Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I offer my deep condolences to the Hawke family and to all the broader members of the Labor family represented today by members opposite. In thinking about what to say at this moment my mind was drawn to a really beautiful essay on leadership by Isaiah Berlin. There have been lots of mentions of Isaiah today; this is a different Isaiah. He made a comparison of leadership styles, in a wonderful essay after World War II, of Roosevelt and Churchill. He described two alternatives—what I think he considered to be opposite strengths in leadership. The first was an individual completely at home, not merely in the present but perhaps even more so in the future; someone who was capable of knowing with clarity where they wanted to go, by what means and why. He described those types of people as policy innovators having a half-conscious, almost premonitory awareness of the coming shape of their own society. These were essentially people who could see clearly an outcome for how they thought the world should be and could see clearly paths around how to get to that outcome.

Then he described an alternative leadership style as being anchored in the strongest possible sense of the past—what he conceived as a sort of unseverable attachment to a description he gave of a brightly coloured vision of history. He saw those types of people as being able to reflect back at their own country's people a composite reality of who they really were that very much resonated with them. It seems that what can make for particularly successful and powerful leadership is people who have both that authentic and insightful sense of who their nation's people really are and who can themselves reflect their own country's contemporary mood back at the people they represent, but who at the same time are futurists. I guess that's in the sense that they're committed to changing central parts of the social and economic landscape that they find themselves in.

Bob Hawke was Prime Minister between 1983 and 1991, obviously, and so he was the Prime Minister of the youth of many of the people here in this parliament and the Prime Minister of the youth of many Australians of generation X. As Prime Minister, Bob Hawke was clearly one of those national leaders who was able to harness that genuine love he had of his country into an energy and optimism, and reflect the best strengths of Australians back to themselves. Very fortunately for Australia, those rare personal qualities weren't squandered. As we've heard this morning, they were harnessed and utilised as a force for enormous good. The eight years of the Hawke government were eight years of government that had broad enough appeal to underwrite this amazing, energetic, risk-averse and overwhelmingly successful commitment to substantial economic reform. That's not to deny all the very significant social policy changes during that era, but it was a period in Australia's government which saw this incredible rarity of the social strength of an individual in a national leader being translated into hard-nosed economic reform.

One personal piece of evidence of the breadth of the appeal of Bob Hawke and his government became apparent to me through the actions of my grandmother. Norma was a very strong-willed woman, a lifelong dyed-in-the wool Liberal, and I recall very vividly in circa 1992, she broke her television because of Paul Keating. It's fair to say that Prime Minister Keating was not Norma's particular cup of tea, so to speak, and that she was a very passionate type—in fact, she is the genealogical link that makes the member for Kennedy and I, as well as friends, blood relatives, but that is a story for another time; by personal invitation, I will tell that story. But Norma, my grandmother, in my presence, threw what I think might have been a vase, which was proximate to her mood, at her own TV, breaking it in the process.

This wasn't quite an event as spectacular as Elvis's shooting of his 25-inch RCA TV because he took offence at the singer Robert Goulet, but it was nevertheless a bit of a sight to witness your grandmother crack her own TV with a swift throw from the outfield of her living room. When I asked her why at the time—and she wasn't in the mood for longer explanations—she simply said, and it will always stick with me: 'They should bring back Bob Hawke. He was a great bloke and at least he liked cricket.' So the fact this woman, who was a dyed-in-the-wool lifelong Liberal from the other side of that voting divide, felt an obvious and genuine affection for Bob Hawke, demonstrated to me then—as have the many reflections today—and since his passing, the real power of those people who shine back through the prime ministership a genuine love of the country's people.

This is obviously a day for the Labor members of the House, and I'm very much looking forward to their recollections and insights, particularly from those who knew the man—and I only met him once at the WACA Ground in the President's Room on the first day of a Perth test match, and he was very generous. I want to quickly finish with the shortest possible story relating to cricket and the University of Western Australia. It was a story relayed by Bob Hawke himself on ABC Radio in Perth in 2013 and it seemed to capture a slice of the spirit of the individual man, something of a Belle Epoque in Western Australia and something of the place that is the University of Western Australia, which was a formative part of Bob Hawke's life. The story was relayed by Bob Hawke—and I might say that UWA, for those of us who've had the great privilege to spend time there, is a place of incredible physical beauty. CGI could not visualise a place more physically Eden-esque than UWA in such a uniquely Australian way. That sense of oasis must have been even more heightened in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Bob Hawke was there.

When you read in the John Curtin library, in the mid-1940s—and it changed a bit in the early 1950s—it was a 35-hour plane trip to Sydney. The isolation of Perth and that oasis effect at UWA must have been quite remarkable. Bob Hawke told the story of having a job as a gardener in 1952, hauling manure by horse and cart to the UWA campus rose gardens. So, a thoroughly modern Prime Minister had that as a job at UWA. On the third of these trips, the horse apparently decided it wasn't much interested in completing the remainder of the work. Bob Hawke approached this problem in a typical consensus and conciliatory way, attempting, he said, to have a word with the horse to see if he could persuade it to do what he wanted it to do. The horse wasn't convinced. It bolted. The cart tipped and ripped a pretty good gash in Bob Hawke's thigh. On that very same day, the South African cricket side was playing the Governor's Eleven at James Oval at UWA. Bob Hawke stumbled onto the field where he found the South African middle-order test batsman Roy McLean on the field. Roy promptly clasped his hands over Bob's thigh to stop the bleeding until an ambulance arrived. What a place and time that must have been, talking about brightly coloured visions of history, and what Bob Hawke lived through and what it brought to his prime ministership was remarkable. So, of course, was the way in which he was such a futurist. By his own admission, in finality, he was a pretty haphazard student during his first two terms at UWA, soaking up what campus life had to offer.

The end to the story that he told on Perth radio was the one alluded to by the opposition leader—that one evening he was on his way home from university on a motorcycle and he had a quite bad accident. He ruptured his spleen, found himself on the critically ill list for a week and came very close to death. He cited that accident on his way home from UWA as a turning point where he felt that his life had been spared for a purpose and that he should make the most of it. Of course, that he very much did, as today's proceedings are testament to. So, again, my sincerest condolences to Bob Hawke's family and to all of my colleagues opposite.

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