Hawke and Keating: strength in unity

A united front for Hawke and Keating during the 2007 campaign. Picture: Patrick Hamilton

Labor's winning combination of the 80s and 90s was a formidable duo

TODAY'S politicians are forever trying to capture the reformist magic of a generation ago, an era known as HAWKEATING. You were never quite sure where one man finished and the other began such was the partnership and the mythology, the reality and the nostalgic storytelling of the Labor years between the end of Malcolm Fraser's premiership and the start of John Howard's.

The working model of government achieved by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating on their better days between 1983 and 1996 produced the goods -- economically, socially, diplomatically -- after a certain shame had attached itself to Labor's brand following Gough Whitlam's dissolution. Even Howard could not avoid praising their work on floating the dollar, allowing the entry of foreign banks, cutting tariffs, ending centralised wage bargaining and establishing a regional economic co-operation forum.

Julia Gillard called theirs a "bittersweet partnership", which in its prime "was the most formidable political duo since Curtin and Chifley". She could not have anticipated that the coming days would reveal a level of bitterness between the two that would leave their comrades bewildered, yet somehow not surprised. "It's just the nature of the two beasts," says one.

In the pantheon of good works and lasting reforms, there is no Maximus Hawke without Keating, and vice versa. When one was down, the other steered or drove harder. If one used charm, the other was the monster. Over their public lives, they could both be unkind and blind, hostage to their demons and dreams. Ultimately, you can never think of one without the other, joined in the collective memory of a time, place and direction.

In launching Blanche d'Alpuget's Hawke: The Prime Minister this week, the incumbent spoke about the idea of reconciliation, how Hawke united the nation "to embark on the building of a modern economy and a modern Australia."

"In fact, it is fair to say that if a Deakinite settlement governed Australia's first century as a nation, as Paul Kelly argues, the Hawke settlement governs Australia's second," she said.

Of course, this paean by the current Prime Minister was in keeping with an officially sanctioned (plus open bar) Bob and Blanche happening. But it is also true to the zeitgeist. There has been a reappraisal of the Hawke-Keating years, brought on in part by Kevin Rudd's helter-skelter 31 months, the Julia ascendancy and Tony Abbott's impressive pick and drive in an election year.

Gillard again, speaking for those born in the 1960s: "Bob Hawke is the benchmark for the prime ministership." Then she listed his qualities that "remain the gold standard for any Australian head of government." They are: an ambition matched by ability, a capacity to take advice, an orderly sense of administration, confidence in delegating to his exceptional team of ministers, effectiveness as a cabinet chair, and a wisdom that combined deeply held values with a sturdy political realism.

"I am not ashamed to say that I take Bob Hawke as a role model," she declared. Some may be surprised to hear that Abbott shares that view about leadership. In an interview earlier this year, Abbott told Inquirer he thought Hawke ran good and reformist governments, that the Labor leader successfully allowed his ministers space to do their jobs and that, if elected, he would try to model his leadership of cabinet on both Hawke and Howard. It was meant as a compliment to those men and a face slap to Rudd.

Like Gillard's stated desire to strive for consensus and remake the nation, modern Labor is trying to rekindle the mojo of the Hawke-Keating years. Yet the model remains beyond its grasp. The recent Rudd-Gillard leadership dynamic and Labor's attempts to introduce reforms tell us why.

Compared with their predecessors, Rudd and Gillard are careerists, on-message automatons lacking life experience and an eon away from the 1980s. That's today's politics, and they are its most successful players on the Labor side. On the surface at least, the game is mercifully no longer as blokey and tribal as it once was. Hawke and Keating were products of those times. It's why their relationship played out the way it did and explains why Keating challenged Hawke in the way he did. Not at the first sign of bother, or even at the first opportunity, as Gillard knocked off Rudd.

Modern Labor says it wants big reforms, but does not want to face the losers from it or spend political capital, as Howard has observed. Apparently, as the mining tax experience shows, it does not have faith in its ability to even explain its policy before announcing it, win an argument with a tough foe (in public or in private) or carry the community along with its programs. It's a failure of imagination and heart.

In those respects, it's great to see the return to the arena of Hawke and Keating, people who are, as Gillard told the National Press Club on Thursday, "passionate about their politics". These out-sized egos, that often sound like wounded bulls, are again engaged in a brutal legacy war.

After speaking to their colleagues this week, some of the officials at the centre of the major reforms, it may just be that the model can never be repeated: two potent rivals, lashed to each other in an unhappy marriage, racking up hit after policy hit. In print and in public, through protest and proxy, Hawke and Keating have been trying to settle history. The spoils again appear to be up for grabs with the publication or, as Keating sees it, the provocation of d'Alpuget's account of Hawke's leadership.

Although not a hagiography, the book, stylishly written as these things go, is from the perspective of Hawke and his inner circle. It is brutally frank about Keating's perceived failings, but incomplete (to be kind) when it comes to Hawke. That is inevitable given the author's proclivities and sources, their human nature and depleted memory banks. A major flaw in the work is because Keating declined to be interviewed for the project.

But he is saying plenty now, with telltale tenderness and brutishness, care and abandon. "When criticism of the Labor years often arose at the hands of Howard and Costello, I would more often than not, make a defensive comment in terms of 'us' or 'Bob and I', because I believed the unity of our purpose reflected more strongly on what we achieved and on Labor's record," Keating wrote to Hawke on Monday in a letter obtained by this newspaper. "That is, we looked stronger together than as two personalities separated as to objectives and outcomes."

Keating has taken extreme umbrage and the iron bar is again out of the shed. "I can only promise you this," he warned Hawke in the July 12 missive, "If I get around to writing a book and I might, I will be telling the truth; the whole truth. And that truth will record the great structural changes that occurred during our years and my own as prime minister, but it will also record without favour, how lucky you were to have me drive the government during your down years, leaving you with the credit for much of the success."

Much as it is it tempting to focus on the election and "move forward" with Gillard or Abbott, Hawke and Keating can't simply be dismissed as yesterday's men, deprived of relevance. While the battle for personal credit and truth rages, their reformist lessons have not been fully absorbed, nor may they ever be repeated.