Wednesdays with Bob

by Derek Rielly

  Of course, shortly after his meeting with Arafat, the Bush government bulldozed Iraq and had neither the international capital nor the energy to lead a two-state solution.

  ‘Colin [Powell] is a lovely man,’ says Hawke. ‘He said, “Bob, I supported your plan entirely but I couldn’t get them to talk about anything but Iraq.”’

  Six months after our discussion, to coincide with the visit of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu to Australia, Hawke will write a piece in the Australian Financial Review calling for a renewed focus on Palestinian statehood.

  ‘I will always remember my meeting immediately after the end of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 with the then Prime Minister Golda Meir,’ Hawke wrote.

  I listened with admiration and in total agreement as this wonderful woman, still traumatised with grief, looked into my eyes and said there could be no peace for Israel until there was an honourable settlement of the aspirations of the Palestinian people … the situation is clear – starkly clear. Like the Jews in the Soviet Union and the blacks in South Africa, the Palestinians have an aspiration to be fully free. But with a majority of the Netanyahu Government openly declared against a Palestinian state they understandably see little hope in the political process … Is there not emerging the danger of Israel being blinded to the threat to its very soul and the vision of its future?

  Bibi will reply, ‘What kind of state will it be that they are advocating? A state that calls for Israel’s destruction? A state whose territory will be used immediately for radical Islam?’

  Those on the right, and even the centre-left, will line up to take a swing.

  The Victorian Labor MP Michael Danby accuses Hawke, and Rudd and Evans, of trying to smash the ALP’s relationship with Israel. ‘I might say to all of the heroes who are beating up on a country, a democratic country where there are gay pride parades – there aren’t any in the surrounding countries – or Christmas celebrations – there aren’t any in the surrounding countries – why don’t they beat up on China when the Chinese president comes to Australia?’ Mr Danby told Sky News. ‘Where is Bob Carr, Gareth Evans and Bob Hawke when the terrible things that are happening in Tibet are discussed? They never raise their heads, they never raise their heads to power. They want to try and provoke the Israeli prime minister and upset relations between him and the Labor Party prior to Netanyahu’s visit.’

  The Australian’s foreign affairs writer Greg Sheridan describes Hawke, Rudd and Gareth Evans as a ‘caterwauling coven of craven Zeitgeist whisperers … intoning sterile incantations’ like the three witches from Macbeth, to no end other than the affirmation of their own supreme virtue. Referring to Hawke and Rudd in particular, Sheridan claims they ‘are always keen to lavish themselves with praise and moral credentials they simply do not possess.’

  Hawke, of course, has been a defender of Israel’s right to exist, and flourish, since 1971, when he was invited to deliver the inaugural Sam Cohen Memorial Lecture, named for Victorian senator Sam Cohen, who founded the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in 1942.

  Hawke recalls: ‘I went over [to Israel] and I was very taken by the Histadrut, which is a trade union movement there. They were very strong within the Labor Party and within politics there. The Israelis were extraordinarily impressive in terms of the enthusiasm with which they were going about the creation of a new state based upon social, democratic principles, and the thought of them being destroyed after being created by the act of the United Nations was appalling to me. So I identified with their right to exist as an independent nation.’

  It’s a remarkable joint, I say. They’ve turned that little slice of dirt and rock into such a prosperous democracy.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Hawke, enthusiasm deflating abruptly. ‘But we’ve got to recognise it’s got some blind spots too. Some of its treatment of the Arab people has been less than brilliant. As I say, I’ve always maintained a commitment to the rights of the Palestinians to their own state, but not at the expense of the destruction to Israel.’

  Still, says, Hawke, it’s important for friends to be open to criticism. To slam Hawke as anti-Israel is a gross misreading of history. Hawke was the man who, as ALP president, bit back when Whitlam steered his government to what he called an ‘even-handed’ approach to the Israelis and the plight of the Palestinians.

  In diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, it is revealed that Hawke told a confidant of the US embassy that Whitlam had an ‘immoral, unethical and ungrateful’ approach to the Israelis and that he’d ‘caved in’ on the question for ‘commercial reasons’. Whitlam, in return, regarded Hawke as a ‘pro-Israel fanatic’.

  With the current surge of Islamic terrorism, I ask, are we at the beginning of a long conflict or do you see light at the end of such a dark tunnel?

  Hawke contemplates the question. Looks at his cigar. Draws. Releases smoke.

  ‘No one can honestly say that they know the answer to that,’ he says at last. ‘What we do know are that the sorts of things that need to be done to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli issues are critically important. Then we need political leadership. I’m hopeful that with the election of Hillary, we’ll have someone who is absolutely committed. I’m not saying this wanting to denigrate Obama, but I don’t think he’s provided the sort of dynamic leadership that’s required. I still hope that leaders will emerge who will realise what’s got to be done, and who are committed to creating fairer societies so that the extremists don’t have such fertile ground as they do at the present time.’

  Hawke says one of the great problems facing the west is that there isn’t a lot of leadership talent out there, least of all someone with the intellectual and political weight to machete through a thicket of contradictions like the Israel–Palestine question.

  ‘Not one outstanding leader in the democracies anywhere in the world today,’ he says.

  Merkel?

  ‘If you listed all the past German chancellors, she’d probably come in fifth or sixth.’

  Trump?

  Hawke pauses, contemptuously blows a ball of smoke.

  ‘Certainly not Trump.’

  Historically, has there been anyone else like Donald Trump in your life?

  ‘No, not within the major democracies that I can recall.’ This, he says, is a new phenomenon of modern American politics. Hawke unleashes even more smoke, furious now.

  ‘Gah! Don’t talk to me about Donald Trump. This bloke’s insane.’

  Should we fret? Do we stand on the precipice of a new dark age?

  ‘Trump’s not going to become president,’ Hawke reassures. ‘He’s just a passing aberration.’

  — CHAPTER 8 —

  KIM BEAZLEY

  THE THREE-TIME LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION AND former deputy prime minister of Australia stoops over the concierge desk of a mid-range Sydney hotel, his sixfoot-two frame dwarfing staff in their black Nehru jackets.

  His tone is polite, although firm enough to indicate inaction on a requested room change won’t be tolerated. As unseen screens are examined and keys tapped, Mr Kim Beazley, AC, leans on one elbow and fiddles with his telephone.

  Is there a better way to survey a man than as an unseen observer at close quarters? For a public figure who was as famous for his sartorial inelegance (one former employee at the Department of Defence described Beazley to me as ‘a man who eats his dinner off his shirt’) as his inability to prise John Howard off the prime ministerial throne, he presents well in navy blazer, clean white shirt and the sort of boots a farmer might wear on his first trip to the big smoke.

  Eventually, I reveal myself.

  ‘Mr Beazley?’

  Beazley spins around to shake my hand. ‘Oh, hello. Hello!’ he says, in a bright voice closer to pre-teen than preretirement.

  He follows me into a large anteroom to talk about his great friend and mentor, Bob Hawke.

  We sit a foot or so apart, Beazley on a two-seat microfibre couch, me on a bamboo chair with an angled se
at. It’s only a determination to avoid embarrassment and the strength in my hams that stops me from sliding onto the tiled floor.

  Beazley, who is almost sixty-eight, has small blue eyes and grey hair, which is full enough at this late stage of the game, and he pats it down at regular intervals. His skin appears untouched by the Western Australian sun, a legacy of decades spent in Canberra’s gloom.

  Hawke and Beazley revel in their commonalities. Both are Rhodes Scholars, both from politically significant Western Australian families: Hawke’s Uncle Bert was state premier and Beazley’s father the federal Minister for Education during Whitlam’s abbreviated reign.

  The pair’s first encounter was at a meeting of the Labor National Executive in 1971, Beazley drawn to the Labor Party for its opposition to the Vietnam War.

  Nine years later, they were both elected members of parliament for the first time. In 1983, Hawke became prime minister and appointed Beazley his Minister for Aviation.

  As Hawke recalls, ‘In a sort of surrogate way, I almost thought of him as a son. And I, I suppose, took him under my wing, in a sense. Had to have a pretty big wing. Pretty big bloke.’

  Beazley, in turn, adored – adores – Hawke.

  He was in London (‘on one of those parliamentary jollies’ with John Dawkins, who’d become Hawke’s first Minister for Finance), when he learned that Fraser had called an early election in the expectation of facing Bill Hayden, not the immensely popular Hawke.

  ‘Fraser only found out about [the leadership change] a second before he had to stand up and make the statements he did about the calling of the election,’ says Beazley. ‘One fellow described to me as Fraser opened the press conference, “That rustling noise you heard was Fraser’s trousers hitting the ground.” He… was gone. Fraser knew it. He was gone the moment Hawke was leader.’

  Beazley rocks back and forth as he recalls a panicked woman from Australia’s High Commission in London visiting him and Dawkins at their hotel because they’d changed their flights in order to return to Australia earlier than anticipated.

  ‘You poor men!’ she cried. ‘Your party has changed its leader and the other side has ambushed you and this is a terrible thing, to have to go home early and face such a conundrum.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ chortled Beazley. ‘We’re both going home to be ministers.’

  It’s important to point out, says Beazley, that unlike a lot of political leaders, Hawke wasn’t driven to office for fame or power for power’s sake.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘a lot of people want to be prime minister. A lot of people would take the view that they should be or could be, but Bob never had that ambition without combining it with a program. He said, “I want to be prime minister not because I’m a golden son or because I have any entitlement, but because I stand for these things.” His strengths were, overwhelmingly, a very clear-cut view of what he wanted to do with the country. He wasn’t wandering around vaguely looking for an agenda. His experience at the ACTU meant that when he got into parliament, he didn’t regard it necessarily as the be-all and end-all of democracy. It was important, but the democracy was broader than just parliament. Democracy involved an ongoing consultation with the Australian people beyond simply election times. The British nineteenth-century political theorist Walter Bagehot once said that the great prime ministers are men of commonplace opinions and uncommon administrative abilities. That was Bob. If the majority of the community didn’t feel that way then Bob would convert them to the view that they always had felt that way and by appealing to their better instincts.’

  Hawke’s gift was an ability to use his natural intellect, tutored at Oxford and honed inside Australia’s arbitration courts, combined with his everyman persona, to shift public attitudes that might’ve seemed, to a lesser man, bolted on.

  ‘The guy was ultra-charisma,’ says Beazley. ‘He always looked to Australians like the quintessential Aussie bloke and talked like the quintessential Aussie bloke. They trusted and listened to him. And he used it relentlessly in areas where Australians have always been ultra-sensitive. They’ve always been ultra-sensitive on the subject of immigration. Bob really sold the non-discrimination policy. Where many Australians were very reluctant to engage on the South African apartheid issue, Bob goes head-on and sets up the Eminent Persons Group that plays a major role in the transitioning in South Africa from white rule to majority rule.

  ‘Then he sees that the Australian economy can’t survive, that our market’s too small in our ultra-protected cocoon. It’s not publicly popular, but he gets out there and he argues his convictions. He always did the Australian public the honour of assuming that they had intelligence. He was the quintessential democrat as a political figure.’

  Another important trait of the Hawke government, according to Beazley, was… wait for it… a deep trust of bureaucracy – a belief that the public service was there to serve whomever is in power and not to be flattered or terrorised.

  One week into the Hawke government, ministers were told to jettison their chiefs of staff into lesser roles and to find an existing bureaucrat – the same bureaucrats who’d worked for Fraser’s Liberal government for eight years – to run their ministries.

  ‘We are not going to make a mess of this government,’ Hawke told the ministers. ‘We need to have a government that is an orderly, disciplined process of getting policy to the cabinet and policy to the public. You’re not going to do that off the back of people who have no experience in doing it.’

  ‘Everyone’s jaw hit the floor,’ says Beazley. ‘But he had a really deep respect for the public service and what it was capable of delivering. He didn’t care about the fact that it had worked for a long time for Liberal governments; his view was that they’re public servants and that’s what they do. It was another strength, that trust.’

  The trust extended to his cabinet.

  ‘You look at leaders subsequent and in recent times,’ Beazley says, ‘and there’s been obsession in their offices that they should control the entire messaging from the government. That nobody goes out there to make a presentation of any sort on policy but that it’s ticked off at the prime ministerial office level. That’s the antithesis of good government. Bob sat all the new ministers down one by one, and he said, “You know the party policy in your area. You know what needs to be done to turn that policy into an implementable government activity. I will intervene in one of two circumstances: one, you ask me to, you want my help with something; two, if something that you’re doing crosses with somebody else’s portfolio, I’ll resolve the dispute.”

  ‘He actually understood that his reputation would be built on the backs of strong effective ministers of good public reputation. He, of all the leaders I’ve seen in my time in politics, is almost unique in his belief that he shone brighter when other people shone with him.’

  What about his famous withering put-downs within cabinet? Was Beazley ever at the end of one of his grenades?

  ‘No, but he could go off his trolley with annoyance at somebody. Barry Jones was a marvellous man and a good science minister, but he had real trouble translating it into policy. He had made one of his umpteenth speeches about the significance of science to the cabinet but he wasn’t in the cabinet meeting when a science matter was before the cabinet. Bob said, “Barry, where’s the fucking policy?!” He could be pretty rough in the put-down but it was so rare.’

  Was Hawke a good master to serve?

  ‘[Hawke was] our best peacetime prime minister. Nobody who succeeded him is that good and nobody who preceded him was that good. Others have served longer but not as comprehensively, ably and purposefully as he did. Or with as much confidence. In all the elections since he ceased to be prime minister, there is no more popular figure in demand by Labor Party candidates and Labor Party campaigns in all the states of the Commonwealth, in all the constituencies.’

  Still, Hawke’s prime ministership ended in blood, not glory. And according to Beazley’s biographer Peter F
itzSimons, Beazley ‘was absolutely gutted by the fight between Hawke and Keating. The last man left standing at Hawke’s left elbow was Kim Christian Beazley, despite extraordinary pressure that had been brought to bear for him to crumple and fold and walk away from Hawke.’

  Says Hawke: ‘This was a very, very tough time for him, because he respected Paul enormously. He has said on occasion to me that, in a sense, part of the spark of political life went out for him after that struggle.’

  Almost a quarter of a century after the December 1991 coup, Beazley says it became the turning point in his own political career; a darkening of the spirit that had propelled him into public office.

  ‘Politics till that point of time had been a real source of joy, a real sense of achievement,’ he says. ‘From that point on it became a grind. You did it not so much from what pleasure you were taking out of it, but you just made the clear determination of what you actually wanted for your country and you just got on with it. Maybe it was just me getting older. All of a sudden it looks to be more of your life behind you than is ahead of you. Maybe it was just the sobriety that came with that perception. I was sad for a long time.’

  Sad or not, Beazley, who served as deputy prime minister in the Keating government, says he has ‘a great affection’ for his mentor’s saboteur.

  ‘Paul was a genius who emerged from a totally different background, in many ways a more ordinary Australian one, to Bob. He was the classic self-educated man and an immensely cultured person. He has a very different character to Bob. Bob is very open. He lives out there, he lives a massive life. Paul is very private. Lives a closed life. He lets little pieces of him be exposed to the public. He does get expansive on one or two subjects that fascinate him. A lady was telling me the other day, she was just wandering around the new development at Barangaroo, around Sydney Harbour. Paul happened to be walking along with his grandchildren and she says, “Hello, Mr Prime Minister, really good to see you… we’re really interested in what you’ve done down here.” Paul then took her on a half-hour tour of the new developments.