Bill Hayden funeral: Farewell to ‘humble’ former Labor leader

Hundreds of mourners, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, gathered in Ipswich to farewell Labor luminary Bill Hayden, who died last month, aged 90.

Anthony Albanese and Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk at the state funeral service for Bill Hayden at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Ipswich. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Inevitably, it was Paul Keating who said it best.

Eulogising his friend and longtime colleague Bill Hayden – a “self-effacing person not driven by egotism” – the former prime minister told how the late Labor great contributed more to his party and the nation than people would ever know.

“We may see the likes of Bill Hayden again, but I doubt it,” said Mr Keating, who served alongside him in two cabinets during the 1980s and was sworn in as PM by governor-general Hayden when four-time election winner Bob Hawke was rolled in 1991.

“Bill’s re-establishment of federal Labor as a real and genuine force is, without doubt, the crowning achievement of his long public life.”

Former prime minister Paul Keating speaks during the state funeral for Bill Hayden.

Mr Keating, Anthony Albanese, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, Governor-General David Hurley, former federal Labor leader Bill Shorten and former governor-generals Quentin Bryce and Peter Cosgrove were among the hundreds who turned out for the state funeral in Mr Hayden’s hometown of Ipswich, west of Brisbane.

It was a day for the True Believers and Labor luminaries reaching back to the turbulent Whitlam years in the 1970s. Mr Hayden was the short-lived government’s “big hitter”, ushering in the forerunner to today’s Medicare before being belatedly promoted to the treasurer’s portfolio, not long before a youthful Mr Keating made it into the ministry.

But then came the Dismissal on Remembrance Day, 1975.

Mr Hayden brought order and policy consistency to a shattered Labor Party, allowing it to rebuild and regain the trust of voters after he took over the leadership from Gough in 1977. The team he put together would be recognised as the “most competent cabinet grouping ever assembled in the country undoubtedly since the Second World War,” Mr Keating said.

“Bill is not with us to take a bow, but he certainly earned one,” the former PM said.

Bill Hayden shares laugh with Bob Hawke at Fairbairn RAAF Base, Canberra.

He credited Mr Hayden with his own rise to the pinnacle of Australian politics: had not Mr Hayden appointed him as shadow treasurer in January 1983, prior to losing the leadership, there is no way Mr Hawke would have given him the job when Labor came to power two months on.

Years later, after that “wry moment” at Yarralumla where Mr Hayden as governor-general accepted Mr Hawke’s resignation from the prime ministership and appointed Mr Keating in his place, “I told him I owed him the treasury appointment – and via the treasury, the leadership of the party and the prime ministership.”

Mr Albanese, touching on Mr Hayden’s famous comment that a drover’s dog could have won the 1983 election that launched the 13-year Hawke-Keating government, said his role was immense. “He may never have resided in the Lodge, but Bill Hayden was the fulcrum which the Labor Party‘s fortunes turned for the better,” he said.

“A humble man in a field rich with ego, he never lost his faith in our party‘s capacity to improve our country.”

Dallas Hayden, centre, and her daughter Georgina at the funeral in Ipswich. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tertius Pickard

Born to working class parents in 1933, Mr Hayden became a public servant, then a police officer, before being elected to the Ipswich-based seat of Oxley aged 28. After serving two terms as foreign minister under Mr Hawke, he was appointed in 1989 to the highest non-elected office in the land as governor-general.

But his enduring love was his wife of 63 years, Dallas, their children and grandchildren. Mrs Hayden cut a composed figure in the front pew as the tributes to her late husband flowed.

Among the congregation at St Mary’s Church, where Mr Hayden, a one-time atheist, practised the Catholicism he adopted late in life, were Hawke-Keating ministers Neal Blewett, John Dawkins, and Michael Tate.

John Falkner, who served with Mr Albanese under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, flew in to join current Labor ministers Jim Chalmers, Murray Watt, Anika Wells and Speaker of parliament Milton Dick.

Ms Palaszczuk sat between the Prime Minister and her partner, Reza Adib.

In a moving tribute, Mr Hayden’s daughter, Georgina, said the family had shared her father “with everyone all our lives”.

“We‘ve been told by many that sharing personal details, sharing our memories, is the expected thing,” she said. “That people want to know what a wonderful father he was — he was, he is still.”