Doing it for Bob
There is a beautiful symmetry to the timing of Hawke’s death on the eve of what would be an historic Labor victory for his protege, Bill Shorten
THE sky is cloudless and blue, the air still crisp but the warm autumn sun has burnt the dew off the leaves and the grass. I’m on the train on my way to Toorak to hand out for election day.
Toorak of all places! The blue ribbon heartland of the Liberal Party, the second most affluent suburb in Australia with a median house price in the millions of dollars and a BMW, Merc or Ferrari in every driveway. The polling booth is in the seat of Higgins, held for almost two decades by Peter Costello. But now even Higgins is in play, so badly have the Liberals fucked up in Victoria.
The Facebook feed on my phone is full of photos of Bill Shorten in a red t-shirt with the slogan ‘vote 1 Chloe Shorten’s husband’ emblazoned across the front of it, dashing through an almost empty intersection of Flinders and Swanston streets at dawn, the railway station clocks behind him. It is still grey and dark, and ScoMo is most likely snuggled up in bed. But here is Bill, still running. Nothing has been left to chance. It feels like a Labor victory is in the air.
Spread across my lap on the train is today’s Age. On the front page, a beautifully lit, atmospheric photo of Steve Bracks, Dan Andrews and Bill Shorten all drinking a beer in honour of Bob Hawke in Hawkey’s ‘second office’, the front bar of the John Curtin Hotel, across the road from Trades Hall in Lygon Street. A huge black and white photo of a beaming Hawke has been propped on the counter of the bar.
On Thursday night, as Shorten and Scott Morrison were preparing for their final, frenetic day of election campaigning, it was announced to the world that Bob Hawke — arguably Australia’s greatest Labor Prime Minister, certainly its most successful — had died, aged 89.
Last night we said goodbye to Hawkey at a quiet ceremony outside Trades Hall, where the ACTU which he led for a decade was founded in 1927. ACTU Secretary Sally McManus spoke. So too did Brendan O’Connor, hopefully the next Workplace Relations Minister, and Brian Howe, deputy Prime Minister to Paul Keating in the early-90s. And then we went across the road to drink a couple of beers in the same front bar of the Curtin in honour of Hawkey.
We were mourning not only a great leader, but a kind of politics which now seems long gone. Politics before the advent of social media and 24 hour news, when authenticity wasn’t just a catchphrase, when politicians were allowed to have personal flaws and to speak their own words, not ones that had been written for them by a spin doctor.
They could argue a case with conviction and use the power of persuasion to convince the public that change was necessary because it was the right thing to do, not because a focus group told them to.
Hawke was my first political hero, not Keating. Like everyone my generation, I was too young for Gough, being in grade one in 1975, the year of the Dismissal. But Hawke was a mythical figure in our household long before he became PM, spoken of in awe by my mother.
He was the first Prime Minister I voted for after turning 18, and he simply stood head and shoulders above everyone else — not just Malcolm Fraser, Andrew Peacock and John Howard, his direct opponents in the 1980s, but also the other world leaders of that era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He changed Australia, but unlike the US and the UK, change was made while looking after the people it most impacted. That came down to Hawke’s union background, and the Accord with the ACTU.
He was the first Prime Minister I voted for after turning 18, and he simply stood head and shoulders above everyone else.
So it is the enormous shadow of Bob Hawke that looms over today’s election.
It feels as if there is a beautiful symmetry to this: the timing of Hawke’s death on the eve of what everyone hopes will be an historic Labor victory. There is a photo on the Age website of a grinning Shorten posed at the same angle in front of that big black and white photo of a grinning Hawke, both of them toothy and dimpled as if to say this is the passing of the mantle, the anointing of Bill as the rightful heir. Almost Kennedyesque.
Like Hawke, Shorten was identified as a future Labor PM at a young age, and from his earliest days in the public eye, Shorten consciously and openly modelled himself on Hawke. In interviews, he would draw comparisons between his style of operating and Hawke’s, declaring himself to be a believer in consensus. A pragmatist who could work with business to find mutually acceptable solutions.
The circle would be complete if Shorten were to become tonight the first union leader since Hawke to be the nation’s leader.
For the past 24 hours, TV and the web have been awash with images of Hawke — sometimes with Shorten, but mostly Hawke in his heyday. Really, it was a heyday for Australia and Labor. Hawke and Keating are concrete proof of Labor as a party of reform, of economic progress, of courage and integrity.
Today’s Liberals are not fit to lick Bob Hawke’s shoes, which is why Tony Abbott’s comments on Thursday night (“You might also say he had a Labor heart, but a Liberal head”) were so offensive.
It is Abbott who more than anyone else is responsible for the destruction of the type of political purity of Hawke’s era. But he and his ilk are also trying to rewrite history, when the record shows that the Liberals opposed almost every one of the reforms of the Hawke-Keating era. Andrew Peacock boycotted the 1983 economic summit, and they fought tooth and nail to destroy Medicare and universal superannuation.
This is the legacy Scott Morrison and today’s Liberals — especially Tony Abbott — are burdened with: a party that can only look out for the wealthy and the privileged, and will always seek to undermine the social compact of the fair go that is the very foundation of Australia. A party of hate and envy and greed.
Scott Morrison has been almost invisible in the past 24 hours, the man that time forgot. The media have dutifully, in the interests of ‘balance’, covered his final campaign events, but he is a pale and colourless figure compared to Shorten, who glows with the spirit of Bob Hawke. I almost felt sorry for Morrison when he delivered his eulogy to Hawke in the rain on Thursday night, having just got off his campaign plane and realising that the election was almost certainly lost now.
True, there is not much love for Labor or the unions in Toorak today, but nor do we expect it. The expensive European cars mark out the local voters as people who are determined to hang onto their taxpayer gifted franking credits than do the right thing in the national interest. We summon up and best smile and offer our how-to-vote cards anyway.
But even in this seat, the Greens seem a good chance of scoring an upset. In the queue, an old man turns on a Liberal Party volunteer and bitterly and loudly harangues him for the disgraceful disloyalty to Turnbull. Liberal voters do the right thing by their party, but they mostly seem resigned to a Labor government.
In a few hours, we will know the fate of this election. But one thing is for sure: today we did it for Bob.
