful candidate for prime minister.

Life's Work

By the time Hawke was elected Australia's twenty-eighth prime minister on March 5, 1983, his country had endured more than a decade of tumultuous political in-fighting, economic booms and busts, and deficit spending, and it had seen the federal government change hands in controversial and often deeply divisive elections. Hawke's rapid rise within the Labor Party had as much to do with his exemplary background in economics and his handling of often tricky labor union negotiations as it had to do with his charisma. His unabashed populism; his embrace of sports, particularly horse racing and yachting; his fondness for cigars; and his exuberant lifestyle, including well-known womanizing, endeared him to the Australian electorate, reflected in his landslide election that drew on a grassroots network of middle-class Australians who saw Hawke as one of their own. His election campaign promised to bring Australia together, and Hawke promoted himself as an expert negotiator who could build consensus.

Indeed, that political management style would bring Hawke much success early on. He defied conventional wisdom, avoiding an audacious agenda of party-driven reform legislation that would reflect Labor's new rise to power. Rather, he soberly confronted what he perceived to be the greatest economic challenge facing Australia—the deficit—and sculpted a pioneering agenda of economic initiatives (much of which was the theoretical work of Treasury Secretary Paul Keating, who would eventually emerge as Hawke's political nemesis within the Labor Party). The program included deregulation of the banks, the relentless mediation of union disputes to avoid catastrophic work stoppages floating the Australian dollar, wide-ranging tariff reform, a capital-gains tax, an overhaul of both the government bureaucracy and the promotion system for public service workers, a halt to government subsidies of obsolete industries, (particularly steel) and, perhaps most controversial, the relinquishing of the state's control of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

At the heart of Hawke's economic reforms was his endeavor to make Australia competitive in the world marketplace. His agenda succeeded. Within six years, the government was running on a surplus. With the opposition Liberal Party deeply divided and reeling from the emergence of a popular figure such as Hawke, Hawke shepherded his ambitious legislative agenda with only token resistance. Indeed, the most vocal objections came from the far-left wing of his own party, which saw in his consensus style too many concessions to business interests (Hawke drew widespread criticism when he sided with the airlines in a controversial pilots' strike in 1989). However, in several defining domestic issues, most prominently the promotion of public education to a cabinet-level department, a public-health campaign to encourage HIV-AIDS awareness, and several environmental crusades geared to protecting the country's dwindling wilderness acreage from industrial development, Hawke clearly reflected the traditional agenda of the Labor Party.

Given the economic recovery of the late 1980s and a public persona that embodied with uncanny savvy the Australian Everyman, Hawke enjoyed a remarkable record of electoral success. He was reelected with comfortable margins in 1984 and in 1987. He earned an international reputation for his aggressive stance against apartheid in South Africa and for his hawkish defense of Israel (also, he was the target of an aborted Palestinian assassination attempt in the late 1970s). Both of these positions earned him considerable respect from the administration of US president Ronald Reagan, although on virtually every economic and social issue the two leaders did not agree.

Hawke's domestic popularity began to decline only in the early 1990s, when Australia was locked into a spiraling recession initially triggered by crippling high interest rates designed to moderate a catastrophic credit buildup in the private sector. When Keating (ironically the architect of the economic agenda that was blamed for the recession) emerged to challenge Hawke's party leadership in June, 1991, staving off that challenge crippled Hawke within his party. By December, Hawke lost his leadership position and resigned his seat in Parliament.

After leaving office, Hawke left the public eye (he divorced his wife, who had endured for decades his womanizing, and married a longtime friend, a journalist who had written his campaign biography in 1982). He resisted the call to engage in political carping about the new direction of the Labor Party and turned his considerable energies into making a fortune in the private sector, primarily through engineering lucrative trade agreements between Australian interests and mainland China and computer technologies in California's Silicon Valley. He also published a book, The Hawke Memoirs, in 1994 and advocated for certain causes, including the movement to declare Australia a republic.

Hawke died on May 16, 2019, at the age of eighty-nine in Sydney, Australia.

Significance

Although much of Hawke's substantial economic reforms were later blamed (justly or not) for the recession in which Australia was mired well into the 1990s and that led to draconian measures (including massive cuts in government spending and tax increases), it was his uncanny command of the Australian political imagination that remains his defining achievement. Part of the international embrace of things Australian in the 1980s, Hawke conjured about his political persona an unerring populist sense of can-do optimism that became distinctly Australian.

At a critical juncture when Australia was reeling from divisiveness in its politics and uncertainty in its economic agenda, Hawke brought the nation together. Rather than abusing that sense of personal endorsement to build a government centered on the cult of his personality, Hawke used that considerable political capital as a base to launch an ambitious agenda of government economic reformation. His robust and often flamboyant lifestyle, defined early on by hard drinking and womanizing, introduced demons that he came to confront and ultimately control later in his life, a personal story of courage and confession that served to further enhance his stature in the annals of twentieth century Australian government. In his late career, Hawke helped to found the University of South Australia's Centre for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding, often suggesting that endeavoring to build a good relationship between the Western world and the Muslim world would play a key role in the future of global politics.

Bibliography

Anson, Stanley. Hawke: An Emotional Life. Melbourne, Vic.: Macphee Gribble. 1991. Psychological profile that focuses on Hawke's early life, particularly the role of his mother after the death of his older brother and Hawke's later abandonment of Christianity.

D'Alpuget, Blanche. Robert J. Hawke: A Biography. Melbourne, Vic.: Landsowne Press, 1982. Highly flattering campaign biography important for presenting a fulsome account of Hawke's defining years in the ACTU, where he honed his management style.

Firth, Stewart. Australia in International Politics: An Introduction to Australian Foreign Policy. Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 2013.

Hawke, Bob. The Hawke Memoirs. Melbourne, Vic.: Heinemann, 1994. Essential, if lengthy, account of Hawke's years as prime minister, particularly his handling of the economic reforms and the emerging challenge of his own treasury minister.

McFadden, Robert D. "Bob Hawke, Who Led Australia Into a New Era as Prime Minister, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 16 May 2019,www.nytimes.com/2019/05/16/obituaries/bob-hawke-dead.html. Accessed 8 July 2019.

McMullin, Robert. The Light on the Hill: The Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Provides context for the Hawke era and provides detailed description of the long and often tense relationship between unions and workers and the emergence of Hawke as an economic strategist and union leader. Details how Hawke reshaped the Labor Party agenda as prime minister.

Mills, Stephen. The Hawke Years. New York: Viking, 1993. Authoritative and detailed account of Hawke's administration, defines the contentious political climate of Australian politics and specifically Hawke's precipitous decline in popularity and his eventual ouster as Labor leader.

Miragliotta, Narelle. The Australian Political System in Action. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Moon, Jeremy. Campbell Sharman. Australian Politics and Government: The Commonwealth, the States, and the Territories. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

Ryan, Susan, and Troy Bramston. The Hawke Government: A Retrospective. London: Pluto, 2003. Assessment of Labor's rise into political power under Hawke and the subsequent turns in Labor policy before and after Hawke, particularly the economic reforms and their consequences.