by Derek Rielly
In 1983, was there a sense within the party, as there was in the community, that a messiah, a suntanned god made four inches taller by a beehive of meticulously whipped silver hair, had arrived?
‘We felt more like that with Whitlam,’ says Evans. ‘Whitlam was the messiah of my generation and then Hawke was the thank god moment with which we put behind us the debacle of ’75 and the catastrophe of all those following years. It was only eight years later and here we are back in government and ready to go and firing on all cylinders. It was exaltation, of course, exhilaration… but messiah? I don’t know. The reason Hayden was knocked off in favour of Hawke was that there was just a total confidence that we would win with Hawke, whereas while we felt we should and we could win with Hayden, we were not absolutely sure, and Hawke was the icing on the cake. I remember it more as a sense of relief than anything else.’
The journalist Paul Kelly writes about women weeping in the streets in one of his first public appearances as Labor leader. Did you see similar instances? Were you yourself moved to tears?
Evans responds with a faux smile.
‘Those of us who knew him better weren’t quite as emotionally charged,’ he says. ‘I saw enough dimensions of his personality and enough of his human side to recognise that we weren’t in the presence of God. We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God, and that was very good for the party and good for the movement.’
What kind of man is Bob Hawke?
‘Highly intelligent, capable, forceful, full of personality, very much the boyo, very much everybody’s favourite drinking companion – although he had very short arms when it came to reaching into his own pocket. Famously so. He was engaging, opinionated, a force of nature.’
Did that impression change over the years?
‘When he went off the grog, obviously, when he became prime minister. Then he quieted down a lot around the edges and was less of an over-the-top personality, which he tended to be when he was on the turps … When you took the grog away, he was missing a dimension or two.’
But, adds Evans, even without a crankcase topped with social lube, ‘he had the same drive and energy and commitment that was there, and the same capacity to connect with anybody anywhere.’
Can you describe the dynamic between you and Hawke?
‘It was a relationship of mutual support rather than any sort of intense bonding…’
There was no father–son thing?
‘Oh no!’ he says. ‘With Beazley you sensed a lot more of that, the mentor relationship… You sensed that very, very strongly with Kim. But I was always more distant and [had a] more objective relationship rather than a subjective one.’
Was that by choice?
‘No, [it was] because we didn’t really have an awful lot in common. We had Oxford and we had university stuff and so on, but my instincts were more …’ Evans pauses. ‘It sounds pompous to say, but they were more cerebral, and I like reading.’
To make his point, Evans says Bob read one book a year at most, and once, when he consumed a book on the eighteenth-century British statesman Robert Walpole, ‘we heard about bloody Robert Walpole about three times a week for the next two years’.
Hawke was highly intelligent, explains Evans, ‘but not an intellectual in any way, shape or form, and with no particular interest in the arts. No interest at all in literature, fiction, no particular interest in history other than when suddenly the light bulb went off and something was extremely relevant… I had no interest whatsoever in the horses or gambling. We were basically quite different personalities but complementary personalities during a period when that mattered.’
I respond that it’s interesting that a man like Hawke could be highly intelligent, a Rhodes Scholar with multiple degrees, but not be an intellectual.
‘It’s very common. Very common. More common than you might think, actually,’ says Evans. ‘Just with no basic intellectual interests. It’s intriguing. That didn’t stop him being quite an acute observer of international relations and he got very engaged in foreign policy issues and… was capable of seeing the bigger pictures and putting the story together. Highly, highly intelligent, but the nature of his interests were not really my interests. Like Beazley, he had a much greater personal enthusiasm for schmoozing, basically. Very comfortable spending long nights just schmoozing, gossiping, moving around, whereas I didn’t mind doing that in particular over a meal or whatever, but I really want to get back to the grind of reading stuff and getting on top of policy issues and getting prepared for stuff. I just approach things in a different way.’
Oh, but it was such a vigorous government, I say.
Vigorous?Evans searches for a more accurate word. ‘Robust,’ he says. ‘Though it was not one that was consistent with British traditions of decorum. But it was effective.’
Speaking of British traditions of decorum, I ask permission to read aloud a thrilling exchange between Hawke and Keating in Evans’ book, Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary.
Evans nods. I read:
Hawke snarled back: ‘I was right and you were wrong and you’ll always be wrong on this issue’. Keating in turn rounded back at him: ‘You were fucking wrong and you’ll live to regret it’. Schoolyard stuff, but they were both pale and tense and almost shaking with anger… it is the clearest indication I have seen for some time as to just how bad things are now, fundamentally, between them.’
I tell Evans I’m surprised that there was such tension between Keating and Hawke so early in the famous partnership.
‘Yes, but it wasn’t existential,’ he says. ‘It was never so bad that it was dysfunctional. When you’ve got old bulls and young bulls in the same patch – old bull Hayden and young bull Evans, old bull Hawke and young bull Keating – that’s life in politics and any institutional environment… I think most of us saw it as healthy rough and tumble. Scary for people who are not used to this sort of stuff but we’re all pretty hardened professionals.’
On balance, who do you think has the more accurate recollection of that period? Hawke in his memoirs or Keating in his various outbursts?
‘Hawke’s is very self-serving and Paul’s is very self-serving. The truth is always somewhere in between. Blanche’s second biography of Hawke [Hawke: The Prime Minister] is, frankly, a disgrace. I would not take too much guidance from that. Even though she wrote the first one [Robert J. Hawke: A Biography] in circumstances that were fairly intimate, nonetheless it’s a well-crafted serious biography; the second one that she wrote three years ago is just a work of second-rate hagiography But, see, Hawke and Keating in retirement had reached a kind modus vivendi of mutual respect. I mean, Hawke himself had simply gotten over being rolled by Keating and Keating was not pursuing his vindication of history. They were just letting that lie and were reasonably civilised to each other when they bumped into each other on party occasions. But when Blanche published that book it really just made my hairs stand on end because it was just ridiculously Hawke was brilliant from start to finish. Got everything right and Keating was a pain in the arse. And, you know, Keating contributed basically nothing and it was all Hawke’s agenda every inch of the way.’
When I put this to Blanche later an eyebrow arches.
‘Sounds like Gareth was weaned on a pickle. Hawke: The Prime Minister is in no way a disgrace; it’s an essay, modest in scope and design, that sets out to answer the question, ‘What sort of leader was he?’ It was written as an addition to the original biography, which had addressed the question everyone was asking: ‘What sort of a man is he?’ My publisher wanted to reissue the biography with an update about the prime ministership. I saw the opportunity to collect information for future scholars that otherwise would be irretrievable – the recollections of public servants and political staff, men (mostly) who would speak to me, but not to the media, and whose memories would be lost as they aged or died. However, when I’d finished it, there was a problem: even using the thinnest paper, it
would make the biography into a brick. Louise Adler, publisher of MUP, and I talked it through and came to the conclusion that a standalone book was the better solution. Gareth shouldn’t slam an unpretentious work intended for the use of future historians as “a disgrace”. Obviously, he didn’t read the preface in which I explained its purpose.’
So, who did what?
‘Hawke is right that some of the early big reforms – the floating of the dollar and all that sort of stuff, which Keating has tended in retrospect to say me me me me me – they were probably more Hawke than Keating. Hawke was a good economist and had a good sense of what needed to be done with these changes,’ says Evans. ‘It took Paul all of’ 83 to really get his head together, his act together and his full understanding of what the treasury was all about. He had a huge capacity to absorb information, argument and analysis, to cut to the quick and to communicate, and a huge capacity to work with the best and the brightest in treasury, but in that first period it was certainly more Hawke than Keating who delivered on all that really, really big stuff. As time went on, there’s no question that Keating was the engine room for most of what kept on happening after that, year in and year out. Just the energy and the creativity and the advocacy brilliance that he brought to it were hugely important for the government.
‘And it is true that Hawke’s visible leadership on policy-type issues took a step back after that first year because he got the big ideas out there. Recovery, reconciliation, reconstruction, the summit, the social wage concept and the basic elements of that narrative were all in place in the first year and brilliantly sold. Thereafter, he got excited and obsessed with particular bits and pieces of foreign policy stuff and how he single-handedly brought an end to the apartheid regime in South Africa.’
How accurate is Hawke’s claim that he played a pivotal role in the destruction of apartheid?
‘Look,’ says Evans, ‘Bob played an important role, no doubt about it. At the heads of government meetings and on the financial sanctions issue he saw the way forward. But, you know, “Nelson said to me, Without you, Bob…” – well, that’s gilding the lily a tiny bit.”
At the launch of your book Inside the Hawke–Keating Government: A Cabinet Diary, Keating used the occasion to claim Hawke all but vanished as the country’s prime minister from 1984 to 1989. How true is that?
‘I don’t buy into Keating’s thesis that Hawke was out to lunch from 1984 onwards,’ says Evans. ‘But Hawke obviously was out to lunch in the ’84 election.’
Which Hawke admits – finding out his daughter Rosslyn was a junkie, getting belted in the face by a cricket ball and so forth, I say.
‘[The government] was on a high after having won in ’83 and just thought they could coast, but I think they just lost the plot in all sorts of ways,’ says Evans. ‘I was shocked by the result when we didn’t do as well as we thought we could and should, but he got his act together after that. Bob was never a detailed policy guy, but he did have a sense of direction, a sense of narrative about where the country should go and the story we as the Labor Party should tell, and I think that’s one of his greatest contributions – that capacity to articulate a narrative … All great political leaders and all serious social transformers have a story which they can tell effectively to the public. It’s not just ducking and weaving from one piecemeal thing to another. It’s a storyline, and Hawke was very good at that.’
He persuaded the electorate that a Labor government wouldn’t be shackled to the old strictures of socialism; that Labor understood the economy was as important to the country’s health as any welfare program. And that it would, that it should, become the natural party of government.
‘We were the ones that, before the British got anywhere near it, invented, basically, the Third Way,’ says Evans. ‘This combination of very dry economics, non-traditional Labor economics, combined with very warm and fuzzy social policy in the great Labor tradition, plus a very liberal internationalist foreign policy, again in the great Labor tradition.’
Evans lists the ability to convince the ACTU to restrain wages, while at the same time ‘ensuring that nobody was left behind’ made it a ‘brilliantly conceived Labor narrative. Brilliant because it accommodated the traditional principles and values of the party to the realities of the modern technological industrial age. If we just relied on the old protectionist policies and everybody in for their wage hikes, inflation-driven sort of stuff, the country was going to go out the door backwards. Bob saw this very well, whereas in Britain the Thatcherites had also seen the necessity for change and delivered it in a very thuggish and ugly way. And then Blair came along with basically the same storyline, which he picked up from Australia, which people don’t fully appreciate.’
It’s a matter on which Evans can speak with authority. For three days in 1990, he showed Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, both to become British Labor prime ministers, the inner workings of the Hawke government.
‘You could see the brains going off like flashbulbs as they realised the significance of what we were doing,’ says Evans. ‘Forget about [British sociologist] Tony Giddens and the LSE [London School of Economics], all the other people who are supposed to be architects of the Blairite Third Way. It was really the Australian experience and what those guys learned from what Hawke and the rest of us were doing here in marrying together the dry rigorous economics with the decent social policy and decent foreign policy. The great fascination of that encounter with Blair and Brown was that everybody thought Brown was the next big thing…’
Oh, I can’t imagine dreary Brown usurping bright-as-a-button Blair. But yes, Evans responds in splendid Latin: Brown dominated ‘for … gravitas, the pietas and the dignitas. Tony was just a little bandy skipping along in the rear. The big, bright smile and slightly goofy grin. I mean smart, but a lightweight by comparison to Gordon Brown the heavyweight.’
Combine Hawke’s instinctive sense of narrative with his rock-star cabinet – ‘the gold standard,’ says Evans – and you have an immensely capable and effective government.
‘Everything was contested, everything was contestable, and that makes for very healthy government because, provided people keep the arguments within the cabinet room … there was a common commitment to the collective cause. If there were arguments about anything it was, “What’s the best policy?” Or, “What’s the best way to deliver it?” Or, “What’s the best way to sell it?” There weren’t arguments that were personal or ideologically driven. You didn’t have that sort of jealousy-type environment, even in the later stages when the Keating–Hawke stuff got rather fraught. You always had the sense that it was the larger Labor enterprise, the larger government enterprise. Even when we finally went out of office after thirteen years, this was not a government that had fallen apart internally. It was not a government that was riven with divisions and personality squabbles or anything like that. It was a government that just got tired and people were a bit sick of us and people were ready for change.’
How do the eight years of the Hawke government compare to Howard’s four-term reign – and, for that matter, the chaos of Rudd–Gillard and Abbott–Turnbull – that followed?
‘It sounds ridiculous and romantic, but when you compare and contrast it, the Howard government was stable, but it was stable without any real mojo internally. They continued some of the key reforms and added to one or two of them, but there was no drive. There was no ambition. There was a much-reduced place in the world in terms of the international stuff.
‘Then you get to Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and it’s just a different universe of jealousy and personality and ideology and dysfunction and a lack of collective capacity to focus on the main game. My story about Rudd is, I think it was a tragedy that he was taken down the way he was and a tragedy that Gillard came to power that way, because it just tarnished her from the beginning.’
Evans posits that if the Rudd government (and let’s remember that Rudd came into the prime minister’s job with a popul
arity rating almost the equal of Hawke’s: 74 per cent in 2008) had had a cabinet like Hawke’s, the government would’ve soared.
‘The real weakness was the inability of that collective core of other senior ministers, ten to twelve of them, to get their own act together and go to the leader and say, “Come on, buddy. Get your act together. This place is falling apart. You’re running it like a bloody two-bit Napoleon,”’ says Evans. ‘If that message had been given with any clarity to Rudd when he first started to behave in a dysfunctional fashion and disrespectful fashion to colleagues, senior public servants, and all of the other things we know about that government, if he had got that message early on, he was smart enough to have learned that, but they were just so weak.’
In A Cabinet Diary you write, ‘I just find Keating’s conversation and company easier to take than Hawke’s staccato narcissism.’ What do you mean by staccato narcissism? I ask.
Well, says Evans, we must first remember that when he wrote the book he was still ‘wounded’ after being demoted from attorney-general to Minister for Trade and Resources.
‘It was very painful and humiliating at the time, because I’d only been in the job for eighteen months and it was the job that everyone associated with me and everyone lusted for,’ he says.
But caveat aside…
‘Hawke is a narcissist… Anyone who gets to senior levels in politics, and particularly leadership levels, as I’ve often said, you’ve got to be a deeply flawed personality. You’ve just got levels of insensitivity known to no ordinary mortal to survive the rigours of these sorts of jobs. You’ve got to be a bit psychologically different. You’ve got to be a bit psychologically strange to ever fight your way to the top and stay there for any period of time. Normal people don’t get these jobs because normal people just get burned off along the way by the stresses and the strains and some of the indecencies of the process.’
As for Keating, Evans says he iced their friendship over a few quotes in the ABC’s 2014 Australian Story episode on Hawke, ‘Just Call Me Bob’. Evans had said, ‘Bob was an absolutely brilliant prime minister and he touched every leadership base you can think of,’ and, ‘The notion that Bob was out of it for another four or five years after that I think is just wrong.’