When Bob Hawke became Prime Minister in March 1983, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels stood at 343ppm.
When he was unceremoniously dumped by the Labor Party in late 1991, after failing to effectively counter Liberal leader John Hewson’s Fightback! campaign, the level stood at 355ppm.
When he died in 2019, the atmospheric levels stood at 411ppm (they’re now pushing 430ppm). I don’t intend to recap his climate mis-steps (see here) and missed opportunities (I did that already in this Conversation piece: Bob Hawke, the environmental PM, bequeathed a huge ‘what if’ on climate change). Nor do I intend to give a blow-by-blow account of who said what about what to whom tonight (a video was made and is already up – if you’re ‘into’ history, politics etc, it’s definitely worth your time.
What I intend to do is … serve up a few banalities and call it a day.
Banality one is that History is about what gets told and how. It’s also about what doesn’t get told (and how it is not talked about – usually by running out of time/focusing on something else.
Fortunately there wasn’t that much banality on display tonight at the Hawke (!) Centre on North Terrace. The event was to launch/publicise a new book ‘Gold Standard: Remembering the Hawke Government’.
It was ably compered (not facilitated!) by Misha Ketchell of The Conversation, who had managed to tear himself away from The West Wing to serve up a series of more-than-perfunctory soft-ball questions to the three professional historians (and co-editors of the book). These were (drum roll please)
- Professor Frank Bongiorno of University of Canberra
- Associate Professor Catherine Holbrook, Deakin University
- Dr Joshua Black. Australian National University
They covered a lot of ground, and wore their deep expertise lightly (this should of course, be the norm among academics, but trust me, it ain’t).
They (especially Holbrook) were good on the way the Hawke government came to loom large as a picture of stability after the 2007-2018 bloodbath of the Prime Ministers. (Fwiw I think the Hawke/Keating era looms large because it was ultimately the death of the Australian Settlement, something discussed at the end of the event by – iirc- Bongiorno).
They (especially Black) were good on the way that the media landscape (mass, social) has transformed out of all sight, and how much more difficult governance is now. There’s a story (not told tonight) of Julia Gillard pointing out that you could offer a huge detailed set of policy statements and the journos would be hungry again hours later. The beast is hungry hungry hungry, and that isn’t helping anyone. (Thomas Mayo covered some of this last week in his Nelson Mandela lecture at the same venue, btw, and it too is well worth your time) – here, inevitably, is my blogpost about that.
What they didn’t cover (at all, or in great depth for my monomania)
So, for me as a former Australian resident and occasional visitor (nearing the end of the latest visitation), a few trends/dilemmas strike me afresh every time I cross the girt sea.
- The flag-waving nationalism (see here for my reflections on that: Who stands for an anthem? Australia from the 1970s to the 2020s. There is also an excellent observation by would-be-host of tonight’s event, Hugh White, in a recent Quarterly Essay.)
- The exquisite vulnerability to climate change (which is being accelerated by the relentless search for fossil fuels for export purposes: The Australian Oil and Gas lobby has just finished its latest trade fair about 200m from the Hawke Centre. It faced only tiny protests, after State Premier Peter Malinauskas unleashed some nice authoritarian anti-protest laws in 2023).
- The running sore of a lack of any real reconciliation with Aboriginal peoples (the acknowledgement of country at tonight’s event was pretty cursory, tbh). If October 7th hadn’t sucked all the oxygen out of the room, then the heart-breaking vote against the Voice would have really damaged Australia’s international standing.
- The increase in inequality and the visible rise of rough sleeping (which is the merest sliver of the tip of the iceberg of homelessness etc). The ‘cost of living’ crisis is a permacrisis for many. It was not always this bad, at least in Australia…
Not all of this can be sheeted home to Hawke, but Hawke’s record especially on climate, the failure to keep the 1988 promise of a Treaty, and the failures around public housing (alluded to near the end), deserved, in my opinion, a bigger chunk of tonight’s assessment. It’s one thing to say you want to avoid hagiography, it’s another to actually avoid it. That said, this was a very nicely done event, and they did, after all, only have an hour. The closest we got to a discussion of neoliberalism (a word mentioned once or twice, almost in passing, and called ‘economic rationalism’ back in the day – though there are ongoing debates about whether those two are the same thing), was Black talking about ‘civil erosion’ the (global) collapse in trade union membership and so on, and then another mention in the context of too-much hagiography.
At this point Frank Bongiorno gave a shout out to his book about the 1980s, and pointed to a list of failures (of treaty, of public service reforms, of the marketization of services that would be better off under actual public control).
Interviewed long after being booted out of the Prime Ministerial role by her own party (sound familiar?) Margaret Thatcher was asked her greatest achievement. She said… Tony Blair.
Blair learned from Hawke/Keating – the early years of Blair gave me a real sense of déjà vu for the mid-80s, in terms of the way the political battles were fought. But I am a bit of a weirdo perhaps (1).
The economy grows, but the problems, the pile of debris we call progress, also grew. Now, 20 and 35 years after they left the stage, those problems are becoming impossible to ignore…
Footnote
At the bus-stop on the way home (after a fabulous meal at Dino’s, the Greek place at the King William Street end of Hindley Street) we bumped the sixteen-ish year old daughter of a friend. The mum is very smart, as is the daughter. I asked her is she knew who Bob Hawke was. Nope. But then, I don’t think at her age I knew who, say, Arthur Caldwell was. The caravan moves on.
To read/re-read/watch/rewatch
The Hawke/Keating Hijack by Dean Jaensch
Tom Uren’s biog (my favourite bit is the tale of the UK and Australian POW camps and their different survival rates. See also James Clavell’s novel of Changi – ‘King Rat’
Blanche D’Alpuget 1982 Robert J. Hawke: a biography, Schwartz,
Blanche D’Alpuget 2010. Hawke: the Prime Minister, Melbourne University Press,
John Murphy An Unlikely Survival: The politics of welfare in Australia since 1950
True Believers TV Show – see this rebuttal.
Chris Wallace 2019 How to Win an Election
Tory Bramston Bob Hawke: Demons and Destiny