Bob Hawke Obituary: Exceptional strengths outweighed weaknesses

Published in The Australian Financial Review, 17 May 2019

Consistency, focus and an openness to debate were the keys to Bob Hawke's consummate leadership, writes former Hawke government minister Gareth Evans.

The remarkable hold Bob Hawke had for so long over both his colleagues and the country was no accident. Plenty of others, not least his partner and ultimate nemesis, Paul Keating, share the credit for making his governments the gold standard they are now judged to have been, but his personal leadership was crucial.

No leader is without his or her shortcomings. But for nearly a decade, through four successful election campaigns, any Hawke weaknesses were outweighed by four exceptional strengths: his ability to craft a grand narrative; to connect with people; to operate collegially; and – most unexpectedly for those who knew only the earlier larrikin – to maintain both personal and institutional discipline.

No government survives for long without a clearly communicated philosophy and sense of policy direction, and Hawke understood this from the outset. His initial 1983 "reconciliation, recovery, reconstruction" storyline rapidly evolved into a more sophisticated narrative built around the themes of dry economic policy, warm and moist social policy, and liberal internationalist foreign policy – essentially the Third Way model subsequently embraced by Tony Blair. At the heart of our capacity to sell wage restraint, deregulation and tough economic reforms generally to the wider community – and internally, to the Left of the party – was the concept of the "social wage" delivered mainly through health, education and superannuation gains.

Able to connect with everyone

Hawke's preoccupations throughout his leadership were overwhelmingly economic, although foreign and defence policy, and the environment, loomed larger in his later years. His personal interests and enthusiasms were quite narrow, as I for one found to my cost during my short and rather unhappy term as attorney-general, when my ambitious Whitlamite program of constitutional, legal and human rights reform was dismissed for the most part as a "wank". As frustrating as some of us found the narrowing of narrative focus, it undoubtedly enabled the Hawke government to present itself throughout as coherently and consistently focused on the main game.

Hawke's legendary ability to connect with people at all social levels, directly or at a distance, was a huge strength throughout his career. Interestingly for someone so often described, not entirely without evidence, as narcissistic – and so often willing to tell both opponents and colleagues precisely what he thought of their arguments and abilities – Hawke did have a genuine ability to make others warm to him, both privately and publicly.

Partly it was his manifestly exuberant pride in and affection for all things Australian. Partly, in the Australia of the '80s, it was his uncontrived blokiness: his obvious ability to empathise with anyone preoccupied with sport, sex, having a beer or making a buck. And less blokey types, including among his colleagues, could relate to his obvious intelligence. Notwithstanding his almost complete lack of interest in less carnal pursuits such as art, music, literature, philosophy or history (despite punishing us for some months with anecdotes from a biography of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, someone had thrust upon him) on no subject was Hawke anyone's dummy.

Grace in victory and defeat

One of the more intriguing features of Hawke's personality was his grace in victory. His battles were usually fought with no holds barred – with snarling invective almost always preferred to the verbal rapier – but once won, were usually followed by great generosity to the losers (the Victorian hard left always excepted). Malcolm Fraser and Bill Hayden were early beneficiaries of that instinct, as were a number of cabinet and ministry colleagues who fell out of favour from time to time. And all this was equally matched, as we saw in abundance after his last caucus ballot, with grace in defeat.

That willingness to fight hard but eventually yield to the weight of numbers or argument – at least from colleagues for whom he had some respect – was a further key reason for Bob Hawke's success. His cabinets operated overwhelmingly on the basis of argument rather than authority. The prime minister may have been first among equals, but only just. Everything was contestable, and contested. We argued everything out, often very fiercely, and didn't just succumb passively to the exercise of leadership authority. The language used around the cabinet table was sometimes more redolent of the schoolyard than 10 Downing Street. But it reflected the intensity of the views held, and everyone's willingness to fight for their corner.

There were a couple of early mishaps – the David Combe affair and the decision to offer logistic support to the US MX missile tests prominent among them – when an overconfident assertion of prime ministerial authority generated an internal backlash. And there were some wobbles towards the end on issues such as Coronation Hill and his New Federalism initiative, when he let his personal views trump his judgment of what his colleagues could comfortably wear. But overwhelmingly, Hawke operated on the clear understanding that his cabinet was neither timorous nor deferential, and unilateral "captain's calls" would never fly. Neither Hawke nor Keating – who followed his example in this respect – always loved the reality of cabinet peer group pressure. But both of them accepted they were running a cabinet, not a presidential, system.

Disciplined role model

Hawke's collegial and consultative instincts extended to the way in which he worked with ministers on their individual portfolios: so long as we weren't screwing up, or deviating too far from the government's collective storyline, he let us get on with the job and make our own running in the media and parliament as we saw fit.

My own experience in a succession of later portfolios – resources, transport and communications, and as foreign minister – involved some tricky navigation, not least with the prime ministerial ears as open as they were to blandishments from a variety of moguls and foreign leaders with whom he had a close personal rapport. But special pleading was always recognised as such, and the arguments were almost invariably resolved on their merits. I knew I had Hawke's support when it mattered most, and that was overwhelmingly also the experience of my colleagues.

The remaining major key to Hawke's success as prime minister was the personal and institutional discipline he brought to the role. If never quite a candidate for Mount Athos, his lifestyle became almost ascetic, certainly by comparison with the exuberance of his boyo days at university and with the ACTU. And he led his ministerial colleagues by example, working long hours, thoroughly reading his briefs, and maintaining a disciplined diary.

Hawke was determined to avoid the manifest dysfunction of the Whitlam government and, from the outset, important ground rules were laid down and observed about cabinet-outer ministry, ministry-caucus, executive-public service and ministerial office relations. Good cabinet process, including prior consultation with all relevant portfolios and interests, was rigorously followed; free debate was not only allowed but encouraged (not that it could really ever have been suppressed, given the quality of the ministers round the table); and outcomes were practically never stitched up in advance (albeit not, in many cases, for want of trying).

Skilful manager of forceful personalities

But the legend of Hawke as a great cabinet chairman has grown a little in the telling. Sometimes he let debates meander almost beyond mortal endurance – usually when he was either genuinely undecided on the best outcome, or had no strong views on the subject and no immediate business demanding attention.

And even though Hawke was famously punctilious about starting meetings on time (and famously regular in lambasting Paul Keating for his indifference to that constraint), one way he kept his record intact was by regularly rescheduling cabinet meetings at the last minute when he found himself with something more urgent to do.

This produced, fairly early on in the life of the government, the spectacular assault on three centuries of established Anglo-Saxon cabinet tradition that I describe in my Cabinet Diary entry for October 26, 1985, when, after a series of ever more frustrating postponements:

• Cabinet was finally called for 6.15pm, and we're all milling around the ante-room when the message came through once more that Hawke was busy and had cancelled it. About six of us then said, more or less in unison, let's go ahead and have the bloody thing anyway, which we duly proceeded to do: with the result that Hawke rather sheepishly got around to joining us about 20 minutes later. The rebellion did not extend to dealing with any particularly contentious item in the boss's absence but it was a spontaneous reaction to being stuffed around and absolutely taken for granted.

The Hawke cabinet was, throughout, very much a team of rivals, a highly strung collective of very capable, forceful personalities. That we managed to work together as we did, and achieve as much as we did, owes almost everything to the quality of the leadership we had. Bob Hawke at his best was as good as it gets for an Australian prime minister.

Gareth Evans is Australian National University chancellor. He was attorney-general, 1983-84; minister for resources and energy, 1984-1987 (both under Bob Hawke as prime minister); and minister for foreign affairs, 1988-1996, among other ministerial positions.