Brotherhood of Bob
Amid the nostalgia of Bob Hawke’s memorial in Sydney was the nagging feeling that Labor is unlikely to produce another leader as great as him. By Fred Pawle.
Bob Hawke’s memorial was a reminder of two things: how great he was as a prime minister and why his party is seldom in power, especially now.
Labor is good at hosting events where camaraderie - or the “brotherhood of man”, as Hawke called it - sets the mood. This was no exception. But it also felt like a memorial to the time that Hawke epitomised.
Most of the audience were older than 50, if not 60. To them, the 1980s were not only the decade when Australia ramped up its independence and international engagement, it was also when they too were establishing careers and families and taking on the big challenges of life.
The nostalgia was not unwarranted. As Paul Keating, Hawke’s Treasurer and successor, pointed out, he and Hawke delivered eight budgets and six major economic reforms. Keating politely omitted listing the reforms, partly because a memorial is no time for policy discussion. If only all the speakers had stuck to this rule.
The nation was cockier in the 80s, thanks partly to Hawke and Keating. We were repeatedly reminded that Hawke “was no saint”, “had his flaws” and was not preoccupied with moral vanity, yet these frailties endeared him to the nation because his love of Australia exceeded them.
Australia was “not geography, but a belief,” former ACTU boss Bill Kelty said. What sort of belief? Kelty recalled watching Hawke in action for the ACTU at the Arbitration Commission in 1966, and marvelled that Hawke was able to arrange the adjournments to coincide with horse races, and that both sides in whatever wage case was being heard would sit around the radio to listen in.
But he didn’t rule on larrikinism alone. It was good to be reminded of the other side of Hawke, the Rhodes Scholar with an astute, strategic, political mind. He had enormous respect for the public service and delegated all the power that was necessary to his ministers.
“He had an encyclopedic knowledge of how this nation worked,” said Kim Beazley, his former defence minister. And he used that knowledge not for his own ambition, but for the nation’s. Hawke once explained the “essence of power” to Beazley: “What you do (in government) is going to have a lifelong effect on millions of others.” To which Beazley added the simple observation, “Your happiness was his motive.”
There was a musical interlude in the middle, when a video of Hawke in a tuxedo making a novel appearance as an orchestra conductor was played and the Sydney Philharmonic Choir struck up the Hallelujah Chorus, featuring the line, “He will reign forever.”
It was about then that the memorial started to feel like a tribute to Labor’s deity, the like of whom will never be seen again.
In a video message from Norway, his successor as prime minister Julia Gillard said “he inspired the party to govern well.” Gillard had her handicaps, but neither she nor Kevin Rudd, the only two Labor PMs since Hawke and Keating, could be described as inspiring. Or governing well, for that matter.
“He wanted to protect us from those who sought to divide us,” said current Labor leader Anthony Albanese without even a hint of irony. It's unlikely that the poignancy of this statement was detected by the Labor luminaries in the room. To the rest of us, it was a sad reminder of just how much Labor had changed since Hawke.
The service was eventually dogged by the policy that proved to be electoral Kryptonite at this year’s election: climate change. Hawke was the first PM to wear environmentalism as a badge, and it remained an obsession of his long after he failed to understand its dwindling appeal among the middle Australians with whom he once had a famous love affair.
A clip of him appearing with his four-year-old granddaughter Sophie in the old TV show Beyond 2000 was shown. In it, Hawke implored us to “care for the planet as you care for your children”. Sophie herself, now fully grown and working as a senior manager of climate change and sustainability at global business consultant EY, then lectured the audience about the “excuses” for not fighting climate change that will emburden our own kids. “Let us listen to the young people,” she said.
Sadly, there were few young people present. If any had been, they would have learned that there is more to Australia - and life - than an unfounded paranoia that humans are destroying their planet. Of all Hawke’s flaws, this is the only one that diminishes his legacy.
All the speakers talked about their personal recollections and awe of the man they knew well, except one. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he only knew Hawke, who was of a previous era, from a distance. As such, he spoke on behalf of the millions of other Australians who also only knew Hawke this way.
But it was no passing relationship. Hawke’s affinity with the Australian people was “a great romance… they knew each other well,” Morrison said. Indeed they did.
The memorial was a reminder of, sadly, how Hawke’s party has lost that relationship. The nation’s politics is immeasurably poorer as a result.