Bob Hawke
Mike Steketee
Australian Biographical Monographs 17
Paperback, 84 page, $19.95
ISBN 9781922815200
Release Date: August 2022
Bob Hawke ranks as one of Australia’s leading prime ministers. He
enjoyed extraordinary electoral success, winning four elections and
serving for eight years and nine months, a term exceeded only by Robert
Menzies and John Howard. His political skills, including his popularity
with voters and his emphasis on consensus, enabled his government to
implement a large agenda of economic reform that transformed the nation.
Often unpopular at the time, the scope and ambition of initiatives such
as financial deregulation, reform of the tax system and cutting import
tariffs are unimaginable in today’s political context. Hawke also left a
substantial record on social policy, including the introduction of
Medicare and directing welfare to those most in need, and on the
environment, with measures such as blocking a dam on Tasmania’s Franklin
River and preserving North Queensland rainforests. His extensive
involvement in foreign policy, including playing a role in ending
apartheid in South Africa, is often overlooked.
Hawke was a complex personality. A son of the manse, his life
combined hard work, discipline and a sense of public duty with an
undisciplined private life of heavy drinking, aggressive behaviour,
multiple affairs and sexual liasions and neglect of his family. The
convention that journalists did not report on politicians’ private lives
unless it affected their public duties meant Hawke survived with his
reputation largely intact until recently. Today such conduct would
disqualify him from leading the nation. Hawke may have adapted to
today’s community standards in the interests of his long-nurtured
ambition to become prime minister but this remains an imponderable.
Mike Steketee was chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning
Herald in the Canberra Press Gallery from 1984 to 1988 and continued to
cover the later years of the Hawke Government as the Herald’s Political
Editor.
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