by Derek Rielly
‘Paul’s very generous-hearted, he is,’ says Beazley. ‘He wouldn’t go looking out of his way to communicate in that fashion, but once in a situation where the approach has been made, then yeah, he will respond with generosity and heart. Hawke, quintessentially the public man living in the glaring daylight. Paul, quintessentially the private man picking his moments.’
How do you respond, then, as a friend and admirer of both, when Keating talks about Hawke sleepwalking as prime minister after 1984? And when he posits that it was he, and not Hawke, who was responsible for the grand reforms that characterised the government?
‘It’s bull-crap,’ says Beazley.
Bull-crap?
‘Yeah. It’s just so – it’s such a million miles from the truth. Now that’s not to say… I don’t in any way belittle Paul’s contribution, it was substantial. [But] Paul tends to forget quite a bit.
‘I think Paul actually had the view that there wasn’t much left of him when he became prime minister… that he gave all that energy to Bob in his mind. There’s enough credit to go around for what was Australia’s greatest peacetime government. You don’t have to try and chase it all for yourself.’
Hawke is different, says Beazley.
‘Bob doesn’t go around talking like that about anyone who was in cabinet with him because he was not there in his mind competing with them for the limelight. The limelight came automatically to them and he’s prepared to trust his reputation to history.’
In his final speech to the House, Hawke said he ‘had no hesitation in declaring his love’ for you, I remind Beazley.
‘Well, I love him, too,’ says Beazley. ‘In fact, you are making me feel completely bloody miserable, because this is the first time I’ve been in Sydney in recent times when I haven’t dropped in to see him. I hear he’s poorly.’
If Hawke handled his shafting by Keating well, how does he take ageing?
‘He hates it. It’s so unfair,’ says Beazley. ‘Bob in spirit is the man forever young, forever interested, forever engaged, forever fascinated with his surroundings.’
— CHAPTER 9 —
ON BEING A POLITICIAN
IT’S THE END OF JULY 2016, AND THE AMERICAN ELECTION is closing in on its final trimester. I decide to quiz Hawke on what character traits it takes to be a country’s leader (according to his former foreign minister Gareth Evans, these include ‘levels of insensitivity unknown to ordinary mortals’ and a ‘deeply flawed personality’), as well as his opinion on the current state of the ALP and significant leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
So let’s bring the curious reader into the sunken living room of the Right Honourable Robert Lee Hawke, whom we see supine beneath a man of Charles Atlas dimensions, the aforementioned Ryan Barraclough, with what appears to be a baby seal made of foam under their combined weight.
It’s the Oov, mentioned earlier, which is doing its ‘stimulation of intervertebral disc lubrication’ thing.
If the sudokus and cryptic crosswords keep the mind supple, the weekly manipulations by his trainer keep Hawke limber and strong. After being rocked back and forth for a few more minutes, he disappears briefly, then returns, eyes wide with expectation.
‘Got a cigar?’
While the lighting ritual unfolds – the snapping of the end, the failed lighter, the uncooperative matches refusing to ignite in the stiff northerly wind – we discuss the Democratic convention in the US.
Been watching it? I ask.
‘Aye, a bit. It’s a funny bloody country, isn’t it?’ says Hawke.
What did you think of Bill Clinton’s speech about Hillary, where he spoke about their great love affair?
‘And with other people?’ Hawke laughs. The cigar booms into life like an old car kicked alive. He nods; I can begin.
What are the basic qualities a prime minister must have, and what qualities do you feel you have?
‘You must be able to relate to people,’ says Hawke. ‘One of the paradoxes of politicians is that they represent people, but so many of them are frightened of people. I’ve been amazed when I’ve gone around with all of my colleagues and just seen how basically uncomfortable they are. I’ve always loved the Australian people. I feel at ease with them and, maybe naturally, they’ve reciprocated. I think that’s probably the number-one requirement.’
Other requirements?
‘You need to have a capacity for hard work. The hours are horrendous. They’ve got to be. You’ve got to be a good listener. People think of politicians as talkers, but a good politician is a good listener. A fair degree of intelligence helps.’
Were there any moments when you had to compromise your ideals for the greater good?
‘You’ve got to be prepared to compromise. You can’t always get exactly your own way,’ says Hawke. ‘My cabinet, universally regarded as probably the best cabinet since Federation, made a rule at the beginning. I didn’t impose it. Most of our decisions were by consensus, but they had a rule that if the prime minister was in a minority, the prime minister’s decision prevailed. An outstanding example of that was the Antarctic.’
Of his eight years in the chair, Hawke references two decisions as his bravest and most significant: to attack apartheid using financial sanctions, and buddying up with Jacques Cousteau and French prime minister Michel Rocard to protect 14 million square kilometres of the world’s last great wildernesses, Antarctica, from mining.
‘I was reading cabinet papers over the weekend and this bloody submission was there from the attorney-general [Gareth Evans] and from the Minister for the Environment [Graham Richardson] to endorse CRAMRA, which was the Convention for the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resources,’ he says.
Richo backed it because he figured some sort of regulation was better than nothing. And Evans felt it would it be too damaging to international relations not to sign a convention that had taken six years to prepare, with negotiations led principally by Australia, and was backed by heavyweight sluggers, the US and Britain.
Hawke and, notably, Keating recoiled.
‘I just said, “No bloody way!” I met with the cabinet but they said, “There’s nothing we can do, Prime Minister. You’ll be working on this for years.” I said, “Bugger that. That’s it.” I went straight off to France and got stuck into it.’
It took eighteen months of intense lobbying, but by 1991, Hawke and Rocard had created the Madrid Protocol that nailed Antarctica shut to drills for fifty years.
The Australian director of international polar conservation organisation Le Cercle Polaire, Neil Hamilton, describes it as ‘the most important international environmental agreement ever signed’.
Hawke says, ‘When we pulled it off, Gareth said, “You old bugger. You were right.” I said, “Yes, I was, Gareth.’”
Evans concedes he was ‘sceptical at the beginning because I thought it was inconsistent with our international treaty obligations and it was probably unsellable and deliverable. I wasn’t objecting to the concept of locking the place up from mineral exploration… He proved me wrong because that was one of the significant achievements of the government. He was right and his instinct was pretty good on a lot of that foreign policy stuff.’
Decisions didn’t always go Hawke’s way, though.
When he went in to bat for the Jawoyn people, who objected to mining on their traditional lands in and around Coronation Hill in Kakadu National Park, for fear it would disturb the creation being Bula, he pushed it so hard within cabinet he reckons it cost him his job.
‘I really castigated the cabinet. I’d never spoken to them as harshly, severely and critically at any point before,’ says Hawke. ‘A lot of my cabinet said we can’t stop development because of a bloody underground serpent.’
Hawke threw their own beliefs against them.
‘I just said, “The hypocrisy of you people astounds me. You don’t have any trouble accommodating to the beliefs of the Holy Trinity, the Resurrection. You easily accommodate that, bu
t the beliefs of other people you treat with contempt.’”
The leader of the opposition, Dr John Hewson, claimed, ‘If you know anything about Aboriginal heritage, Bula didn’t exist ten years ago. He suddenly emerged as a device to block Coronation Hill.’
The Australian Mining Industry Council came out swinging, running full-page advertisements which read, ‘Can we afford to let Mr Hawke make a $38 billion mistake?’
Hawke’s fury was evident in his cabinet speech:
This supercilious, supremacist discrimination is abhorrent to everything I hold most important and to what in the end I believe the party stands for … We would never contemplate repudiating such findings if they were in respect of the white community and its beliefs. But three hundred blacks are different. You don’t want to say it really, but they are talking bullshit. We won’t say so, but if we give the miners another twelve months to put the pressure on them, the poor silly buggers might come to their senses and think like us! Or at least like Hewson and the miners. Well, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t want any part of that hypocrisy and I don’t want any part of that discrimination.
On that one, Evans says, ‘Hawkey was just getting a bit carried away with the romance of it. There was a bit of the sense that he was losing the plot of it in terms of getting his balances right.’ Hawke tells me, ‘These were a terribly unjustly treated people. Great gaps in education, health and life expectancy. It was intolerable. I just believed that we had to do everything we could to improve their lot in life.’
Given the rule that the prime minister’s decision prevailed, even if it was a minority view, Hawke carried the day. And later that year Keating, whose supporters secured extra votes with a pledge that the decision would be reversed, became prime minister.
The Madrid Protocol. Coronation Hill. Where does your environmentalism come from? I ask.
‘I just believed we had an obligation to future generations to preserve for them the wonderful environment with which they’d have been blessed. That we had an obligation to future generations to do all we could in regard to issues concerning environment.’
What are the great joys of being prime minister?
‘The fact that every day you can do something that’s going to help some people or a lot of people. You’re given an enormous opportunity there to make your country and the world a better place. And it’s an enormous honour, responsibility and opportunity. I woke up every morning looking forward to the day. It was just a totally consuming job.’
What are the lowest points of the job?
Hawke names 1984 as the nadir; ‘a terribly low point for me. I went through that campaign in physical agony, just physical agony.’
Shortly after calling an early election, Hawke was batting for the Prime Minister’s XI in its traditional match against the Canberra press gallery. He missed an easy hook shot and copped the ball in his face. His spectacles were smashed, filling his right eye with shards of glass.
What sort of journalist bounces a prime minister?!
‘It was a terrible case of batting, because it was a very ordinary delivery and I should’ve hit the fucking thing for six,’ says Hawke, who had his revenge while on the hustings at a naval base in Nowra later in the year.
Surrounded by press, he was asked by the naval commander if he’d like to ride in the little transport basket suspended between two ships.
‘Not me, but I’ve got someone who will,’ said Hawke, pointing at journalist Gary O’Neill.
Not long before, Hawke found out that his youngest daughter Rosslyn, who was twenty-four and had just given birth to her second child, was a heroin addict. She weighed thirty-eight kilograms and was expected to die if she continued to use.
‘I was devastated and overwhelmed by sorrow for this beautiful girl, who as a youngster had always been able to get me to spoil her, but with whom I had spent too little time when she became a teenager,’ remembers Hawke. ‘That was without any doubt the lowest period of my time in office. I was just distraught, but I had to get on and I did.’
What do you consider the worst position in which you were ever placed as prime minister?
‘One of the hardest things I had to do was to sack Mick Young. He was a very close mate and we had the Combe–Ivanov affair come up. We’d had a secret cabinet meeting on it. Mick went and talked about it to Walshy [Eric Walsh], a journalist mate of his, and I had no alternative but to sack him.’
The Combe–Ivanov affair was a spy scandal thrown at the government a few weeks after taking office. The former ALP national secretary turned political lobbyist David Combe was accused by ASIO of compromising national security by bud-dying up with Soviet diplomat, and former KGB officer, Valery Ivanov.
Hawke responded by expelling Ivanov.
‘If you kick him it out it will damage Australian–Soviet relations,’ said Harvey Barnett, the director-general of ASIO.
‘Fuck the Russians,’ snapped Hawke.
Combe’s access to the government was cut off. As a former Labor man whose bread and butter as a lobbyist lay in his access and friendship with government ministers, it was a sharp, if necessary, blow.
‘I was accused of being a bastard who had dumped his mate and behaved cruelly towards him,’ writes Hawke.
As hard as it was squeezing out David Combe, sacking Mick cut Hawke deep.
‘That was a terribly difficult decision – terribly,’ he says. ‘He, of course, was very hurt.’
How do you sack someone who is a good friend?
‘You just have to do it. I said, “Mate, you’ve got to go.’”
How did he take it?
‘Not well.’
Hawke pauses, thinks.
‘But if I’d prevaricated on that, on a question of national security, it would have put our government in jeopardy. There was just no doubt what had to be done.’
I tell Hawke I want to run through of couple of Machiavelli’s principles of leadership, given the brutality of politics.
Try to avoid being hated, except during times of war.
‘The issue never arose with me. I always tried to bring the people with me, right from the very, very beginning. That was my approach.’
A leader must act with cunning, and if necessary, force.
‘I don’t like the word cunning,’ says Hawke. ‘It has unsavoury overtones. There are times when you’ve got to play your cards carefully. You won’t necessarily disclose everything at the beginning. Gradually try to get people to a point of view. You have to act cleverly.’
People will inevitably lie to you, so it is therefore acceptable for you to lie to them.
‘No. I don’t accept that proposition at all.’
Trust no one.
‘I don’t accept that.’
A prince would only be successful when he utilised the strength of his ministers. Collaboration created comradery and no room for disunity and rebellion.
‘I agree absolutely with that. My cabinet responded marvellously to my leadership. We strove for, and nearly always got, consensus. If there wasn’t, as I said, my view prevailed. They were not unhappy about that. It was their decision.’
I suggest to Hawke his might be the last cabinet where ministers were household names – for the right reasons.
‘Before John Hewson went into parliament he was a journalist and he wrote that it was the best cabinet since Federation. I haven’t heard anyone disagree with that. There certainly hasn’t been one since to match it.’
Hawke leans forward, rests his cigar on an ashtray.
‘It’s a marvellous comment on the Labor Party. All the funny and not-so-pleasant Machiavellian stuff that goes on, all the factional fires going on – in some mysterious, magical way, out of all that came this marvellous collection of people.’
Was it a fluke, this confluence of talent?
‘I don’t know,’ says Hawke. ‘I’m very grateful, whatever it was.’
Another principle of Machiavelli: Read history and reflect upon
the deeds of outstanding men. Would you agree?
‘Yes, very much so. You’re a fool if you can’t learn from others. In the end, it’s not a question of aping others – you’ve got to be your own man – but, as I say, you’re a fool if you don’t try and learn.’
Do you believe nations have seasonal variations? A summer, a spring, an autumn, a winter? And how would you describe the Hawke government?
‘Ours was a spring, if you like,’ says Hawke.
He references the statement by Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who said in 1980 that if Australia kept going the way it was, ‘it’ll finish up the poor white trash of Asia.’
‘There was a lot of truth in that,’ Hawke concedes. ‘We came through the war in good shape compared to Europe. There was an enormous demand and high prices for our primary products and then for our mineral products. We had an easy run. Then you had the oil crisis in the seventies. The lucky country soon would come to an end. When I was elected, we had double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. This was a frightful situation. Fundamental changes had to be made. That’s why we had the economic summit when we came into office. Tell the people, let them know the enormity of the situation we face.’
What kind of leader was Lee Kuan Yew?
‘Highly intelligent. Justifiably arrogant. He was a very tough leader. People were very critical of the tough regime he had there, but people had forgotten that the communist threat was very real. Infiltrating, coming down through Asia. He was determined that they were not going to get control of Singapore. He had a very tough regime, but he was justified in what he did.’
