I was born in Bordertown, a small town in South Australia near the Victorian border. My father was a Congregationalist minister; My uncle, Albert Hawke, was Labor Premier of Western Australia between 1953 and 1959 and was a close friend of Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, who was in many ways one of my role models. Mum had an almost messianic belief in my destiny and this contributed to this supreme self-confidence throughout my career.
I was raised in Perth and went to the Perth Modern School and completed undergraduate degrees in Law and Arts (Economics) at the University of Western Australia. I then joined the Labor Party in 1947, where I was selected as a Rhodes Scholar in 1953 and went to Oxford University to complete a Bachelor of Letters at University College with a thesis on wage-fixing in Australia.
Haha My achievements were possibly outweighed by the notoriety i achieved as the holder of a world record for the fastest consumption of beer: two and a half pints in eleven seconds. In My memoirs, I suggested that this single feat may have contributed to the political success I had more than any other, by endearing me to a voting population with a strong beer culture.
Returning 1956, I married Hazel Masterton, Having four wonderful kids, one of whom died in infancy. We moved to Canberra where I started studying for a doctorate at the Australian National University, but abandoned the degree in 1958 when i was offered a post as research officer at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) headquarters in Melbourne. My ambition, self-belief and larrikin nature was already obvious. John Button, Industry Minister in the Hawke Labor government, recalled me holding court in the bar of a dingy pub that served as a Labor and union hangout, and offering him the post of Attorney-General in a future Hawke government. I first attempted to enter parliament in 1963, where he unsuccessfully ran against Hubert Opperman in the seat of Corio.
Part of my work at the ACTU was the presentation of its annual case for higher wages to the national wages tribunal, the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. I attained such success and prominence in this role that in 1969 I was encouraged to run for ACTU President, despite the fact that I had never held elected office in a trade union.
I was elected to the presidency of the ACTU in 1969 on a modernising platform, by a narrow margin (399 to 350) and with the support of the left of the union movement, including some associated with the Communist Party.
I declared publicly that "socialist is not a word I would use to describe myself" and my approach to government was pragmatic .I concerned myself with making improvements to workers' lives from within the traditional institutions of government, rather than to any idealogical theory. I opposed the Vietnam war, but was a strong supporter of the US-Australian alliance, and also an emotional supporter of Israel.
In industrial matters, I continued to demonstrate a preference for and considerable skill at negotiation, and was generally liked and respected by employers as well as the unions he advocated for. As early as 1972 speculation began that I would soon enter Parliament and become Labor leader. But while my career continued successfully, my heavy use of alcohol and my notorious womanising placed considerable strains on my family life.
In 1973 I became Federal President of the Labor Party. When the Gough Whitlam government was controversially dismissed by the Governor General in 1975 and the government defeated at the ensuing election, Whitlam initially offered the Labor leadership to Me, although it was not within Whitlam's power to decide who would succeed him. I decided not to enter Parliament at that time, a decision I soon regretted. I , however, influential in averting national strike action. The strain of this period took its toll, and in 1979 I suffered a physical collapse.
This shock led Me to make a sustained and ultimately successful effort to conquer My alcoholism — John Curtin was my inspiration in this as in other things. I was helped in this by his relationship with the writer Blanche d'Alpuget, who in 1982 published an admiring biography of me. My popularity with the public was unaffected, and polling suggested that I was a far more popular politician than either Bill Hayden, the Labor leader since 1977, or the incumbent Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Indeed I had been the most popular man in Australia for nearly ten years by the time he entered Parliament.
I was elected to the House of Representatives for the Melbourne seat of Wills at the 1980 election, and was immediately elected to the Opposition front bench. Hayden's failure to defeat Fraser at that election gave me an opportunity. I enlisted the support of the powerful New South Wales right-wing Labor "machine" to undermine Hayden, whom I famously described as "a lying cunt with a limited future." (Graham Richardson, Whatever It Takes, 76). In July 1982 I made my first challenge for the Labor leadership, losing by four votes.
By the end of 1982, however, it was obvious that Fraser was planning an early election, and Labor MPs began to fear that with Hayden as leader they would lose. In February 1983, on the same day that Fraser called an election for 5 March, Hayden was persuaded to resign and I became Labor leader without opposition. Where i went on to win the election in a landslide, becoming Prime Minister less than thirty days after assuming leadership of his party and barely three years after entering Parliament.
The inaugural days of the Hawke government were distinctly different from those of the Whitlam era. Rather than immediately initiating extensive reform programmes, I announced that Fraser's pre-election concealment of the budget deficit meant that many of Labor's election commitments would have to be deferred. I managed to persuade the Labor caucus to divide the ministry into two tiers, with only the most important Ministers attending regular cabinet meetings. This was to avoid what I viewed as the unwieldy nature of the 27-member Whitlam cabinet. The caucus under Hawke also exhibited a much more formalised system of parliamentary factions, which significantly altered the dynamics of caucus operations.
I used his great authority to carry out a substantial set of policy changes. Accounts from ministers indicate that while I was not usually the driving force for economic reform (that impetus coming from the Treasurer Paul Keating and Industry Minister John Button), I took the role of reaching consensus and providing political guidance on what was electorally feasible and how best to sell it to the public, at which he was highly successful.
Keating and I provided a study in contrasts. I was a Rhodes Scholar; Keating left high school early. Hawke's enthusiasms were cigars, horse racing and all forms of sport; Keating preferred classical architecture and collecting antique Swiss cuckoo clocks. I was consensus-driven; Keating revelled in aggressive debate. I was a lapsed Protestant; Keating was a practising Catholic. Despite their differences, we formed an effective political partnership.
Among other things, the my Government floated the Australian dollar, deregulated the financial system, overhauled the tariff system, privatised state sector industries, ended subsidisation of loss-making industries, and sold off the state-owned Commonwealth Bank of Australia — all reforms that in other Western countries would have been performed by right-wing governments (except in New Zealand under Roger Douglas in David Lange's Labour Government). The tax system was reformed, most notably through the taxation of capital gains — a reform strongly opposed by the Liberal Party at the time, but not reversed when they returned to office.
I benefitted greatly from the disarray into which the Liberal opposition fell after the resignation of Fraser. The Liberals were divided between supporters of the dour, economically and socially conservative John Howard and the urbane Andrew Peacock. The arch-conservative Premier of Queensland, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, also helped Hawke with his "Joh for Canberra" campaign in 1987, which proved highly damaging for the conservatives. Exploiting these divisions, I led the Labor Party to comfortable election victories in 1984 and 1987.
My Prime Ministership saw considerable friction between him and the grassroots of the Labor Party, who were unhappy at what they viewed as my iconoclasm and willingness to co-operate with business interests. All Labor Prime Ministers have at times engendered the hostility of the organisational wing of the party, but none more so than Hawke, who expressed his willingness to cull Labor's "sacred cows". The Socialist Left faction, as well as prominent Labor figure Barry Jones, offered severe criticism of a number of government decisions.
On social policy, the Hawke government saw gradual reforms. The Whitlam government's universal health insurance system (Medibank), which had been dismantled by Fraser, was restored under a new name, Medicare. A notable success for which the government's response is given considerable credit was Australia's public health campaign about AIDS. In the latter years of the Hawke government, Aboriginal affairs saw considerable attention, with an investigation of the idea of a treaty between Aborigines and the government, though this idea was overtaken by events, notably including the Mabo court decision.
The Hawke government also made some notable environmental decisions. In its first months in office it stopped the construction of the Franklin Dam, on the Franklin River in Tasmania, responding to a groundswell of protest about the issue. In 1990, a looming tight election saw a tough political operator, Graham Richardson, appointed Environment Minister, whose task it was to attract second-preference votes from the Australian Democrats and other environmental parties. Richardson claimed this as a major factor in the government's narrow re-election in 1990, my last triumph.
