Wednesdays with Bob

by Derek Rielly

  Arranged on the other walls and in a display cabinet are the famous photo of Steve Waugh, arms outstretched after his last-ball century against England at the SCG in 2003, Howard with Mark Taylor, with Ian Thorpe, with John Bertrand, Dawn Fraser and – ah, yes – his old adversary Bob Hawke.

  As if on cue, I see Howard enter the waiting room, his secretary hurrying behind him.

  ‘Where’s Mr Rielly?’ he booms.

  I move out of his blind spot. We shake – such a vital grip – and Howard, who is seventy-seven years old but bounces with the vigour of someone who animates his body regularly, leads me the few metres into his apartment-sized office. Fifty-three floors above Sydney Harbour, the visitor and his master are bathed in the light from a floor-to-ceiling window that stretches the twenty-metre length of the office.

  The eastern and western walls feature floor-to-ceiling bookcases. A large dark wood desk occupies the western quarter, a small lounge and a chair are on the opposite side, and there is a lectern in the middle with the day’s newspapers neatly arranged. It so happens that Mike Baird has just resigned as NSW premier.

  The headlines read:

  BREAKING BAIRD

  BAIRD BOWS OUT

  BRUISED BAIRD BAILS.

  ‘Seven premiers in ten years,’ I say.

  ‘And this was a good one,’ muses Howard.

  Howard takes up the lounge chair. I’m on the leather couch, which is slightly lower, thereby allowing the former PM a superior position.

  I ask Howard to describe his current relationship with Hawke. Well, he says, they don’t exactly seek each other out. But they have appeared together at various public events sixty-ish times.

  ‘There’s no point in maintaining any sort of personal antagonism,’ says Howard.

  What are your early memories of Hawke?

  ‘He was very much the outspoken, sometimes belligerent trade union leader,’ says Howard. ‘I remember the very first time I had to deal with him one-on-one…’

  A landline rings.

  ‘Excuse me for a moment. Tony… Could I call you back? I’m just doing an interview… No, no, no, I’ll ring you back, okay? Thank you.’

  Did my interview just triumph over a phone call from Tony Abbott? Howard’s courtesy knows no bounds!

  He continues: ‘I was a very junior minister in the Fraser government and we were introducing some legislation, which I thought was long overdue, to expose trade unions to penalties if they engaged in secondary boycotts of companies. Because under the then law, if a company engaged in a secondary boycott against another company it would be penalised, and I couldn’t see why a union should be any different. And what was happening was… say a union was having an argument with a company, they would, in order to further their argument, impose a boycott on a third company that was doing business with the company that they had the argument with.’

  The turbulent seventies!

  ‘Yeah, and we thought that was unreasonable. Bob said it was outrageous and I didn’t understand industrial reality and said there’d be blood on the streets if I went ahead with it. We went ahead with it and it was legislated.’

  Did Pitt Street run red with the blood of the worker?

  ‘There wasn’t any blood on the streets,’ Howard says with a laugh. ‘But he played his part. You could tell that he was performing on a larger stage and he did establish an identity. Whatever people’s politics might have been at the time, whether they were Labor or Coalition, he did establish an identity as a major public figure long before he entered parliament.’

  I say that I’ve read conflicting accounts of the Coalition’s response to the ALP’s switch to Hawke in 1983. In some accounts, Fraser said that he wasn’t particularly bothered about facing Hawke in an election. In other versions, the prevailing reason for wanting that early election in ’82 was so that he didn’t have to face Hawke. And that after Hayden saw off Hawke’s July ’82 challenge the cabinet broke into spontaneous applause. What’s your memory of the event?

  ‘When Hawke became leader of the Labor Party that made our task that much harder. I’m not saying that it was impossible for Hayden to have beaten Fraser – he might’ve – but I thought the elevation of Hawke probably put it beyond doubt.’

  Does he remember the mood surrounding Hawke’s elevation to the leadership in 1983? I mention Paul Kelly’s description of women weeping in the street during Hawke’s first walk-through in Brisbane, adding Gareth Evans’ remark, ‘We were in the presence of someone who a lot of people perceived as God.’

  A tight grin. ‘Yeah, well,’ says Howard. ‘I didn’t share those views.’

  There was a newspaper headline in 1983 that read ‘Hawke. Sexy. Tamie’. Do you remember that?

  ‘I do,’ says Howard.

  Do you remember Mr Fraser or the party’s reaction to it?

  Curtly: ‘No.’

  But you could see the public adored him.

  Howard nods, concedes the point. ‘I didn’t buy into it, but I understood it. He’s an intelligent man with the common touch. He did it well, but I don’t know that I was overwhelmed by it. I respected the political reality of it.’

  Still, says Howard, it doesn’t matter who you are. ‘In the end, nobody has popularity that lasts forever. It’s one of the great ironies of politics.’

  I issue a language warning. Before the interview, I’d pondered the repercussions if I were to say cunt in the course of reciting a John Singleton quote relevant to the manner in which Howard left office. Would the great conservative leader, who values politeness above all, have me removed?

  I roll my eyes to indicate I don’t really want to dirty our atmospherics with gutter language but, you know how it is… Singo.

  Howard shrugs back to indicate we’ll probably both survive the onslaught of filth.

  I read aloud: ‘No quivering of the bottom lip like that wuss Fraser. No self-important speeches like with Gough and these other cunts. Fucking cop it on the chin and move on.’

  Do you believe Hawke exited with similar dignity?

  ‘He was, of course, removed by his party. I was removed by my ultimate masters, the people. I thought Hawke, when he lost the second challenge to Keating, behaved quite well.’

  Howard says the first and only time he entered the prime minister’s office in the new Parliament House, until he was elected himself in 1996, was shortly after Keating’s coup.

  ‘[Hawke] was there, nobody else – I think there was just one of his aides there – and he had one bit of paper on his desk.’

  What was on this mysterious sheet of paper?

  Howard said he couldn’t see it.

  (The following day, I’ll have a brief email exchange with Blanche.

  Me: Would it be too much to ask your gorgeous husband if he recalls this single sheet of paper and what it was?

  B: I’ll ask him when he returns to the house this afternoon. Wonderfully mysterious.

  Later:

  B: I’ve just asked himself. He said, ‘I’ve no fucking idea.’ You could perhaps put that more elegantly.

  Howard, more than anyone, could relate to Hawke’s pain. He was offed by Peacock after losing the ’87 election to Hawke.

  ‘I had no argument with him, and when you’re removed like that …’ Howard pauses. ‘Party room removals can be very tough because there’s an element of …’

  Treachery?

  Worse, says Howard. ‘There’s an element of regicide in it.’

  From the perspective of opposition, how did you see the Keating challenges and Keating’s destabilisation of the government?

  ‘He was obviously intent on pulling it all down. I wondered about the wisdom of the Labor Party getting rid of Hawke in favour of Keating because, relatively speaking, Hawke was so very popular. But Keating won the 1993 election, and could Hawke have won it? We’ll never know.’

  Was it interesting to study and watch unfold?

  ‘Oh, it was very interesting. It was taking place in a time when J
ohn Hewson was leader of the Coalition and we were doing very well in the polls and so forth. Very interesting to watch.’

  With each twist of the knife, each wound opened, were there smiles in the shadow cabinet?

  ‘No. Enough of us had been around long enough to know that these things could change very rapidly.’

  Whose version of history is closer to the truth regarding the Hawke government’s economic reforms, Keating’s or Hawke’s?

  ‘They wouldn’t ever have carried the changes with the public without Hawke,’ says Howard. ‘They both believed in the change. Hawke’s popularity and political skills were necessary. But that is not to denigrate Keating’s contribution as treasurer. People should not accept that Hawke did not have a well-developed understanding of economics. He was very good.’

  As treasurer in the Fraser government, Howard had championed a dollar loosed onto the international markets, deregulating the financial system, tariff reform and running surplus budgets by hacking into welfare spending. Did he ever feel as if the Hawke government was stealing from his economic playbook?

  ‘I think it was a deliberate policy on the part of Bob Hawke to embrace certain policies that he not only thought were good but that he also knew would be very hard for us to oppose because they were policies I, in particular, had advocated.’

  Did you feel vindicated when the Hawke government floated the dollar?

  ‘I don’t know whether I felt vindicated or not. I remember supporting it. That was probably the biggest decision that that government took on the economy and I said it was correct. Correct and courageous … There were many people on my side of politics at the time that were opposed to a float and their argument was that the Australian economy was too small and would be buffeted if we had a floating exchange rate. I didn’t think that. Hawke was probably more influential in bringing about the float than Keating. Although Keating now argues that he was in favour of it … My sense is that the then governor of the Reserve Bank, Bob Johnston, and Bob Hawke were the two people who played a dominant role in the decision to float.’

  The gradual privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank by the ALP must’ve stuck in your craw, I suggest to Howard. Hawke called your plan to sell it off as ‘economic vandalism’.

  ‘He said it was vandalism and a Thatcherite obscenity. Oh, yes, he did all of that. He was shameless! He made speeches to the Labor Party faithful saying he’d never flog off the family’s silver like that dreadful fellow Howard.’

  In your book The Menzies Era, you call it a ‘masterclass in political hypocrisy’.

  ‘Yeah, of course it was.’

  It’s a great line.

  ‘It’s absolutely a masterclass of political hypocrisy.’

  Do you believe Hawke gradually came around to the idea of privatisation of public assets or do you believe he was an opportunist?

  ‘Both Hawke and Keating, particularly, believed they’d struck gold because I attacked them from the right, and not from the left. So they could always say, “Well, they’re more extreme than we are and therefore we’re the safe option.”’

  A smart play, says Howard. ‘If they felt they had to adjust policy, they knew that given the position I had taken, I couldn’t oppose them doing it.’

  Tell me about the afternoon when Kim Beazley came to see you to sew up your support for the final sale of the Commonwealth Bank…

  ‘Ah, Beazley, yeah. On the eve of the very last budget of the Labor government in 1995, Beazley rang me. I have always enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, a very friendly relationship with Beazley. He is a very able man. And likeable. He rang me and said, “John, is it still your policy to privatise the Commonwealth Bank?” I said, “Yeah, it’s been our policy for years, for a decade.” Well, he said, “We’ve included the privatisation of the part of the Commonwealth Bank that we still own in the budget tonight and we’re counting the proceeds and it’s a big part of the budget. We will need your help to get it through the Senate. Because the Democrats are opposed to it, and they hold the balance of power, and if you oppose it, we’ll not get it through.”

  ‘And I said, “Well, it’s our policy, we’re not going to oppose it.” I said, “We might highlight your bleeding hypocrisy and the fact that your treasurer promised the finance sector unions that you wouldn’t do it. But we’re not going to vote against something that’s been our policy for ten years.’”

  Howard leans forward. Hands grip the thighs tight. He looks at me. It would be intimidating if I wasn’t enjoying his candour so much.

  ‘Now that was a classic example of how they needed us. And the fact that we had adopted positions, you might say to the right of where they were, made life easy for them… It would’ve been ridiculous to have opposed something just for the sake of embarrassing them. Years ago there was a case in New South Wales where the Liberal Party in opposition opposed the privatisation of some electricity assets. That was a mistake, because if you believe in something, even though the other side proposes it, you really have to accept it.’

  The golden days of bipartisanship – although Keating’s recollection is slightly different. In an article for The Australian in 2007, Keating lambasted John Howard for continuing to perpetuate ‘the lie’ that the Hawke and Keating governments had benefitted from opposition support for the reform agenda. ‘Bob Hawke and I needed John Howard’s endorsements for our policy changes in 1983 like we needed a dose of rabies.’

  Speaking of Keating, the treasurer fought hard for a 12.5 per cent consumption tax in 1985. Hawke opposed it. It was the first crack in the famous relationship. Eight years later, Keating leveraged public fear of a GST, wrapped as it was in Hewson’s Fightback package, to win the 1993 election.

  ‘Keating was furious when he couldn’t get it through. And I, from opposition, supported it,’ says Howard. ‘And then he turns around and attacks Hewson and wins the election.’

  You write in The Menzies Era about Hawke’s decision not to debate you in the ’87 election, arguing that ‘an indulgent media accepted the superficial excuse that he’d already debated me many times in Parliament’. Do you believe he was indulged by the press?

  ‘He was massively indulged,’ says Howard. ‘And the fact that when Hawke embraced policies that we’d been advocating and they’d previously attacked, they didn’t seem to lose any paint for their hypocrisy. But that [the ’87 debate] was a very good example. For years, the media had quite rightly argued that we should be debating, and the first debate was in 1984 and Peacock did very well against Hawke in that debate. It was for that reason that Hawke didn’t want to debate me. Those debates, the atmospherics of them, always favour the challenger.

  ‘People’s assumption is because somebody’s already prime minister he’s going to wipe the floor with his opponent. And when you inevitably don’t wipe the floor, because nobody ever wipes the floor with his opponent in these circumstances, people think, “Oh, that opposition leader is quite good, isn’t he?”’

  How did you feel when Hawke convinced John Singleton to handle the ALP’s ’87 campaign?

  ‘Well, I remember Whingeing Wendy.’ Which, says Howard, ‘was a legitimate campaign ploy. I don’t bear any grudges about something like that. I frankly don’t bear many grudges about anything. What’s the point?’

  In his memoirs, Hawke describes you thus: ‘Unlike Andrew Peacock, who was more the amiable dilettante, Howard was a hard-working, fully professional politician.’ Was there always a mutual respect?

  ‘It’s grown stronger in more recent years,’ says Howard. ‘But Bob Hawke was somebody who had his eyes on the main prize from a very early stage and therefore he analysed his opponents very carefully.’

  How will Hawke’s government be remembered?

  ‘It’ll be seen as the most competent Labor government since World War II… Hawke is the best Labor prime minister Australia’s had. I underline the word Labor.’

  In a list of prime ministers since Federation where does Hawke rank?

&n
bsp; ‘It goes without saying that I don’t rate him as high as somebody like Menzies.’

  Can we get a little more precise?

  ‘It’s pretty precise, isn’t it? To say he’s the best Labor prime minister?’

  Would you regard Hawke as among the top five best Australian prime ministers ever?

  ‘That’s my opinion,’ says Howard, on the cusp of boil. ‘Don’t press me any further.’

  If we’re not going to compare left with right, how about Labor v. Labor. Who was the superior prime minister, Hawke or Keating?

  ‘Oh,’ says Howard, ‘Hawke was a much better prime minister.’

  — CHAPTER 15 —

  BOB TURNS EIGHTY-SEVEN

  THE READER WILL NOT BE SHOCKED TO LEARN THAT Hawke isn’t a man to let a birthday swing past without some bawdy fun. While others cower from the anniversary, Hawke announces and flaunts his age.

  Let’s catalogue recent milestones.

  The seventieth, 1999. In the games room, which is located on level one of Hawke’s four-level house, the full-sized billiard table is pushed out of the way and ice statues of a nude woman and man are filled with white wine. The woman dispenses wine from her breasts, the man from his penis. One notable guest delights partygoers when she declines a glass and instead presses her mouth to the male’s member to receive her wine.

  A band plays. Terrific speeches are made. John Singleton arrives late and, slightly boozed, announces his gift of a quarter-share in the soon-to-be-champion yearling Belle du Jour.

  The eightieth, 2009. Bennelong restaurant at Sydney Opera House is festooned with ALP greats, including Paul Keating and Kim Beazley. Current Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd also attends, despite an earlier missive from his office to say that he won’t. Hawke, who doesn’t usually dance, surprises guests when he waltzes Blanche around the room, something he practised two weeks for.