If i’d had another week of campaigning, I would have won’, Hawke said later. Time is always his enemy. But it is doubtful, given the events of October–November 1963, that an extra week on the hustings would have put Hawke in parliament as the member for Corio. The election campaign began with the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam and ended with the assassination of President Kennedy of the United States; by 23 November not just the electors of Corio but the whole Western world was appalled and yearning for security. People, in those circumstances, do not dismiss conservative governments. The nation in 1963 clung to Menzies as a child to its father’s leg.
Hawke polled 748 more primary votes than Opperman, creating a swing to Labor of 3 per cent in an election that brought a national 3 per cent swing away from the ALP and when its vote in Victoria as a whole dropped to 40.3 per cent, with 12.4 per cent of first preferences going to the DLP. His result was excellent, in the circumstances, but it was not good enough: after the distribution of DLP preferences he had only 22 456 votes to Opperman’s 25 666. ‘Who brought this Communist in here?’ a member of the Corio Club had demanded when he saw Hawke being introduced around the clubhouse. Hawke’s sponsor, a local businessman, strode forward and knocked the calumniator down. It was a nasty campaign.
It began badly for Hawke, with resentment of him among the local party faithful. The rulers of the Victorian ALP, the central executive, were dissatisfied with the two Corio men who had put themselves forward for the seat and on the eve of selection of candidates (having secured Hawke’s promise to run), announced that nominations had been reopened. They gave the early election as their excuse for bending the rules. They then selected Hawke. An outsider. George Poyser, in 1963 the assistant secretary of the Victorian ALP, former secretary of the Geelong Trades Hall Council (and later a Labor senator), was appointed Hawke’s campaign manager. He said, ‘There was a lot of resentment that the executive had behaved in this way and a lot of resentment against Hawke who, party members felt, had been imposed upon them. I went down to Corio with a feeling of dread.’
Enthusiastic local members are essential in election campaigns: they do the chores—the letterbox drops, the handing out of advertisements, the lending of their motor cars, the cheering at meetings. There was only a month in which to campaign. Poyser said,
Hawke had to be sold to the party faithful before we could sell him to the electorate at large. The key to it was that he was a Rhodes scholar and a working-class advocate. We pushed the Rhodes scholar line and within a week Bob had 100 per cent of the local organisation behind him.
But meanwhile, Opperman’s machine had caught the scent of ALP discontent about the outsider and began to press hard on the ‘local man’ issue. A few weeks earlier the football team of the city of Geelong had played in the Victorian Football League grand final. Football is a matter of life and death to Victorians, who each winter become maddened, in their tens of thousands, as the grand final approaches. Opperman had made a highly publicised dash by air and road from Brisbane to arrive in time to see Geelong beat Hawthorn for the premiership. He still glowed, locally, from the heroes’ reflected glory. Hawke gave an undertaking that if elected he would live in Corio, but a promise was not enough to quieten the clamour of criticism, so the party rented him a house in Portarlington. Hazel and the children moved down from Melbourne. She was still ‘easily upset’, as campaigners noticed, and not well enough to play a public role; ‘I fed the troops’, she said. Here again the Opperman machine had an edge: his wife was politically active and campaigned continually for her husband among local people she had known for years. Hawke’s own health was a worry. While an inside group knew that he was recovering from alcoholic poisoning and grief, and described this to others as ‘a bit of a chest problem’, there was doubt whether he would be able to stand up to the campaigning. Poyser said,
Every day there was a factory-gate meeting, each evening he went around the clubs and at weekends he met the football enthusiasts. We had to make him a byword in Geelong very quickly; he had to be given the maximum exposure to the electorate.
A sense of pathos is never far from the ALP and was expressed in the slogan Hawke’s managers wrote: ‘Bob’s standing for you—give him a seat’. Opperman, in contrast, ran on the virile message, ‘Performance not Promises! Your man is Opperman.’
On 5 November the press was forecasting the possibility of a Labor victory. On 6 November Calwell, in what he described as ‘a red-blooded, face-to-face Australian political meeting open to all comers’, launched Labor’s campaign, promising a 5.5 per cent increase in economic growth, a revolution in education, a vigorous housing drive, tax concessions, improved social services, and a nuclear-free zone in the southern hemisphere. Menzies, who had perfected the appearance of lofty good temper with fools and such confidence in the job he was doing that he could afford a gentlemanly indolence, replied that the ALP was either promising ‘roaring inflation’ or intended to increase taxes. A nuclear-free zone was a ‘suicidal proposal’, he sighed. He had smacked at Calwell as if dislodging a gnat. He would open his own campaign a week later—on television.
The Corio campaign managers knew their candidate. Hawke was, above all, a debater and one suited to the unexpected and dashing. Poyser arranged to fill the Geelong West Town Hall with television sets; Menzies’ speech would be screened to the audience gathered for Hawke, then he and Gough Whitlam would reply to it—as if they were both in debate with the prime minister. It was a clever piece of theatre that very few politicians would be capable of carrying off. While Menzies was speaking Hawke scribbled out only an opening paragraph:
You have witnessed tonight in the speech of the P.M. the most amazing piece of hypocrisy in postwar Australian political history. This man came to office on a hoax—to put value into the £1—and will now be thrown out of that office as a political burglar, a man completely lacking in integrity. The millionaire in words is starkly revealed as poverty-stricken in ideas . . . By their deeds shall we know them . . .1
Hawke had guessed, accurately, that Menzies would again, as he had in 1961, adopt as his own a number of Labor policies.
It was a night of strong assertions and superlatives: Whitlam told the audience of 750 Labor supporters that Hawke had ‘greater industrial experience than any man in Australia’. With two fast-on-their-feet agitators on stage the evening went with zest.
But earlier that day, 12 November, the DLP candidate, J. J. Mahoney, had been reported at length in the Geelong Advertiser for a speech he had made to the local Polish community, during which he had dwelt upon the Indonesian peril. Mahoney had said that the election was the most vital ever to be held in Australia and that it was a question of ‘safeguarding the nation’s future’. It was necessary therefore that policies relating to defence and foreign affairs be placed above all else, otherwise coming generations might be forced to ‘live in slavery’. He continued,
Under the leadership of Dr Sukarno this threat is inspired by nationalistic tendencies, but Communism is helping to ferment and incite Sukarno’s lust for power. The children of Australia cannot vote in this election: their future rests upon the votes of older people.
Two days later the Advertiser reported him saying, ‘Once the millions of Asia spill over into Australia this country cannot defend itself . . .’ The Advertiser, owned by the local Douglas family and managed by a former sea-captain who had married into the clan, was conservative. Poyser had been complaining to its management about bias since 1949. He said, ‘It did no good. They would not give equal space, equally displayed, to Labor, but they raised no objections to running our advertisements, full-page, if we liked.’ Hysteria in the electorate was building up and was thoroughly reported by the local paper. When Opperman opened his campaign a few days after Hawke he was continuously heckled for an hour and a half. He attacked Hawke as Left-wing and made repeated references to the sinister ‘36 faceless men’. The slurs about the ALP and Communism were everywhere, especially on local radio broadcasts aimed at housewives.
Hawke’s health gave way and he had to spend three days in bed. Hazel recalled being enraged and mortified as she listened to gentle radio voices appealing to her, the mother in the home, to save her children’s lives by refusing to vote for Labor. Hawke said,
The Catholic Church was very very strong, and I remember one incident vividly: [Senator] Pat Kennelly, a devout Catholic, came down to campaign. There was an opening of a big new hall in one of the Catholic parishes on a Saturday and it was suggested he and I should go along there. The DLP had been putting out the most monstrous stuff about the party generally and about me—that the party was under the control of Communists and I was a disguised Communist. And this afternoon as we walked through the crowds little kids of eleven and twelve pointed at me and Pat, saying ‘Communists, Communists, Communists’. Pat nearly wept. He couldn’t believe the church was doing that.
However, Hawke had already established a swing, and was holding it. He had also had a stroke of luck: the shipping, coal and hotel magnate, R. W. Miller, held a grudge against Opperman and wanted him sacked as Minister for Shipping. Opperman had refused to grant permits to Miller’s ships to operate on the Australian coastal trade, while granting permits to ships flying flags of convenience and owned, mostly, by the major oil companies. Miller saw his chance in Hawke and offered to support his campaign financially. Poyser said,
We kept the Miller money separate from the official Labor accounts, so that it did not appear in any of the books. We were frightened that the Liberals would accuse us of overspending. We worked through a Mr Taylor in Miller’s office. We would ring him up, tell him how much a full-page advertisement or a radio ad. would cost, and the cheque for the exact amount would arrive next day.
Huge advertisements about Hawke began to appear in the Advertiser, and Hawke, who is always at home with debate on specifics, began to castigate Opperman for his handling of the shipping portfolio. The minister was piqued into reply, saying Australia could not afford to establish its own shipping line for carrying import and export cargoes.
On 20 November Hawke addressed a lunchtime meeting of factory workers at Alcoa, telling them, ‘Australia must move positively and quickly to establish an overseas shipping line’, and that the country was being held to ransom by the Overseas Shipping Conference, which decided the freight charges to be imposed on Australian exporters. On the same day the Miller Canopus sailed into the port of Geelong. The crew lowered a huge piece of cloth, which covered almost one side of the ship, with an advertisement painted on it urging a vote for Hawke. The next day there was a half-page advertisement in the Advertiser saying, ‘The Labor Movement Welcomes R. W. Miller’s Canopus to Geelong, The First Australian Owned Tanker To Enter Corio Bay With An Australian Crew’. There was a picture of Hawke and one of the tanker. Hawke repeatedly challenged Opperman to debate with him face to face, but the minister wisely declined and instead rode around Corio on his bicycle. He had said in one speech that there were six Communists among Labor’s ‘36 faceless men’; the Labor machine was demanding stridently and futilely that he retract the statement. Opperman was so hard pressed by Hawke that he left the electorate only once during the campaign and had ministerial documents sent by car to Geelong for signing.
By the morning of 23 November, a week before polling day, Hawke was running away with the seat. His handbills announced:
His outstanding academic career . . . He has conducted all recent major cases before the Arbitration Commission which have resulted in increases in the basic wage and margins and three weeks annual leave. His recent international experience. His armed services experience. Bob Hawke flew as a pilot with the Oxford University Air Squadron of the royal air force volunteer reserve.
Sport: An all-round sportsman . . . played 1st grade cricket . . . toured with the Oxford University side. He has youth—education—experience—vigour—integrity.2
The electorate had been lavishly papered with these bills. Once Hawke had been accepted by the party, he had stirred such enthusiasm that scores of volunteers had joined his campaign and five times had filled the letterboxes of Corio with campaign leaflets. When Harold Holt, the federal Treasurer, had challenged anyone to name a country more prosperous than Australia Hawke had challenged Holt to debate the government’s economic management. Holt had declined. Hawke said, ‘None of them would debate. I talked about defence and international affairs, but basically I talked about economics. I tried to tell the story about the attack on living standards via wages and wages policy that was involved in the Menzies government approach. I had the authority of my position as ACTU advocate.’
Then, in the late morning of Saturday, 23 November, the forward rush of enthusiasm hit a wall: President Kennedy had been shot dead. It was as if the planet had lurched in its orbit.
Poyser heard the news over the radio in the Geelong Trades Hall and thought, ‘Nationally, we can’t win’. Hawke, who’d been told early that morning, was stunned, but remained optimistic. The old campaigners, however, knew that a different message was necessary now that people were frightened. New, full-page advertisements of Hawke were made, picturing, for the first time, Hazel and the children all seated together on a settee and announcing, ‘Bob Hawke the Family Man’.3
Labor was in retreat. By 25 November the party’s defence policy had been swept away. In Brisbane Calwell announced that Labor’s nuclear-free southern hemisphere idea had been misunderstood; that in a war the USA would ‘give Australia nuclear arms’; and that ‘we, the ALP, would use any weapon to defend Australia if attacked’. Menzies smiled and pointed out that he had already ordered TFX aircraft, which ‘rounded off the largest and most ambitious re-equipment program in the peace-time history of Australia’. Hawke said,
The atmosphere the Libs created in that post-Kennedy assassination period was unbelievable. They had B-47 bombers flying over Australia; there was constant talk about ‘the Asian hordes’, as some people chose to refer to the Indonesians, and about the F-111s. Menzies was brought down to Corio on the day before the election to speak at the Ford factory. There had never been so many police in the area—police were wandering around with rifles, on the roofs of buildings, and they went through the lockers in the factory—there was supposed to be an assassination threat to Menzies. The atmosphere was electric. At the Ford meeting people were expecting to see Menzies shot. And they had conjured up the whole bloody thing!
Poyser recalled Menzies’ address to the Ford workers: ‘He had turned up surrounded by police. In the crowd some joker ignited a cracker he had in a cigarette packet. When the thing went bang people’s faces turned white.’
By election day the polls showed that Labor would lose. In Corio there were police stationed at the booths. The Geelong Advertiser that morning ran an editorial spurning Labor’s ‘gaudy bait’ and noting, ‘Mr Opperman in his younger days was idolised by Geelong and district people as a world famous figure in sport . . . The electorate is not likely to forsake him now.’
By ten o’clock that night television commentators announced that Menzies was back in government, while in a maverick result Bob Hawke had beaten the minister for shipping. Hawke said,
People around me were saying, ‘Hey, you’ve won it!’ I found George Poyser, who knew how every booth in the electorate had to vote for us to win. He used the East Geelong High School booth as his litmus test: if my vote was of a certain percentage there, I would be in. I told him everyone thought I’d won and he replied, ‘Well, you haven’t. The figures from East Geelong High School are not good enough.’
It was a week before the result was officially known. Opperman, in accepting victory, commented with spleen on the ALP expenditure and Miller’s generosity to Hawke’s campaign: ‘Never has so much been spent in so short a time by so varied interests to effect a defeat’.
Hawke said, ‘It was a disappointment—I don’t like losing anything I do—but I knew I had achieved an enormous result. And I had something to go back to that I was very much involved in and deeply committed to.’
The basic wage case for 1964 was due to open in ten weeks, with a new young advocate representing the employers. In the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission the dawn was breaking for what was later called ‘the heroic age of advocacy’.
The wage fixation changes of 1961 had been, in the words of the chief judge, Sir Richard Kirby, ‘a great reformative step’. They had worked in relation to prices in 1962 and 1963 and now it was time for the triennial review of productivity. If that went smoothly, the unions could begin to relax: they would have a whole package of wages adjusted to prices and productivity: their decade-long fight against the decision of 1953 would have succeeded; and they would have a planned, stable system for the allotment of money logically intermeshed with the Australian economy. At least, in theory.4
Hawke approached the 1964 case with confidence. The economy was booming, with international reserves of £840 million—higher than ever before; there had been a 40 per cent increase of exports of manufactured goods compared with the same period twelve months earlier, and it followed upon the increase in margins and annual leave that Hawke had won in 1963. The employers could not cry Bankrupt! A new mood of buoyancy was sweeping the nation, summed up in the title of a recently published book, The Lucky Country. Unemployment was negligible. People swollen with abundance went on diets of grilled rump steak. We had never had it so good and we were going to have it better, for the drumbeats of the mining boom were already audible in the distance. London was swinging. Western Europe (and Japan) danced and shrieked with Beatlemania. In America, Kennedy’s Camelot was changing into Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which would see an end to poverty, inequality, ignorance. The heady, golden ’60s were underway.
The wage case for that year reflected the confidence and good temper of the times. It was a friendly, humorous case, with the Bar table and the Bench swapping jokes and passing notes about the cricket scores. It ended in Sydney with the chief judge and the two leading advocates boozing together, and later Hawke and the employers’ new man, Jim Robinson, dancing pas de deux in the foyer of the Menzies Hotel at four o’clock in the morning.
A few weeks later the full Bench gave its decision: the basic wage would be increased by £1 to take account of price and productivity increases.
The unions were jubilant. The employers’ counterpart to Albert Monk, George Polites, invented a judges’ jingle that did the rounds of all the industrial relations pubs: ‘The economy in the round is sound—we’ll give a pound!’
The night before the decision was given the defence minister, Senator Paltridge, had told parliament that the United States had been pressing Australia to join more actively in supporting the sagging anti-Communist front in South Vietnam, and that Australia would therefore be sending military instructors to help out the American military instructors already in the country. His statement was the proverbial cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. In the wage case, too, there had been a little cloud: it was called the total wage. The employers wanted it; the unions rejected it, and so did the Bench. But it kept on growing. ‘The heroic age of advocacy’ between Hawke and Jim Robinson was the battle for the total wage, which opened in 1964. The economic nightmare of Australian wage fixation, which came to a climax in 1974 and again in 1981, began then.
Wage fixation and its economic consequences is a highly complicated—and controversial—area that only a full-length book could adequately cover. For brevity, one can give this equation: under the system of basic wage and margin an annual pay packet was made up of, say, £1000 basic wage and £1000 margin, increased one part at a time, with a lag of several years for margins’ increases. With a total wage the annual pay packet is still £2000, but it is increased at one blow. If a flat-rate increase is awarded, the lesser-paid worker tends to catch up with the better paid. Better-paid workers want percentage increases, for it takes no talent in mathematics to realise that, say, 10 per cent of £2000 is greater than 10 per cent of £1000. The most militant unions are the craft unions, and they are better paid; therefore, over a period of time, they will tend to get their own way and have percentage increases awarded. This means that the highly paid workers will be even more highly paid in relation to the poorly paid. Relativities are badly disturbed; envy arises—the fitter earns more so the labourer demands more and the brain surgeon puts up his fees. Taxation swallows most of the gain, but more of the brain surgeon’s, so he hires a lawyer/accountant to figure out how to pay less tax. Governments discover they needed the extra tax wealth all along and spend it on causes appropriate to their political priorities; this creates resentment in half the electorate. The result is bad temper, high wages, cheating, and huge tax returns to the government. Prices increase—for whatever reason (drought in the wheat belt, a consumer fad)—and the fitter demands a wage rise.
The employers had designed their total wage argument with a different scenario in mind. They wanted the total wage increased only for gains in productivity. But for the unions productivity increases are mere gravy. Their meat is prices and their measuring stick is the consumer price index, which is expressed in percentage terms. Australia ended up with a total wage increased for prices at a time of low productivity movements.
George Polites, the executive director of the Australian Council of Employers’ Federation (ACEF), has the credit for designing the case for the total wage but had no hand in the botched-up way it was applied in law. Polites had come to the Employers’ Federation in 1959, having worked his way up from industrial advocate for the Victorian employers to the job of personnel director of the then small but ambitious transnational company, Utah, before becoming the dynamo of organised employers. He was short, energetic, full of nervous energy and shrewdness, his speech terse and humorous, prickling with shafts of epigrammatic wit. He had been dissatisfied with the advocacy of Drew Aird but the internal politics of the ACEF had prevented him from making real reforms until the annual leave case of 1963. That year he had persuaded his colleagues that a young barrister he had spotted in the South Australian basic wage case of 1960, a case known as ‘The South Australian Employers versus The World’, was the man to establish against Hawke. Polites’ protégé was Jim Robinson, a barrister four years Hawke’s senior, who had not, as was customary for the employers’ counsel, taken silk. He was, like Hawke, a son of the manse.
Polites had a stroke of genius in promoting Robinson, for he was an opponent whom Hawke could not dislike, could not regard as a personal enemy—as he had, so notably, Cliff Menhennitt. (A few months earlier, in the 1963 margins and annual leave case, clashes between Hawke and Menhennitt had filled the courtroom with emotional lightning, causing pain to observers and judges.) As well, Robinson was malleable: Polites, as his mentor, was to be the phantom general directing his young warrior’s fight.
Robinson was slim, blue eyed, with delicate, almost fawn-like features and, although aggressive in court, was a man of instantly recognisable good nature and good humour. Like Hawke he had the faculty of becoming, in a few seconds, a boy again—Kirby used to call him Peter Pan—and his boyishness, which was whimsical, complemented the naughty innocence of Hawke’s sudden reversions to childhood play. His manner was languid; his speech finely modulated and slow, touched, as was Hawke’s, by Biblical allusions. Robinson’s mother had alarmed her wealthy family by marrying a missionary and going off to China. Robinson was born there. His childhood was characterised by the external chaos of the warlord period and the internal control of a stern, anaemic Christianity. He had grown up with evening prayers and daily Bible readings, church four times on Sundays and caveats against the sin of worldliness. His father was formidable—‘a headmaster in another form’. Robinson said, ‘There was no smoking, no drinking, no lipstick for girls, no movies—Hollywood was the workplace of the Devil—no radio on Sundays. Even the Women’s Weekly was a bit risqué.’ At the age of twelve he had come to Australia, and rebelled—by breaking Sabbath observance and, in secret, playing sport. Hawke was fascinated that Robinson had defied the church so young. Having discovered the similarities of their childhoods they were charmed by each other and spent hours discussing how they should rear their own children with greater liberty than they had known. Robinson was particularly attracted to Hawke’s relationship with Clem and Hawke’s openly expressed affection for men he admired. By 1964 they were already warm friends. Hawke had loathed some advocates on ideological grounds: Robinson was non-political. ‘Jim didn’t believe he was going to save the nation, like Cliff Menhennitt. I often thought he wouldn’t mind taking a case for our side’, Hawke remarked. Robinson was already in Hawke’s debt: in the 1960 case one of the employers’ witnesses had gone to Hawke and suggested that Hawke cross-examine his evidence in a certain way, which would discredit it. Hawke had dismissed the man and so as not to distress Robinson—who was on trial for his future career—had waited until the case was over before telling him about the perfidy. Robinson said, ‘That remains with me twenty years later as being what typified Bob’s integrity’. From that case on they had bonds of trust: to save time and work they exchanged the names of witnesses, and witness statements, and later gave warning of procedural changes although, as Robinson said later,
Bob played the game straighter than we did. He would as a matter of course give us as much notice as possible of procedural points. We would consider the length of notice we’d give him as part of our tactics. Perhaps it made no practical difference, because Bob thrived on surprises, but it was an article of faith with him that he never sought to take advantage of trust. And he never complained about not receiving identical treatment from me and George.
Since he had taken over as head of the employers’ body Polites had become determined that its traditional argument to the Commission, a brief he described as ‘no increase, no time, no how’, must be changed. He thought the employers’ refusal to concede any award wage increase, in a time of full employment and strong economic growth, was sterile and unreal—and ultimately damaging. While employers asserted fiercely in court that they could afford not a penny more in wages, outside court they were already paying large over-award rates as they competed among themselves for labour. The unions, therefore, regarded the employers’ submissions as exercises in hypocrisy.
The employers had come to behave like hapless virgins in court—and wantons outside—and regarded the unions as bent upon rape, in court and out. Polites recognised how bad for industrial relations this situation was and determined that there must be some rapprochement between desire and its rebuff, that some award wage permissiveness was in order. He fought hard in the employers’ councils to persuade his colleagues that it was in their best interest to give something—and to ask for something in return—instead of having the process of exchange accomplished by force majeure. His solution, unveiled by Robinson in the 1964 case, was the New Look Wages Plan. With it, the employers were offering to increase wages in line with productivity increases; they asked in return for the abolition of the basic wage and margin system and its replacement by a total wage. Welding the two-part system into one would prevent the unions having ‘two bites of the cherry’, as it was commonly described—that is, winning an increase in the basic wage then topping this up with an increase in margins, using as a major reason the disturbance of relativities.
The unions could never agree to the New Look Wages Plan, for it ruled out cost-of-living adjustments and without them any inflation would shrivel the value of wages. It would be back to the days of Sir Raymond Kelly. At the time neither side imagined that over a period of years the Arbitration Commission would mediate the issue by giving the employers part of what they wanted and the unions part of what they wanted, and that the final result would be a hybrid, a total wage adjusted for inflation, not productivity. Productivity could drop to zero, but if inflation were 10 per cent wages would be increased by 10 per cent, or almost that amount—and that is what happened, and what institutionalised the wage crises of the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1964 the word ‘stagflation’ did not exist.
The day after Robinson revealed the New Look Wages Plan there was a big union rally in Melbourne, addressed by many officials, including Albert Monk. It passed a resolution: ‘This meeting is emphatic that the move to abolish the basic wage is no more than an attempt to satisfy further the selfish demands of employers and from which no benefit can possibly result to any member of the work force’. The meeting called on workers to ‘support the basic wage struggle’. In court Hawke poured scorn on the total wage and productivity gearing of it, summoning to his aid the work of the attorney-general, Garfield Barwick. In 1961 Barwick had prepared a White Paper on restrictive trade practices in Australia that showed that a system of monopolies and inhibitions upon free trade existed. Hawke argued that these practices, long outlawed in other countries, rendered invalid the employers’ theory that wages be increased only in line with productivity increases, for the theory depended upon the free working of the market. He was, during these years, already developing the idea that was to sweep him to national prominence later, when he set out to break retail price maintenance.
Hawke had a receptive audience for his case. The Bench for 1964 was Kirby, Gallagher, Moore and John (later Sir John) Nimmo, the last a new judge who had come to the jurisdiction only a month before. Hawke knew he could rely upon Kirby and Moore to uphold the 1961 judgment, and probably Gallagher. Even if the decision were split 2–2, the chief judge would have a casting vote, so whatever Gallagher and Nimmo decided, Hawke could not lose. He was at his most relaxed and agreeable in court that year, confident of a victory and not required to engage in the verbal brutality of cross-examination. After 1961, when Dr Perkins had decided he would not face cross-examination from Hawke, the employers had abandoned the habit of calling witnesses. The transcript is scattered with flashes of humour and some unexplained adjournments, when in fact proceedings were halted so that Hawke and Robinson could go to Kirby’s chambers to listen to the cricket. At the end of the day Hawke and Robinson would have a beer in the Beaufort Hotel on the corner of Queen and Little Bourke Streets, where they burlesqued their performances in court, acting out imagined conversations between the judges about how each advocate had behaved. Robinson recalled,
The thing I remember most about Bob in those days was his enthusiasm for debate, on any topic. Whether in court or out, he always had a view—a strong, well-articulated view, on all subjects. And he thrived on debate . . . His style of advocacy sought to force a response from the Bench so that the members would become involved, rather than just listen. Once the response came he switched from formal advocate to informal debater. You could almost hear him say, ‘Now I’ve gotcha!’ It was the tactic he had used so successfully with Ashburner, in 1961. Kirby was difficult to corner, and when cornered would wax wrathful, but Moore could be drawn into a discussion. We both used a variation of the technique with a commissioner, Terry Winter [who for technical reasons was part of a second Bench simultaneously hearing the 1964 case]. Winter would ask a question when Bob or I was addressing and the one of us concerned would straight-faced say something like, ‘I’m glad you asked that question, Mr Commissioner, it shows a shrewd appreciation of the argument I was putting and with the benefit of that observation I can move now directly to the development of a related issue’. And then without answering the question we’d simply resume our submissions. Bob and I used to joke about this in the Beaufort and picture Winter going home that night, wondering, ‘What was it that I asked that was so brilliant?’
Another aspect of Bob’s advocacy was its apparent credibility. In the 1963 margins case I sarcastically referred to him as ‘the golden prophet of economic analysis’. This was, of course, to suggest that he really had feet of clay. Bob presented to the Bench his more difficult economic propositions like a big game fisherman showing off his personal trophies. How then could one doubt the authenticity of such a presentation! If a judge were bold enough to question Hawke’s reasoning Bob would take his argument step by step, stopping to ask, ‘Does Your Honour follow me so far?’ I could never bring myself to do that, but it was sickeningly effective. You see, unless the judge said, ‘No. I’m not satisfied—what about XYZ?’, Bob felt he’d won him over. It worked more often than not. Even today there’s no other advocate who does that in the same way as he can. Every question is an absolute plus to him; he uses a question as a catalyst to embellish his arguments, and the embellishments fit—they sound arguable. That is a very complete forensic skill.
Predictably, for a man who aimed at the brilliant coup and had little patience for detailed planning, Hawke was not so outstanding as a tactician. He was more generous—or naive—than his opponents in the exchange of information. He had a fixed hatred of Kelly and returned repeatedly to Kelly’s wickedness, lecturing the Bench about old cases until ‘Hawke’s historical exercise’ became a standing joke and Robinson would suggest languidly that there could be nothing of any moment in the rest of what Mr Hawke had to say, since he had spent two days giving a history lesson. This was a technique that Hawke had learned from Eggleston and did not abandon, presumably, because he so loved to be right—as Sir John Moore described it later, ‘banging my head against a wall and saying, “You’re a bloody nong!”’ The judges were often noticeably bored by Hawke’s long harangues on times past and wrong decisions. In the employers’ camp George Polites was a born tactician. He planned for Robinson not only the preliminary points, the order of addresses, the nature of the case, its length and how to counter Hawke’s arguments, but also such details as whether to avoid splitting Robinson’s case over a weekend. Robinson said, ‘Bob was less concerned with the peripheral matters surrounding a case: he went for the jugular’.
By 1964 the president of the Commission, Sir Richard Kirby, had overcome his initial hostility to Hawke and treated him and Robinson as favourite nephews. He had come to expect cheekiness and intemperate language from Hawke in court and out. When the case ended in May, in Sydney, Hawke, Robinson and Kirby were invited to an employers’ function held at a golf club, and happened to be sitting together in an alcove. Robinson said,
Bob was calling Kirby ‘Dick This’ and ‘Dick That’. I never called him anything but Your Honour, or Judge or Sir Richard and Bob got irritated by this. He said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Jim, be a man. Call him Dick.’ And I said—we’d been drinking since eleven o’clock that morning, and it was now about eight at night—‘Now, look here, Bob, that is my choice. I will call him what I want. I might even call him “ya old bastard”, but I won’t call him Dick.’ Kirby sat there, listening to us arguing and highly amused by the pair of us.
Within less than a year Kirby’s avuncular tolerance for Hawke was to become a major factor in an industrial relations scandal, the national wage case of 1965. This case, Hawke’s worst defeat, led directly to his decision to run for the presidency of the ACTU.
The seeds of the 1965 judgment, which equalled in notoriety the decision of 1953, were planted in 1964. Although Hawke won a victory in gaining an extra £1 for unionists, its award was made on a decision split between Kirby and Moore on one side, and Gallagher and Nimmo on the other, and to make it law Kirby had to exercise his right of the casting vote. On the question of how wages should be determined, Kirby, Moore and Gallagher upheld the principles of the 1961 decision; Nimmo rejected them. Since Nimmo was new to the jurisdiction his action was discounted. It should not have been. It was the first public sign that inside the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission a challenge to the authority of the president was evolving. There was a complex of reasons for it; one major one was anger about Kirby’s failure to restrain Hawke. Three judges at least—Gallagher, Nimmo and Sweeney—all deplored Hawke’s lack of respect, his ‘dyslogistic’ mode of address, as they called it; his contempt for ‘the majesty of the law’.
The whole system had been shaken by his style. Even when most polite, Hawke talked man to man or even teacher to man—‘like a Dutch uncle’—to the Bench. Kirby said,
While he wouldn’t persuade, he was totally honest. Other coves would try to mislead you, but Bob would never, either to strengthen his case or to preserve it from weakness, lie or mislead us. He was like the good little boy who would always own up.
Among the employers and the more conservative union officials there was grave concern about Hawke’s style, for he had set a fashion in tough talking that other young union advocates were copying, and they were not always as honest, or logical, as Hawke. In 1963 the Electrical Trades Union called an officers’ meeting at which one of the agenda items was: Should an industrial advocate be aggressive? The question was decided in the affirmative only after long debate. There were many less formal arguments. George Polites said,
We took a conscious decision not to embrace Bob’s style of advocacy. We thought it was bad in itself, and bad for the system . . . There was a double standard, anyway. Robinson could never have got away with the violent language accepted from Hawke. In his opening submission in 1964 I instructed Jim to needle the Bench, accusing it of having ‘a bet both ways’. Kirby became enraged. He called Jim ‘a disgrace to your principals’ and demanded an apology. I refused to let Jim apologise in the way Kirby had asked. What he had said was nothing compared to the extravagance of Hawke, of his personalised attacks. Bob had the Bench in terrorem.
The question of ‘Hawke’s style’ was spreading.
The 1964 decision was given in June; in July Hawke went to Western Australia to argue for a £3 1 shilling increase in the state basic wage. In the opinion of observers he angered the arbitrator by his forcefulness. The awarded increase was only 3 shillings.
While in Perth Hawke appeared on television and, asked about Labor’s failure in the 1963 election, replied that the party had been ‘inefficient in enunciating its principles in terms of the needs of present-day society’. Within a decade members of the ALP would be able to point to a hundred similar statements from Hawke, his supporters quoting them as examples of honesty and clear thinking, his enemies as instances of contempt for the rules of solidarity.
There were already small signs that Hawke, while a man of the Left, did not fit snugly into its mould. One was his house. In 1964 he and Hazel had sold the Keats Street cottage and bought a two-storeyed orange brick house in Royal Avenue, Sandringham, a street of large and expensive residences owned by business and professional people. There was nothing working class about the place, from its price—£17 250—to its tennis court. It was well beyond Hawke’s means, for he was earning only a little more than £2000 annually. The house had been on the market for eighteen months without attracting a buyer and, although imposing outside was, according to Hazel, ‘a soulless place inside, painted battleship grey’. Hawke had fallen in love with its tennis court: it was a piece of his childhood recreated to have a house with a tennis court attached. The owner agreed to sell the house for £12 250 and allow Hawke a year’s option to buy the tennis court for £5000. ‘My bank manager took a tremendous gamble and agreed to give me a huge overdraft’, Hawke said. As a financial proposition for the bank Hawke had one advantage: in 1963 the Sydney Sun had published a story referring to, ‘R. J. Hawke, the Communist industrial officer of the Waterside Workers’ Federation’. (The name should have been Norm Docker.) Hawke sued for libel. One week before his option on the tennis court was due to expire the settlement, for £1000, came through. It was the first of many. Hawke continued to spend his libel settlements on improvements to the house, or in reducing his debts. In later years he would lead guests to ‘the Frank Packer swimming pool’ and ‘the Maxwell Newton sauna bath’, but he did not know how much over the years he has won in libel cases, for his lack of interest in handling financial matters was total. He said, ‘I had no qualms about libel settlements. The people gathered at the other end of the Bar table to oppose me were earning in one day what I earned in a year. I reckoned I deserved the extra cash.’ In the 1960s the grandness of the Royal Avenue house excited comment among trade union friends, even though it was half-furnished. ‘Most people said it looked as if we couldn’t afford to live in it—the curtains were rotting and all the furniture was second-hand’, Hazel recalled. In those days the adverse comments were mere ribbing.
Besides the house, another sign that Hawke felt free of the bonds that were willingly, even exultantly, worn by other people of the Left was his choice of friends. From his first years out of school Hawke had enjoyed friendships across the political and social spectrum: Jules Zanetti had been intrigued that Hawke, after tea with the governor, would go to the pub to yarn with men in blue singlets—or vice versa. There had always been some version of hymn-singers and boozers, thesis and antithesis, with his life as the synthesis. But it was years before the trade union movement realised that Hawke had many friendships, and a second life, among ‘the ruling class’.
In the 1960s one of these friends was Rod (later Sir Roderick) Carnegie, known from Oxford, where he had been a famous oar. Carnegie was a young man on his way to the top in business, already the Australian principal of the American consulting firm McKinsey & Co. They met for lunch every three months or so. Carnegie said,
I found his views on the overall society interesting. I think we shared a common belief that Australia was a country that had to find its own independent identity. The issues that concerned him were: What does it mean to be an Australian? What does Australia stand for? Should Australia depend upon the tradition of great and powerful allies? Whether totally owned foreign companies were good for Australia, or not? Were we developing the country in a way that was most appropriate? He was concerned about the way in which society tried to work together on issues.
These were all matters to which Carnegie, over the years, has also addressed himself. He continued,
I remember at one lunch we got into disagreement about Menzies. Bob took the line that Menzies would be ultimately assessed as a very bad prime minister, and while I could agree with part of what he was saying, I thought he was not providing a balanced point of view. Among the older members of the community, who were just coping with the shock of England entering the Common Market, and other changes in relationships—the Suez Canal, for instance—I can see how Bob would have come across as a radical person.
By the late 1970s Hawke’s friendship with Carnegie and other captains of industry was public knowledge, and the cause of fury in trade union and Left-wing circles. It was thought to demonstrate a change of personality in Hawke, a corruption. In fact, while his attitudes have changed over the years, his behaviour has remained consistent. The boy who did not accept the authority of his headmaster, or the intrinsic majesty of the law, or the church’s bans on alcohol and sex, or the drinker’s bans on the church, or the judiciary’s demands for respectful language, rejected too the authority of his political colleagues to define how he should live.
As an advocate Hawke was about to face his biggest crisis with authority, in the national wage case of 1965. The result was a personal disaster, sweeping away six years of his work. Nationally, it was disastrous also, for the 1965 decision crumpled the trust that both the trade union movement and the employers had vested in the wage-fixing system.
Authority was at the heart of the 1965 case: the authority of legal traditions; the authority of the chief judge; the authority of employers of labour. Industrially, the challenge to authority had already begun. After more than a decade of quietude when there had been a minimum of industrial unrest, and most of that on the wharves, in the boom year of 1964 men and women members of blue- and white-collar unions began to demand their share of increased prosperity, by going on strike. Railwaymen and wharfies, mannequins and public servants struck work and the year had drawn to a close on a note of rising industrial discord.
The employers did not wait, as was usual, for the unions to go through the legal process necessary to create a national wage case but took the initiative and brought on the case themselves. They had decided to apply again in 1965 for the total wage. As a tactic, they were going to carp at the Bench about the increasing turbulence of industrial life—which, they were to submit, the total wage would calm. The idea was a piece of Polites’ wizardry.
The Bench for 1965 was Kirby, Moore, Gallagher, Sweeney and Nimmo. Kirby and Moore, Polites knew, viewed strikes as a fact of life in a buoyant economy; the other judges believed strikes were preventable.
The hearing opened in late January but did not get properly under way until 2 March, with Robinson instead of Hawke appearing first. He tendered fifty-seven exhibits, many of them leaflets and articles from union journals that urged demonstrations by members to influence the Commission’s decision. One exhibit, the ‘militant’s blueprint’, was an outline for a strike campaign for higher wages. Robinson said,
We culled the unions’ own publications, because they had the ring of their own free minds, and were absolutely delighted to find an editorial, the ‘militant’s blueprint’. We were using it to scold the Bench for granting £1 in 1964 and were using it, even more importantly long term, to achieve the total wage. In early cases we had produced dozens of examples of nastiness from the trade union movement. But the reaction on a new mind [that is, Mr Justice Sweeney] to national wage proceedings was quite dramatic—greater than we had expected. I don’t think anybody really in the industrial relations jurisdiction would have taken any of the material as gospel without discounting it. What unions say and what they do is different. There was an unworldly reaction from the Bench.
It was obvious early in the hearing that some judges viewed militant behaviour with disfavour. For Sweeney and Nimmo this reaction was understandable, for they were new to industrial relations and unused to the belligerent coloratura of union rhetoric. Gallagher, however, was one of the most experienced industrial lawyers in the country. But he held strong views on law and order and had a reputation for being the most outspoken member of the Commission on the subject of strikes. Robinson added, ‘It’s fair to say that Gallagher was always capable of responding to that sort of material—an emotive response’. Robinson was offering a 6-shilling increase in wages, for productivity increases, to be made to a total, not a basic, wage.
He was followed by John Kerr, QC, representing the Commonwealth. Hawke disliked Kerr, who had an impressive head of prematurely white hair, and a falsetto voice. When he swept into court Hawke would remark loudly, ‘Here comes Goldilocks’, or, ‘The Liberace of the Law . . .’ Kerr’s submission stated that any wage increase in 1965 ‘would be fraught with danger’ but was silent on the Commonwealth’s attitude to the total wage—to Hawke’s considerable irritation. Hawke’s brief was to apply for an increase of between 12 and 15 shillings in the basic wage for an increase in prices and productivity, and to object to the request for a total wage. For the first time since 1953 the unions were not demanding reinstatement of automatic adjustments, such was their faith in the Commission.
Polites, who said later, ‘Hawke never understood Gallagher, and neither did Kirby’, had shrewdly assessed the psychology of all the actors: Robinson was totally prepared and confident. The minefield had been laid and Hawke strode manfully into it.
Hawke said,
There clearly was a determination on the part of three members of the Bench not to do me, but to do Kirby and Moore, and that meant having me as an object of considerable dislike. It was an incredible performance. They behaved totally unjudicially.
Polites added, ‘Bob made up his mind he had lost the case right at the start’.
Before the hearing began the Melbourne Trades Hall Council had circulated a pamphlet reading: ‘We ask workers in all factories, shops, offices, depots, etc. to elect and send representatives in a continuous stream to fill the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission’s chamber during the hearing of claims. do it now!’
Hawke’s opening address was smothered by the shouts of his supporters, proceedings had to be adjourned and Hawke had to give an undertaking that there would be no more rumpus. On his first day he clashed with Gallagher; Kirby rebuked him; then he clashed with Sweeney when he referred to the 1953 judgment as ‘infamous’; then with Gallagher again over the question of strike campaigns. Gallagher, a warm-hearted and emotional man, was losing his temper with Hawke, who had already affronted him and Nimmo by attacking them for their dissent from the prevailing decision of 1964. Hawke accused the Commonwealth of ‘flagrant and blatant dishonesty’ for not stating plainly that it neither supported nor opposed the total wage. Kerr, when he had a chance to reply, was scathing about Hawke’s ‘extravagant language’.
Early in the case there were lively, amicable exchanges between Hawke and Sweeney, who arrived each day with an index of transcripts of earlier cases and was taking an acute interest in Hawke’s submissions. Sweeney was known as ‘a lawyer’s lawyer’; increasingly, he began to debate with Hawke, to raise queries, to demand further proof. The hearing had moved to Sydney on 16 March, to Temple Court where, across the corridor, a royal commission was in progress. Hawke was speaking so loudly that he disrupted its proceedings and a note was sent in asking that he lower his voice; he was also speaking so fast that the shorthand writers could record him for only ten minutes at a time. His voice had broken down in earlier cases; on Hawke’s fifth day of talking, to an increasingly irascible Bench, George Polites nudged Robinson and said, ‘They’re after him. He’ll lose his voice in a minute.’ Hawke needed a week to recover his voice. He returned full of fight. On 6 April there was another rumpus when 200 wharf labourers picketed Temple Court and stood in the street shouting, ‘We want wage justice!’ so loudly that their voices penetrated to the hearing, on the building’s third floor. After an hour Kirby announced the case was adjourned and police were summoned. The next morning there was a police guard, for the wharfies as they had prepared to move off under orders had shouted, ‘You wait! The women are coming tomorrow.’ The atmosphere was jittery in expectation of a female demonstration. Hawke assured the Bench there would not be another onslaught, male or female, but Kirby decided that the police guard should remain. Hawke launched back into an attack upon Gallagher and Nimmo, and an attempt to defend to Sweeney the principles of the 1961 judgment that, for days, the judge had been disparaging. The exchanges between Hawke and Sweeney were becoming increasingly splenetic and at the lunch adjournment a group of union officials, including David McBride and Cliff Dolan, took Hawke aside and said, ‘Look mate, go easy. He’s getting under your guard.’ After lunch Hawke had been speaking for only a few minutes, directly to Sweeney, when this exchange took place:
hawke: I think Your Honour will see that there is a classic illustration of the sort of stupidity, if I may say so with respect to the tribunal at the time, that they were getting themselves into.
sweeney, j: It is a very different thing to say ‘with respect’. If you want to be consistent, you should delete the ‘stupidity’ reference or the ‘respect’.
hawke: In that case, I would prefer to delete the ‘with respect’.
sweeney, j: You please yourself, as far as I am concerned.
hawke: Yes, I will please myself, Your Honour.5
The atmosphere was electric. Along the Bench faces were pale with anger. Kirby sat in silence and, after what seemed a lifetime, Hawke began speaking again.
Sweeney had clearly rejected the 1961 wage-fixing principles that Hawke had fought for over years; Nimmo had rejected them in 1964 and would do so again. That left Gallagher.
At 10 a.m. on 28 June in the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission Building in Melbourne, the Number 1 courtroom was packed with union and employer officials and journalists waiting to hear the decision. The judges trooped in, sat, then Kirby, his voice shaking with distress, announced that their decision was split, and to the disbelief of his audience continued, ‘The majority view will be given by Mr Justice Gallagher on behalf of other members of the Bench’.
It was fifteen years since a chief judge had been rolled.
As Gallagher read the judgment on behalf of himself, Sweeney and Nimmo the shock in the courtroom turned to dismay. The majority decision did not do the one thing that by law a wage case is required to do: settle an industrial dispute. Hawke had lost shatteringly: the 1961 principles, which the unions had so deeply trusted that they had not even asked for automatic adjustments, were gone.
The judgment rejected the unions’ formula of prices and productivity. It adopted ‘capacity to pay’ but rejected the employers’ formula for measuring capacity—productivity. It refused to increase the basic wage at all, but awarded an additional 6 shillings to margins, calculated, strangely enough, on the productivity formula. It rejected a total wage, but decided that in future basic wage and margins cases be heard simultaneously, which was tantamount to making the acceptance of a total wage inevitable. It adopted the view that wage increases should be compatible with price stability. It condemned a strike in Mount Isa and the waterside workers’ campaign against involvement in the Vietnam War. It pointed out that strikes reduced the capacity of the economy to pay higher wages, inflicted hardship on the general body of employees and asserted that a policy of strike action was diametrically opposed to arbitration, and that strikes were a calamity for the whole community.
Within minutes of the court adjourning, militant union officials were demanding that the ACTU demonstrate the anger of the movement by calling a national strike. An emergency executive meeting was arranged for the following week.
Cliff Dolan recalled,
Bob was absolutely furious. I sat through the whole case and right from the word Go it had been obvious that Sweeney and Nimmo had a prejudice against him. There was no doubt, if you were in that courtroom, that they were out to get him. His submissions were as good as ever, but he’d lost the case before it started. However, we all still expected a certain amount of justice. There was no justice in the decision . . . A big group of us had discussions, going on until the early hours of next morning, about what he could do. Bob was looking for some way to appeal the decision.
There is no appeal against decisions of a full Bench. Nevertheless Hawke called on Kirby in chambers and asked him to overturn the decision. Kirby refused.
In some shops workers had downed tools immediately on 29 June; there were scores of wildcat strikes and the large Communist-led Amalgamated Engineering Union began churning out pamphlets titled, ‘Arbitration Be Damned’.
When the ACTU executive met, Hawke addressed it for an hour about the legal possibilities. After another five hours of discussion the executive decided not to call a national strike and directed Hawke to apply for a review of the 1965 decision. Kirby rejected his application, mentioning in passing that judgments need not be ‘treated as dogma which cannot be departed from in the future. Indeed the contrary is the case.’ It was as good as a promise that, one way or another, the 1965 decision could be reversed but that legal niceties would have to be observed. Meanwhile, Hawke’s detractors on the Right-wing of the union movement and among the employers were laughing up their sleeves. In those circles it was held that Hawke had mismanaged the 1965 case and brought calamity on his own head.
Hawke’s commitment to a career in the trade union movement had waxed and waned for six years. He had begun work as ACTU advocate with a determination to force reforms in wage fixation, and with his eye on parliament. When he had been rebuffed in 1960 his commitment had taken a further vigorous leap. By 1963 it had relaxed once more. Abruptly in 1965 defeat converted ambivalence to a consuming passion to achieve reform. Within weeks of Kirby’s refusal to overturn the decision Hawke had made two resolutions: ‘I got hold of that judgment, which was both incompetent and devious, and I determined I would go through it, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by bloody word—and destroy it!’ He had also decided to become the next president of the ACTU.
When the news got round industrial relations circles, which it did quickly, for Hawke confides his plans in many, including journalists, some people laughed out loud. The ACTU was a blue-collar organisation; Monk aside, its executive was made up of men who had worked their way up from ‘the tools’ to jobs within their unions and finally to the top of the union tree. Conventional wisdom of the Right, which controlled the ACTU, had it that only a union official could aspire to replace Monk. For an employee and former academic, like Hawke, the ambition seemed as risible as a donkey in the Melbourne Cup. Hawke said, ‘Albert and Harold never let me forget that I was only an employee’. Eighteen months earlier when a member of the ACTU executive had suggested the presidency idea to Hawke he had laughed himself and replied, ‘I wouldn’t have a feather to fly with’. What he needed was a machine.
In the spring of 1965 Hawke began assembling a machine that would drive him forward into the president’s job.