Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Bob Hawke was born in Bordertown, South Australia, yet no-one really thinks of Bob Hawke as a South Australian. He went to school and university in Western Australia, yet no-one really thinks about Bob Hawke as a Western Australian. He lived, worked and represented an electorate in Victoria, yet no-one talks about Bob Hawke as a Victorian. And he spent his post-political life living in Sydney, yet no-one really thinks of Bob Hawke as a New South Welshman. Bob Hawke was an Australian—that's what mattered; that's how people saw him; that's how he'll be remembered. And that was the characteristic he most wanted for himself.

On the evening of 19 December 1991, at a press conference in this very building, just after he lost the Labor leadership and thus saw his almost nine years as Prime Minister come to an end, Hawke was asked how he wanted to be remembered. He said:

I guess as a bloke who loved his country, and still does, and loves Australians, and who was not essentially changed by high office.

He said:

I hope they still will think of me as the Bob Hawke that they got to know – the larrikin trade union leader who perhaps had sufficient common sense and intelligence to tone down his larrikinism to some extent and behave in a way that a prime minister should if he’s going to be a proper representative of his people, but who, in the end, is essentially a dinky-di Australian.

If the contributions in this place thus far and the extensive coverage of Bob Hawke's passing are anything to go by, it's fair to say that the former Prime Minister achieved his wish.

There is no one correct answer to the question of what Bob Hawke's most significant achievement was, in policy terms. But one of the most important lessons he taught us is one that, especially in our present political era, we need to sincerely pause and reflect upon. Bob Hawke was authentic: he didn't pretend to be faultless; he was candid about his vulnerabilities and his imperfections. If there's any lesson to be drawn from his time on the political stage, surely it is that perfection is not a precondition for greatness. In a political age where an entire week can be consumed by something someone put on Twitter years ago, and we in parliament and those in the media tie themselves up in knots wondering whether someone meets some arbitrary character test, it's worth asking ourselves whether the quality of our politics is being enhanced by such an approach.

Suppose Bob Hawke had been a candidate for the first time in 2019, rather than in 1963, when he first ran for Corio, or when he initially won his seat of Wills in 1980. Would his past transgressions have ruled him out of contention? Almost certainly. Would Australia have been poorer as a result? Most definitely. I say that as someone who has been a lifelong Liberal and campaigned actively, as a young person on the ground in Perth, to defeat the Hawke government in the late 1980s.

Like others in this place, I also owe my journey, my interest in politics, to Bob Hawke. Surprisingly, like Senator Hanson-Young, I also wrote to the Prime Minister, as a young teenager, requesting the most simplest of things—a campaign sticker. You can imagine my delight, when I got home from school, to receive an envelope marked with the Office of the Prime Minister. There was a simple letter saying, 'Dear Dean, please find enclosed a campaign sticker.' And it was the campaign sticker from the 1983 federal election campaign: 'Bringing Australians together'.

Indeed, in my first speech, I reflected on the general political approach taken by the Hawke Labor government and the WA Labor government of Brian Burke at the time, and how it made me feel deeply uncomfortable, and how this sparked a political interest and fervour in me, forcing me to consider deeply my own political values and approach. In that first speech, I said that I had been appalled by Labor's cosy menage a trois of big business, big government and big unions wilfully taking for granted ordinary families like mine and those around me. Seven years later, that continues to inform my own approach to political issues. When I hear phrases like 'there is a consensus' or 'there is overwhelming agreement' about something, I am instinctively drawn to look deeper into the issue and start from a position of suspicion.

But moments like this morning give us an opportunity to stop and reflect. One of the more unfortunate developments in Australian politics over the past decade has been an unwillingness on both sides to acknowledge when our opponents have been right about things—as the saying goes, even a broken clock is correct twice a day. To oppose for the sake of opposing, for every single battle to be fought along tribal lines, leaves no room for nuance. As the 46th Parliament commences this week, perhaps one of the ways we can all honour Bob Hawke's memory is to call time on this tired approach. That doesn't mean we should agree on everything. If we have honest disagreements, we should prosecute them fully and energetically. Australians are entitled to expect that. But they are equally entitled to policy consistency. That also means being prepared to acknowledge when our political opponents have got something right in policy terms.

In the wake of Bob Hawke's passing, there was much coverage of the economic reforms he achieved, in partnership with Paul Keating, during the 1980s and into the early part of the 1990s—floating the dollar, reforming tax, opening up the banking sector to competition, privatising some government owned businesses and reducing tariffs, to name but a few. All of these reforms were noted as being essential to the establishment of what we now call 'modern Australia'. What they mean, of course, by the term 'modern Australia' is an economy that is more outward looking, more economically integrated with the Asian region, less reliant on protectionist trade barriers, less enamoured of centralised wage fixing and more open to competition.

At the time when many of these things were undertaken, 35 years ago, it was possible to find serious opposition to these propositions. Some of the fiercest opposition was in Bob Hawke's own caucus room. But, to their credit, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating pushed through and did not in any way resile—because they had a powerful belief, a powerful conviction, in what they were doing and their view that it was the right thing to do.

I think it is also worth pointing out that they also had another significant ally in many of these undertakings—namely, their partisan opponents and, in particular, John Howard, who was shadow Treasurer and, later, Leader of the Opposition when Bob Hawke undertook the most audacious aspects of his economic reform agenda. It is one thing to claim, three decades after the fact, that certain economic reforms were obvious or inevitable; it is an easy analysis, but it is also a shallow one. It is my observation that what matters most—and I think what history will judge—is the attitude that political parties take not at a point of time but over time. John Howard, for the most part, supported the signature reforms the Hawke Labor government undertook. Why? Because he could see they were consistent with what was in Australia's long-term interests. It is worth recalling that that bipartisanship was not returned when John Howard was Prime Minister a decade later and pursuing further economic reforms, particularly in relation to his first round of industrial relations changes and tax reform and the introduction of the GST.

There is a reason why Bob Hawke and John Howard held each other in such high regard and why history will ultimately be kind to both gentlemen. They were both able to resist the temptation to do the easy thing politically and instead remained steadfast in pursuing the economic reforms they believed to be right—a belief that both history and Australia's economic performance over the last three decades have clearly vindicated. Both also recognised that political capital is a precious commodity that does not last forever—something that some of their successors in high office over the past decade have perhaps not been as skilled at recognising.

I don't make these observation as a means of litigating past battles but, rather, because we are at the beginning of a new parliament and I think there is an opportunity to recapture some of the more rational approach to politics that characterised the Hawke era—a rational approach that I don't believe is necessarily beyond our reach. The common lesson of Hawke and Howard, reflected in the outcome of the most recent ballot just a few months ago, is that Australians want to and will reward their leaders when they are focused on the issues that matter to them.

We should also acknowledge that this great Australian larrikin possessed, I think, one of the greatest of political gifts, and that is grace, because, as we all know, Mr Hawke ultimately ceased to be Prime Minister not because he was defeated at an election but because he was removed from the leadership by his own colleagues. Politics is a very brutal business. Most of us in this place do not get to be here without having some experience of setbacks and defeat, and most of us here will not ultimately get to choose the precise timing or manner of our own departure. That good fortune will fall to just a few.

I cannot imagine how personally hurtful it would have been for Bob Hawke to lose the job he loved at the hands of a party that he'd taken to four successive election victories, a feat equalled only by Menzies and by John Howard. However, the measure of an individual is how they deal with such a setback. No-one is ever really immune from the very real and serious temptations to lash out or to settle scores. But, to his enormous credit, that was something that Bob Hawke was not characterised by. Of course, he published a memoir and participated in a television documentary where he made some blunt observations regarding his successor, and I think that is totally defensible; a former leader is always entitled to offer their perspective on their period in office. But that is a very different thing from waging a protracted campaign of vengeance. It's certainly very different from engaging in behaviour designed to damage your own political party in the context of a federal election campaign. Of course, Bob Hawke was on the public stage in a pre-Twitter era, but even so it's difficult to envisage him weaponising social media as a means of damaging a political party to which he owed his entire public career.

In fact, there is footage of Bob Hawke on the election night in 1993 sharing his joy at Labor's victory. When the Labor Party gathered in the Great Hall of this building for a dinner to celebrate that famous victory for the true believers a few weeks later, Bob Hawke was present to hear the man who replaced him say: 'Just let me say this: you can't have a fifth election victory without a fourth, and the bloke that gave it to us is here tonight. Thanks for coming, Bob.' And that generosity of spirit was returned just a couple of weeks ago during Bob Hawke's memorial at the Sydney Opera House, when, at Hawke's own request, one of the eulogies was delivered by Paul Keating, the man who had torn him down.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable things that I found in the course of reading about some of the events during the Hawke-Keating leadership tussle is that, on the very day Keating had declared his first unsuccessful challenge in June of 1991, he and Hawke had spent the whole day in the same room presiding over a premiers conference as Prime Minister and Treasurer. There's a degree to which time heals all wounds, there's no doubt. But I think, more than that, these moments show an ability to put personal ambition aside and work in the national interest that now seems unimaginable. But, if it is unimaginable, that is because we, the politicians, have made it so. The experience of the past decade in Australian politics notwithstanding, I like to think it possible we will see such cooperation again in the not-too-distant future.

There's no doubt that Menzies, Hawke and Howard are the three giants of postwar politics in our country. They were from very different backgrounds and are very different people. Of course, each of them was possessed by an enormous ambition, energy and drive, a prerequisite in politics. But perhaps what sets these three apart is that their ambition went beyond merely securing their own personal advancement, and that was something that fellow Australians could sense and see. Far more than other prime ministers, something within these three has managed to capture the public mood, permitting them to sustain public support through successive elections in a way others have not been able to match. The ability to appeal to so many of your fellow Australians over such a long period of time is a remarkable thing. No one factor can explain it. But perhaps the one element common to all three was that they were authentic and true to themselves and to their beliefs and had a clear set of values. That consistency is what enabled them to develop a bond with the public capable of withstanding the day-to-day vicissitudes that accompany political life.

Bob Hawke was said to have had a love affair with the Australian people, but his political legacy goes far beyond anything that can be measured by opinion polls and election results. He forced his own party to fundamentally rethink its approach to economic management and pursued essential economic reforms that previous Liberal governments had been too timid to touch, and even though he left the stage reluctantly he nonetheless did it in a manner that was graceful, was dignified and protected the interests of the political party to which he had devoted his whole life.

Bob Hawke will always remain a Labor Party icon, but even those of us who have never voted for him should be proud of the manner in which he conducted his prime ministership and the fundamental decency he displayed towards political friend and political foe alike. The best tribute those of us serving as parliamentarians today can pay to Bob Hawke is to work harder to emulate the positive, principled and generous spirit he brought to his many years in public life. Robert James Lee Hawke, AC, may you rest in peace.