In 1959, a champion for the workers announces himself

Hawke’s role in realising pay rises for millions made him a hero to union members.

Bob Hawke with Gough Whitlam in 1975.

For Bob Hawke, ambitious, brilliant and not yet 30, it was the moment that trumpeted his arrival on the national stage. It was 1959 and after a jaw-dropping display of advocacy that had brutalised a pompous judiciary and stunned employers, Hawke had convinced the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to increase the basic wage by 15 shillings, the biggest rise in six years.

It was his first appearance as advocate for the ACTU. Weeks later, he fronted a second case and won again, securing a 28 per cent increase in awards, the margin paid to workers for skill and experience on top of the basic wage. Hawke had delivered significant pay rises for millions of workers and he became a hero to union members who revelled not only in their enlarged pay packets but in how, through the sheer force of his arguments, Hawke had stuck it to the bosses and traumatised the conservative barristers and judges who populated the commission in Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street.

Hawke had not risen from the shop floor. There had been deep scepticism about the ACTU appointing an Oxford University-educated Rhodes scholar to succeed Richard Eggleston as its advocate. After that case, Hawke’s tertiary education credentials were no longer a black mark but a source of union pride.

“I established, frankly, an enormous reputation immediately in ’59,” Hawke said in last year’s ABC documentary Hawke: The Larrikin & the Leader. “It was my first case and I was a national figure from then on.” But while Hawke, immodestly and not untypically, declared that he then “knew more about the basic wage than anyone else in the country”, he had yet to achieve his larger goal of overturning the notorious basic wage decision of 1953.

As recounted by Hawke’s biographer and, later, wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, the seeds of the 1953 ruling were sown in 1950 when Alf Foster, a former union advocate disparaged by the press as the “red judge”, led a bench mutiny against chief judge Raymond Kelly and increased the basic wage from £7 to £8. The conservative Kelly regarded the Foster-inspired decision as a disaster and extracted his revenge in 1953 when he oversaw the abolition of quarterly cost-of-­living increases — a feature of the nation’s wage-fixing system — and a further ruling that wages could rise only when the economy had the capacity to pay.

The decision sent tremors through the union movement, removing workers’ protection from inflation, which in 1951 had soared to 22.5 per cent. The union trauma was compounded by three failed attempts to overturn Kelly’s decision in 1956, 1957 and 1958. Then along came Hawke.

Recalling his first appearance, ­d’Alpuget writes, Hawke was “continually pacing as he addressed the bench above him, rolling on the side of his shoes, gesticulating, swivelling his eyeballs to show impatience and flicking his eyebrows up and down as if they were attached to strings. Hawke was in the continuous motion of high nervous energy, his body language intensifying the message of his speech, all delivered in a rat-a-tat-tat of sentences bursting at up to 220 words a ­minute — too fast for all but the best shorthand writers — and in a very loud voice. It was said that union officials several blocks away in the Trades Hall could hear his submissions.”

Hawke lambasted the bench, then led by commission president Richard Kirby, the only judge sitting that year who had been on the 1953 bench. He characterised Kirby as a fool and a villain for the earlier ­decision. The judges, long used to advocates adopting a deferential tone, felt scandalised.

“Apart from Eggleston, I’d rank Bob Hawke above any of the silks that appeared before us, but he employed bad tactics,” Kirby told d’Alpuget. “It’s part of the honesty of the man, of course — he would not tell a lie, he would not pretend he thought I was a decent chap and those decisions of mine had been an aberration. He was determined to rub my nose in the dirt. If only he’d shown me a way that we could get out of that 1953 decision, how we could rationalise it.”

What Hawke did was school the judges in economics. While concepts such as productivity are the bread and butter of today’s industrial relations debate, it was not well understood by the bench. Before the 1959 case, three economists spent hundreds of hours teaching him economics. Hawke produced evidence that while productivity had risen by 10 per cent since 1953, real wages had fallen by 5 per cent. Kirby said Hawke “belted economic understanding into our heads”, making him realise the adverse impact on workers of the 1953 decision.

In response, the Kirby-led commission handed Hawke the dual victory: increasing the basic wage to a level that it would have been had adjustments not been scrapped six years earlier, and the 28 per cent increase in award margins. However, they would not overturn the 1953 decision.

Alarmed by Hawke’s successes, the business community and the Menzies government changed tack. Employers dubbed him “Mr Inflation”. Rumours spread he was a communist and that his real objective was the destruction of capitalism. Even his mother, Ellie, took him aside to ask him if he had become a communist. An irritated Hawke, d’Alpuget wrote, replied only: “I’m not a card-carrying member.”

In 1960, the commonwealth engaged Eggleston as its advocate. He surprised Hawke by breaking from convention and actively opposing the ACTU claim. The bench went on to award a five shilling increase, far short of the union claim, and refused again to reinstate quarterly adjustments.

At the conclusion of the case, Foster, who had been senior deputy president of the commission since 1956 and was impressed by Hawke, reached out to the young man, d’Alpuget writes. Hawke started visiting Foster regularly at his house on Sunday mornings. During one of their meetings, Hawke told Foster how his Oxford University supervisor, Colin Clark, had rejected his proposed thesis on wages arbitration. Foster was thrilled, revealing to Hawke that Clark had been the “economic guru” to BA Santamaria, the anti-communist Catholic activist. ‘

“(Foster said) Santamaria had worn the carpet thin — Alf’s exact phrase — going in and out of Sir Raymond Kelly’s office before the 1953 case,” Hawke told d’Alpuget. Santamaria later denied the claims.

Angered by the news, and his defeat in 1960, Hawke threw himself into the 1961 hearings. His performance that year is regarded as one of the most extraordinary in the history of wage case hearings. Hawke’s opening address lasted three days and his address in reply went for 12 days. Sir John Moore, a former commonwealth advocate who would become the second president of the commission, and who was sitting on the case, recalled how Hawke “reached a stage where he physically couldn’t stand except by hanging on to the lectern”.

“We were adjourning at regular intervals because his voice was giving out,” Moore told d’Alpuget. “I could see from where I was sitting on the bench that he had kicked his shoes off and was standing there in his socks, just barely able to go on, but still arguing very forcefully. He was an extraordinarily strong debater.”

In a unanimous decision, the bench increased the basic wage by 12 shillings and said it should be adjusted annually in line with the cost-of-living index and triennially for productivity increases. The 1961 decision reinstated adjustments but it did not return the quarterly cost-of-living increases abolished by Kelly in 1953. In 1965, Kirby and Moore were in the minority when the commission essentially unravelled the 1961 decision, a move that helped Hawke decide he should give up being an advocate and run for the ACTU presidency.

The magnitude of Hawke’s achievements as advocate are not well understood today. Too often, his time at the ACTU is characterised by his larrikinism, his marathon sessions at the Lygon (later John Curtin) Hotel, and the cynical view that when president from 1969, he entered high-profile ­industrial disputes when they were on the verge of settlement.

All this is true but doesn’t tell the entire story. What is the more remarkable when examining his achievements as advocate is that he started at the ACTU when it operated out of a small two-stor­ey red-brick building opposite Trades Hall in Carlton. In preparation for that first case, which began in February, Hawke had had to work long hours over the summer. Hawke would leave home at 4am and work for five hours before going to court. In his busiest periods, he would work 18 hours a day, seven days a week, lying on the floor during the lunch adjournment to take a nap.

“The pressure was unbelievable,” he told d’Alpuget. “But I had to be right on top of it because once I got on my feet I was totally vulnerable. I had to be on top of all the statistics, all the theories and be prepared to answer questions that were flung at me from the bench or that came from the bar table — from employers and the commonwealth — and they had all the resources in the world.

“The work had the beauty for me of a very concrete relevance to society. I think the joy of that carried me through.”