One of the lads
Michael Davie
THE HAWKE MEMOIRS by Bob Hawke Heinemann, £20, pp. 618 or most of his eight years as Australia's Labor Prime Minister, Bob Hawke enjoyed a degree of popularity unprecedented in a country whose citizens hold all politicians in low esteem, if they esteem them at all. He was helped by the contrast with his awkward conservative predecessor. Malcolm Fraser had no small talk of any kind, but Hawke glad-handed everyone, including the Queen. His drinking and infidelities, freely confessed, did nothing to harm his well-groomed reputation as a good bloke.
In this country, the Alan Clark diaries have ruined the market for conventional political memoirs. Who, after peering into the bloody innards of Whitehall through the eyes of Clark, awaits with impatience the recollections of Sir Geoffrey Howe? Australia's Alan Clark has yet to emerge, unfortunately. When he or she does so, British politics will look chivalrous by comparison. Hawke's memoirs follow convention: grandiose title, chronological structure, photographs of the author with world leaders, occasional misspellings of names ('Sir William Hezeltine'; 'Indira Ghandi').
Also conventional is the self-serving content; modesty is not among Hawke's virtues. He reminds us, fairly enough, that he was Australia's most successful Labor leader in the 100 since the party was found- ed, and the victor of four elections. He also explains, perhaps with less justice, his lead- ing role — if not the leading role — in forc- ing the South Africans to dismantle apartheid. It also appears that he played an important role, as a middle man, in ending the cold war; and that he was the one who persuaded Gorbachev to persuade Arafat to change his policies towards Israel.
Hawke's domestic achievements are open to less doubt. 'Consensus' was his favourite word. As a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions he carried weight with a new breed of economically sophisticated trade union leaders, and even before he became prime minister he had persuaded some of the most powerful businessmen that a Hawke premiership might in some ways be better for them than the Liberals. So it proved, at least in the early days, as he deregulated the economy, outflanked the hard left, and dramatically improved Australia's industri- al relations record.
In one respect Hawke admits that he was lucky. His party was in office when a sea change in social democratic thinking was taking place across the western world. 'Had we not been in power,' he writes, 'there is little doubt that we would have been doomed to a continued irrelevance'. That is why, he thinks, the Australian Labor Party, under his guidance to be sure, was able to jettison the ideological baggage of the past and transform itself into a modern party ten years before the British Labour Party began to move in the same direction. Hawke produces one striking example of his own freedom from ideological bias. He advised President Bush — it was 'George' and 'Bob', just as it had been 'Bob' and `Ron' — how to beat Dukakis.
This is a substantial volume, but it leaves out a few things the reader might like to know more about. One serious charge levelled against Hawke was that he ran a government of 'mates', that is, a govern-
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ment that paid rather too much attention to the interests of his friends. The charge has always stung. Hawke tries to refute it here by describing how he put the interests of Australia first when he destroyed (not his word) one of his mates who had also become a mate of the KGB. Even so, one would like to hear more about his associa- tions with three in particular of Australia's leading capitalists: Sir Peter Abeles, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch. He tells us that he asked Mr Murdoch, over dinner in Geneva, whether he would ever have enough power and money and that Mr Murdoch looked at him 'as though I was slightly deranged'; but that is the only men- tion the man to whom Hawke gave Australia's highest honour and who shortly afterwards gave up his Australian citizen- ship.
There are few, if any, revelations. In Australia, the book has caused a furore because of Hawke's remarks about his former Treasurer, Paul Keating, who, having resigned, lobbied against him and finally replaced him. But it is scarcely news that Hawke disliked Keating. Their internecine war virtually paralysed Canber- ra for months, making the British Labour Party's rows seem very demure.
Even so, the venom of Hawke's descrip- tions of Keating is startling; no parallel exists for such comprehensive rubbishing of a serving Prime Minister by his predeces- sor. As Hawke tells it, Keating was an inexperienced protégé whose hand Hawke held until he was able to run the Treasury on his own; Keating has taken the credit for deregulating the Australian economy, but to begin with, Hawke says firmly, Keat- ing was 'not an ardent deregulator'. He was a none too competent minister, invariably late for meetings, arrogant and disloyal. He was consumed by ambition. Hawke contrasts his own capacity for work with Keating's: 'Everybody who knows Paul knows that working for long hours for weeks at a stretch does not come easily to him . . .' He also contrasts his own love of sport with Keating's passion for old clocks.
Hawke's anecdotes about Keating's attitudes are uniformly damaging, and designedly so. He describes how Keating, defeated in Cabinet over telecommunica- tions reform, turned on a spectacular tantrum, threw his pencil on the table and stormed out of the Cabinet room describing all of us as a lot of 'f—ing second-raters'.
He says that Keating once described Australia as 'the arse-end of the world', thus implying that Keating (unlike Hawke) is not a true Australian patriot. Keating is now the champion of Australian relations with Asia. It was not always so, according to Hawke. In the Cabinet anteroom, a minister complained about the stomach troubles that had struck him on a mission to Asia. 'Serves you right', said Keating. `They're the places you fly over on your way to Europe'.
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