House debates

Wednesday, 3 July 2019

Condolences

Hawke, Hon. Robert James Lee (Bob), AC

12:20 pm

Photo of Mark ButlerMark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great privilege to follow the Minister for Indigenous Australians. I want to thank him for his contribution to this condolence motion. I want to thank the government for agreeing to set aside today's proceedings to honour Bob Hawke, and for the energy and the effort that so many government members have taken to prepare speeches and for the generous content of those speeches in tribute to a man who was not of their political party but who I think all recognise made a great contribution to this nation.

I grew up, as so many in this chamber did, in a deeply political household that, in my case, was fiercely Labor. Although I had an 'It's time' badge pinned to my clothes when I was a toddler, the 1983 election is the first election at a federal level that I remember clearly. My mum had taken leave from her job to work in Labor Party headquarters, as she did for all of Hawke's elections through that period. I assume my mother was at an election party far more enjoyable than mine six weeks ago, but my brother and I spent the evening of election night in 1983 at my great-uncle's house—my great-uncle on my father's side. My father's side has a proud but very misdirected Tory legacy in their family, and my great-uncle, who was a dear, dear man, unfortunately was a terrible Tory. I can still remember to this day the scowl on his face as he looked at me clapping when Bob Hawke walked into the tally room on that evening. I'm not sure I really understood why I was clapping, except that I knew that's what my mum wanted.

Right through my adolescence, Bob Hawke was Australia's Prime Minister. The first federal election I was entitled to vote at, I got to vote for Bob Hawke. So it's perhaps hard to be entirely objective about a man who was such a giant in those formative years of my life. But on any objective measure, at a far more mature age than I was when I first voted, I'm very clear in my mind that Bob Hawke was Australia's greatest Prime Minister. There is room for reasonable people to disagree about these things. As the Prime Minister quite reasonably said, the test that John Curtin was subject to during World War II was something that, thankfully, none of us have ever known and hopefully will never know. But Hawke, I think, on any objective test, deserves the title of Australia's greatest Prime Minister.

His time as Prime Minister was located in the middle of a period of relatively strong and stable leadership for almost four decades from Whitlam to Howard, a period that we've not known in this place for more than a decade. But the remarkable thing among those five prime ministers, Whitlam to Howard, is how quickly Hawke got the job, because all four of those other prime ministers—Whitlam, Fraser, Keating and Howard—had served at least 20 years as parliamentarians before they became Prime Minister. Bob Hawke had just served three and, as the Prime Minister said earlier today—I didn't know this statistic myself—only 36 days as Leader of the Opposition. Truly blessed. The speed with which he came up to the toughest job in the nation was just extraordinary.

He excelled immediately and right through the course of his prime ministership in all the major areas of public policy as we understand them. On the international stage, as many on my side of the chamber and the other side have said, he was confident, he was hardworking, he was progressive and he always projected an independent Australian national interest on that international stage. On economic policy, he's universally and justifiably recognised as the Prime Minister who oversaw the modernisation of the Australian economy, with a brilliant Treasurer in Paul Keating and a wonderful cabinet as well, setting us up for the 20 years of uninterrupted economic growth that has lifted Australia's prosperity to such a degree over the last almost three decades.

But he was not presiding over the only economy in the Western world that was undergoing the pressures of the 1980s that Australia was confronting, and his response—or his government's response—to that was something that I think deserves some attention, because this was the era of Reaganomics. It was the era of Thatcher's radicalism, and there was an alternative path to the path that Hawke and Keating steered Australia through. It was that path of Reaganomics and Thatcher's radicalism. Instead, Hawke's modernisation of the Australian economy was uniquely and quintessentially Labor. He worked with those workers and those communities in Australia that were being impacted by the pain of unavoidable economic restructuring, because the truth is that, over the sweep of our history, Australia has generally been particularly poor at structural adjustment. We've generally expected communities just to suck it up. I've seen that in my own community over the last five years as Australia's car manufacturing industry has shut down. Structural adjustment programs have really just extended to helping workers dust off their CVs and perhaps do some job interview training.

Hawke, Keating and John Button's approach was quintessentially different. It worked with workers and their unions. It worked with local communities and came up with deep, meaningful structural adjustment programs that we've seen only too rarely here in Australia—the car plan, the steel plan, the really deliberative approach to waterfront industry reform that was extraordinarily hard but worked with unions and industry and local government authorities to make sure that, as far as possible, it spread the pain of that unavoidable economic restructuring.

As we know, and as has been said so many times already over the last few hours, his social reforms, as well as his economic reforms, still sit right at the heart of Australian society today. They are enduring. They are now an unstitchable part of the fabric of Australian society—Medicare, lifting the high school retention rate from 30 to 70 per cent, making meaningful those higher education reforms that Whitlam had started a decade and a half earlier, universal superannuation. Expanding childcare, I think, was one of the jewels in the crown of Australia's social reforms during that period because it made practically meaningful the ability, particularly of working mothers, to combine work with family responsibilities.

But the final area of policy I want to address is the environment. There's already been a number of speakers who have addressed this, particularly the member for Watson, who has had a lifelong devotion to environmental policy. Hawke's granddaughter Sophie told the story at Hawke's memorial service—and the member for Watson has relayed it as well—about protecting Antarctica. That alone, if it were his only environmental protection achievement, in itself, would be a giant legacy. But there is so much else besides that—the Tasmanian wilderness, the Daintree and visionary programs like Landcare that have already been talked about. Without question, Hawke is the greatest Prime Minister that Australia's natural environment has ever had.

But I want to address the question of climate change as well, because at Hawke's memorial Sophie also said that, in the past several months, Hawke had expressed great sadness that Australia had failed to act on climate change and that he saw it as a collective failure of our nation that we'd traded short-term interests over intergenerational equity. In the 1980s, barely a decade after the term 'global warming' first appeared in Science magazine, Hawke created the Commission for the Future. Some of its earliest work was the greenhouse project to examine climate change—its causes and effects and the methods to manage the problem. Before 1987 or 1988, there had barely been a public mention of climate change beyond scientific journals, particularly until the testimony of NASA scientist James Hansen to Congress in the US in the late 1980s. This was part of what I think was a golden area of global climate change cooperation, when no politician suggested that the scientific community was engaged in conspiracy or suggested that the current generation's economic interests should take priority over longer-term considerations, including the economic interests of future generations.

In 1988, the Toronto conference bought together politicians, scientists and economists from several dozen countries and called upon the developed nations of the world to stabilise carbon emissions at 1988 levels by 2000 and to cut them by 20 per cent by 2005. Hawke was a key supporter of this effort. He spoke passionately on the television in 1989 alongside his then 4-year-old granddaughter, Sophie, imploring Australia to think of the long term. He was very clear on the potential of climate change to disrupt Australian life. As he put it: 'The greenhouse effect'—as we called it back then, and now call global warming—'cannot be dismissed as just another environmental problem. It has the potential to change fundamentally, within a single lifetime, the way all nations and people live and work.'

Hawke fought the 1990 election campaign largely on environmental issues, including the Coronation Hill goldminers, as we've heard already a number of times this morning, as well as a commitment that a re-elected government would adopt the Toronto position as an interim target—Australia's first emissions reduction target. It is worth noting that this was a bipartisan position adopted by Andrew Peacock, the then Liberal leader.

As the Hawke years ended, and the recession of the early1990s took hold, the golden era of climate consensus, very short as it was, drew to an end. Powerful lobby groups and companies targeted the science in a manner not seen against any other scientific consensus in the modern era. The powerful tools of self-interest, economic doomsaying and fear took hold in the political sphere, and the landscape was slowly infected with toxic sludge, tearing at the groundwork that Hawke had worked so hard to lay for climate action. To honour Bob, we should continue the work that he began, because Bob knew that we only borrow the planet; we borrow it from our kids, from their kids and so on.

I first met Bob almost 20 years ago on an evening as part of the election review after the 2001 Tampa election loss, as it was called then, that he and Neville Wran conducted along with Tim Gartrell. We had a party members' forum in South Australia. As I recall it, I was blamed for pretty much all of the party's ills at the time! It was a meeting that was obviously stacked with my factional enemies! After that, the four of us enjoyed a dinner over several hours and several bottles of wine. Tim and I, pretty young at the time and straitlaced individuals, were exposed to all of the colour of Labor's history over recent decades—the terrible conferences and so on and so forth—through Bob and Neville, two giants of the Labor movement. We bonded over a common knowledge of Ray Gietzelt, who was the legendary general secretary of the union that I was the secretary of at the time, the Federated Miscellaneous Workers' Union of Australia. Ray had been general secretary of the union for decades, and was really the driving force that got the numbers for Bob to become the ACTU president in the late sixties. There was also their love of Lionel Murphy, who was Ray's best friend and a great friend also of Bob and Neville. That set the tone, I think, for a relationship that all of us enjoyed on this side of the House, no matter how young, junior and relatively insignificant we were in the Labor movement. Bob always treated us as equals, and was always incredibly generous with his time to encourage, to advise and to press us to be more ambitious, more progressive and more brave. He really was the most generous Labor figure of his time in terms of devotion to continual campaigning for Labor and the mentoring of younger Labor people.

I last saw him at his home over summer, enjoying a couple of hours with him, Blanche and Sue Pieters-Hawke, his daughter and a great friend of mine who I've worked closely with, particularly around dementia, as well as his dear friend and former advisor Craig Emerson. As the member for Watson remarked, at some point during that afternoon we were sharing a cigar with his daughter Sue and Bob put his hand on my forearm and just said, apropos of nothing at the time, 'Paul and I have made up.' It was clearly a wonderful thing for him personally, and, as I remarked to him at the time, such an important thing for our party. It was so important that he and Paul had broken bread and the most important partnership of modern Labor had found a way back together before Bob had passed.

I want to send my condolence to Blanche and his family, Sue, Stephen and Rosslyn and his granddaughters, but also to his friends. I particularly want to mention Craig Emerson, who I know was such a dear friend to Bob for so many years and who gave so much of his time in Bob's later months to ensure that Bob's family was supported—that Bob and Blanche, personally, were supported—and also so that Bob was able to connect with so many members of the Labor Party in his final months. Today we farewell a genuinely exceptional Australian.

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