It may be that future historians with a fondness for the convenience of dates will note 6 October 1973 as the day on which the centuries of world domination by the values and laws that arose from Christendom ended. Just a year afterwards, on 13 November 1974, in the General Assembly of the United Nations, Christianity’s younger cousin-faith, Islam, revealed the triumph of its reinvigoration: with a gun holster visible on his hip, Yassar Arafat, leader of the PLO, entered the hall, strode to the podium and said, ‘Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.’
It was the first time a man had addressed the international parliament with such dramatic symbolism. The most dangerous weapon previously displayed there by a speaker was Nikita Khruschchev’s shoe, with which he had banged the lectern. Arafat’s gun holster was a sign of the changing times: as a British diplomat had quipped in earlier days, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven may run on love, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil’. The PLO was admitted to observer status in the UN; before the end of the decade an interesting term had entered common speech: ‘the Islamic Bomb’. Nuclear weapons had once been ‘American’ or ‘Russian’ or ‘Chinese’. Abruptly they were not only national, but religious.
For the rest of the 1970s Hawke fought against the crusades of a new era. He tried to be a mediator: in the PLO, in Israel, in Egypt and Jordan—extraordinary, but futile, efforts. He even tried to meet Yassar Arafat when, in late 1974, a senior Egyptian journalist who had contacts with the PLO visited Australia and offered to sound out the possibilities for such a meeting. However, by then the PLO was riding high and had little need or desire to hold discussions with such a committed Zionist as Hawke. The increasingly bitter exchanges between Hawke and Hartley made it all the less likely.
Early in 1975 Hawke learned that, with Hartley’s encouragement, a PLO delegation had been invited to visit Australia and that the government had agreed to issue visas. Hawke was outraged. The Australian government would not, for example, allow representatives of the Ustashi, the group dedicated to the overthrow of the government of Yugoslavia, to enter the country. The PLO visa issue was, for Hawke, another example of the Whitlam government’s dual morality. Hawke’s diary notes for 29 January 1975: ‘8.25 a.m. spoke to Whitlam about PLO visas’. Many others spoke, too. The trip was cancelled.
The next day Hawke had to chair an ALP federal executive meeting that would finalise business for the party’s biennial conference, due the following week, in Terrigal.
Terrigal is a holiday resort town on the north coast of New South Wales. The choice of a hot weather playground for the party’s meeting was ill advised, for matters of state should never be seen without neckties, or in the company of bare shoulders. Hawke said,
The Terrigal conference would have been the worst the ALP ever had. The whole thing was a schemozzle. Ministers were writing their policy statements hours before going up to the conference. The assembling of an economic policy statement was—oh, ludicrous. There was no wages policy debate. There was an unreal air to the whole show; the government clearly felt that this was an ALP conference that was irrelevant, because they were in government, they were running things, they knew what they were going to do—or didn’t know what they were going to do—but at any rate, it was for them to decide. So what was the use of this conference? And matters were worsened by the determination of the press to convey the whole thing as an exercise in hedonism. The photographs of people sitting around the swimming pool, being thrown in the pool . . .
Hawke himself was guilty of playing into the hands of those sections of the press that were now extremely hostile to the government and were eager to project an image of it that was undignified. He agreed to assist the promotion of the government-sponsored Old Sydney Town project and, allotted the part of a convict, was photographed shirtless, his hands bound, and apparently being whipped by an attractive young woman who worked in the office of the new federal Treasurer, Dr Jim Cairns. Egerton complained about the photograph at the time, and said later that Hawke had been distracted from his duties during the conference by his own streak of hedonism.
Hawke gave the address that opened proceedings, a rallying cry for solidarity, but he was still writing it minutes before he delivered it, so the opportunity for having the speech distributed to the news media was missed. He had the valid excuse that he had no speech writers, no support staff at all, as president of the ALP. Ministers had plenty of hired hands—rather too many, and of the wrong type, in the view of the press.
For some months the news media had been focusing upon the person and position of a former air hostess and director of some failed companies, Junie Morosi. Morosi, a handsome Eurasian, had in late 1974 become the personal assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister and federal Treasurer, Dr Jim Cairns. Their relationship had aroused curiosity. Cairns had been subjected to a barrage of attack and innuendo, but his fine response to the Cyclone Tracy disaster on Christmas Eve 1974 had served to recoup his prestige. People had temporarily forgotten about Junie Morosi. Then on the second-last day of the conference that, while it had produced little of value in terms of policy, had at least avoided any Left–Right brawls or motions demanding the nationalisation of BHP, Cairns gave a personal interview. The journalist he talked to, Toni McRae, happened to be the wife of an aspiring Liberal politician. He admitted to this woman that he had ‘a kind of love’ for Junie Morosi. The news media went wild. Only once in a generation can editors hope for a comment as fey as that from a senior politician. The silly photographs aside, the Terrigal conference had been depicted generally as a dull turn-out, which is how the government wanted it to be seen. Overnight, Cairns’ candid comments turned it into a farce.
George Rockey who, along with Abeles and Kornhauser, had helped to nurse Hawke through 1974, had driven to Terrigal to collect him. Rockey described himself as ‘a very low-profile person’. He was small, neat and rather introverted, in marked contrast to his partner’s, Abeles’, largeness and ebullience. He and Hawke already had the type of easy friendship that Hawke can form in an instant, but between them there was a deeper attraction, an almost shy drawing together of opposites. Rockey was a gambling man and had been ‘a bottle of Scotch a night’ drinker, but had become teetotal in 1971 because he had reached the stage when every time he drank alcohol he fainted. He was thirteen years Hawke’s senior and their relationship, much more than that between Hawke and Abeles, was another father–son affair. For all his gentleness and interest in psychology and metaphysics, Rockey was also worldly, even world-weary. He had worked as an intelligence agent during the war and perhaps because of this, and his later experience as a Jungian analysand, was not inclined to take people on face value. He had known plenty of betrayals. Early in their relationship he had decided to put Hawke’s honesty to a test with a ‘five-figure cheque’, made out to Hawke, mentioning that it was for the ALP campaign fund. Years later he remarked, still with an echo of that first pleasure in his voice, ‘And you know, next day I got a receipt for it from the secretary of the party’.
When he collected Hawke at Terrigal, Hawke was depressed about the state of the government and the farcical image that, in the end, the conference had had forced upon it. Rockey recalled,
I said to Bob the political situation was hopeless and told him that he had better bail out now. I offered him a sort of bribe. I said he could have any job he wanted in industry—he could be earning $100 000 a year, instead of living hand-to-mouth, with not enough money to educate his children. I said, ‘Look, leave the party. Leave the trade unions and think of yourself and Hazel and your children.’ He became so angry with me. He said, ‘George, stop the car. I’m getting out.’ I knew then that I’d met a good man, a person of real honour.
Another matter of honour soon arose for Hawke. In early May 1975 Francis Blanchard, the new director-general of the ILO, sent his senior assistant, Bernard Fortin, on what Fortin described as ‘a secret mission’ to Australia to elicit Hawke’s help for the ILO. Blanchard had not met Hawke at this stage, so it was a measure of Hawke’s reputation within the ILO that the director-general approached him to assist the organisation—in the affair that was later known as the Crisis of 1975.
The ILO had been the first of the United Nations bodies to feel the sting of Arab vengeance against Israel and the old colonial powers. In June 1974, at the annual conference that Hawke had not attended because of the death threats, delegates had voted overwhelmingly for a resolution condemning ‘the policy of discrimination, racism and violation of trade union freedoms and rights practised by the Israeli authorities in Palestine and in the other occupied Arab Territories’. There had been no investigation by the ILO to discover if in fact such abuses existed in Israeli-occupied territory. In the past, when a state had been condemned, there had been a formal ILO investigation beforehand. However, times had changed. The Islamic countries of the Middle East, Africa and South-East Asia, joined by the Soviet bloc states and a few Europeans, in this case Spain and Greece, as well as Mexico, had an automatic majority. Having passed a resolution condemning Israel, they then passed a second: to have the ILO investigate conditions of workers in Israel. The resolutions, coming from nations in which trade union freedom was a joke, were staggeringly cynical and, legally, ranked with the adventures of Alice in Wonderland: sentence first, then judge. At the same conference the PLO had submitted a request to the director-general, Blanchard, to be admitted as an observer to all the activities and meetings of the ILO. The PLO could not request membership because the ILO constitution limits membership to states. The Americans had let it be known that if the PLO were admitted to observer status—a question that would be decided in June 1975—the USA would withdraw from the ILO. George Meany, who had chief say on the issue, was intransigent. If the Americans withdrew it was feared that America’s allies—for example, West Germany, which had the most important trade union movement in Europe—would also withdraw. Blanchard recalled,
I was desperate to find a solution that would allow the PLO some sort of status in the ILO but which would occur in a way that would not violate the constitution or the standing orders of the International Labour Conference. On one side we had the Arabs saying their demand was absolutely justified; on the other, the Americans, totally intransigent; and in the middle a lot of the European nations very embarrassed. Everything was complicated by Vietnam.
By early 1975, after a decade of American fighting there, the North Vietnamese armies were sweeping south; in late April North Vietnamese tanks rumbled into Saigon and, amid horrendous panic, one of the Indo-Chinese wars ended. At home and abroad American morale was at a nadir. Uncle Sam was in an irrational frame of mind, and was not yet accustomed to the idea that the non-Communist global community, ordered about by Washington since the end of World War II, had changed, and that there were, now, many centres of power outside the USA.
Blanchard continued,
Nations were using the war to insult and attack America and so, of course, the Americans were particularly sensitive. I thought of Bob Hawke as someone who could help because of several factors: he was totally orthodox on Israel and I knew he had a lot of credit in Washington and in the American Federation of Labor. George Meany liked him. I believed Bob was a man to get the Americans to listen, although I must say that Meany, a fascinating man, was absolutely The Chairman, the boss . . . I had the impression, which I later found to be true, that Bob was fascinated by the world at large, beyond the shores of Australia, and fascinated by foreign policy. To me that meant he would not look at problems in a narrow way, but in the wider context of world politics. Bob had criticisms of the ILO, which he would make in private, but at the same time he understood, he had strong feelings about, its importance as an institution. And he could realise what a real crisis, as an institution, it was facing.
Fortin relayed Blanchard’s request to Hawke, who agreed to fly to Geneva via Washington. Before arriving in Australia Fortin had gone in secret to Cairo, to ask the leader of the Egyptian workers’ delegation, Anwar Salama, a former Minister of Labour, to try to seek a compromise also. Salama had readily agreed. The Yom Kippur War had been a catharsis for the Egyptians, for their armies’ vast incursions into Israeli-held territory had exorcised the humiliation of the 1967 war. The Egyptian leadership had announced, and the nation believed, that they had won a great military victory during the 1973 war, and now that Egyptian pride was purring they were thinking more peaceful thoughts. The Egyptians agreed to lean on the Syrians and other hardline anti-Israel delegations so that a compromise on PLO observer status could be reached in the ILO’s Standing Orders Committee. The International Labour Conference would then, automatically, pass the committee’s resolution.
Clyde Cameron was to lead the Australian government delegation to the International Labour Conference, but on the eve of his departure Whitlam sacked him as Minister for Labour. Cameron, however, refused to be sacked and the Prime Minister had to ask the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, to withdraw Cameron’s commission—a somewhat ironic circumstance, at least for Cameron, in view of later events. His dismissal was one of a growing number of changes in the Whitlam ministry that added to the government’s appearance of confusion. The drama over Cameron forced Hawke to abandon going first to Washington.
He set out in late May, breaking his journey to Switzerland in Athens, and from there went for a day’s sightseeing to Delphi. At Delphi he received the news that Whitlam had performed a second miracle of bad timing.
Lance Barnard, the defence minister, had been miserable since he had lost the deputy prime ministership to Cairns. Barnard was a close friend of Whitlam. He had told the Prime Minister he wanted to leave politics and, since the post was becoming vacant, to be the next ambassador to Stockholm. This would mean a by-election in Barnard’s seat, Bass, a Tasmanian electorate that had been egregiously affected by the tariff cuts. Whitlam had conceded to the request of his old friend, and so a by-election would be held in Bass on 26 June 1975. Hawke recalled, still stuttering five years later,
I—I literally couldn’t believe it! It was insane. And the reasons why it was insane were just so obvious. You had Malcolm Fraser [the new leader of the Opposition] looking around for a justification to bring the government down short of its term, and not having a justification—because, simply to assert that a government is doing badly is no reason to force it to the polls. So what do we do? We give a by-election gratuitously which Fraser was obviously going to use to say, ‘Here is an opportunity for the nation to express its view about the Whitlam government’. And what were the circumstances? The economy in bad shape; the unions disaffected generally, but particularly in Bass, where the textile industry had been decimated. On top of that Bass was a rural electorate and the rural lobbies hated Whitlam—they’d been throwing tomatoes at him—and further, Bass was not basically a Labor seat, but owed an enormous amount to the personality and position of Lance Barnard. So when you added all those things together, you could guarantee a huge swing. I hoped that if I kicked up enough fuss immediately, and was tough enough, there may have been a chance of turning Gough’s decision around. There was no way in the world that I was going to allow, as president of the party, a position to be established where Whitlam or anyone else could act in a way which conveyed the impression that the ALP or the Labor government was his possession, in respect of which he could make decisions that could destroy it, and do so without criticism. I believed that the government was in the process of being destroyed by that decision about Bass, and that the Labor Party was being mortally hurt. The Galston decision had thrown away the seat of Parramatta; Bass was throwing away the Whitlam Labor government.
Hawke had one of his ‘outbursts’ to the news media: the Bass by-election was, he said, ‘an act of Galstonian madness’. He returned quickly to Athens where the switchboard of his hotel had fifty telephone calls from Australia for him. He repeatedly told the news media that the decision was disastrous. He said later,
Gough never forgave me. Because what I said then and later, when I returned to Australia, proved to be right. Liberals confirmed my opinion—several of them told me afterwards that it was the Bass result which had made up Fraser’s mind to go for our throats.
By the time Hawke arrived in Geneva he knew that his efforts to have the decision reversed were in vain; he began drinking heavily. People in Geneva who had known him for years and were used to his argumentativeness when drunk were shocked by him, now. He was seething with bitterness and would verbally attack anyone. He bailed up a junior staff member in the Australian embassy to ask sneeringly, ‘Do you ever criticise your boss? Do you just shut up and cop it when you know he’s doing something wrong? Have you got any guts?’
He kept working during the week, however, and took part in confidential discussions between the representatives of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, France, and Australia, represented by him. The discussions were chaired by Blanchard, and were promising, since all the Arab states were from the soft-line camp and all agreed to lobby their hardline brothers.
On 3 June Blanchard had invited Hawke to a private interview, their first meeting. Hawke had arrived half-drunk and, declining an offer of afternoon tea, had asked for beer and drunk three bottles of it in quick succession. His language had been coarse but fortunately Blanchard, who is very much the dignified French mandarin, had not been able to understand much of Hawke’s swearing and Fortin, who was also present and whose English is idiomatic, had not translated for him. Blanchard had formed an unfavourable impression of Hawke from this encounter, but nevertheless was willing to act upon the assurances of others that Hawke was a better man than he appeared. During the interview he had invited Hawke to lunch at his country estate in Gex the following Sunday. By then Hawke had come to terms with his misery over Bass. Barry Watchorn, a senior Australian diplomat in Geneva, recalled, ‘On Sunday morning there was a knock on my door early and there was Bob, wreathed in smiles. He was making an apology for the way he had behaved all week.’
At the luncheon in Gex the guests were Hawke, Fortin and Parodi, the leader of the French government delegation. Their purpose that day was to work out an amendment to the Arab resolution that ‘liberation movements be admitted to observer status in the ILO’, which would satisfy both the Arabs and the Americans and would not violate the rules of the ILO. The resolution, as it stood, was a monstrous piece of provocation and a precedent that could turn the ILO into a political circus. The PLO was committed in its charter to the total destruction of Israel, an ‘illegal entity’. But Israel was a member of the ILO and the admission of the PLO—even with observer status only—could reduce the proceedings of the organisation to the level of a bear-baiting spectacle.
Bargaining is necessary for transcending differences of opinion; in Hawke bargaining (a prime political skill) is second nature. It was he who, during the luncheon at Gex, hit upon the words that could force the PLO, if it deeply desired to have observer status at the ILO, to bargain for that status. His amendment to the resolution was: ‘that the liberation movement in question recognises the principles of the ILO and its Constitution and the right of all member states to continue in existence and participate in the work of the Organisation’. It was a masterstroke, for if the amendment were passed, the PLO would have to commit itself, before the world community, to rewriting its charter and withdrawing from it the demand that Israel be smashed—or, to abandon its plans to enter the ILO.
The four men were overjoyed. They had two and a half days left to sell the Gex amendment to the opposing camps. Blanchard recalled that by Monday evening, ‘We felt we had sealed the thing. The Americans in private conversations accepted our formula, as had many of the Arabs.’ The next step was to shepherd the amendment through the Standing Orders Committee of the Governing Body. Then, on 12 June, in plenary session of the International Labour Conference in the Palais des Nations, delegates would make their formal votes, having been advised how to vote by their factional representatives in the Standing Orders Committee, and everybody could get on with the business of the conditions of work, the status of female employees, child labour and other appropriate concerns.
It was the Americans, specifically George Meany, who set in process a chain reaction that ended all hopes. Meany, from Washington, instructed that the American delegation was to reject both the resolution and its amendment. There ensued, in the words of Francis Wolf, the ILO’s legal adviser, ‘a terrible battle in the Standing Orders Committee’. The Arabs flew into a rage because of the American attitude and announced that, in these circumstances, compromise was anathema. Salama and Hawke tried valiantly to bully and cajole the committee meeting to consider the wider context of its actions, but to no avail.
On the afternoon of 12 June Hawke rose with, as usual, just a few lines of notes, to address the plenary session. The Palais des Nations was packed; all the international galleries were filled; the world press was overflowing its gallery. After Arafat’s triumph in the UN General Assembly six months earlier, this was the second great show of strength by the Islamic world. Tony Street, the shadow Minister for Labour, was attending the ILO for the first time and recalled,
The atmosphere was electric with tension. Bob Hawke made a truly great speech. And it was like a Greek tragedy, because he stood there and pleaded, on international and humanitarian grounds, with those hundreds of delegates—and yet he knew, we all knew, that it was a lost cause. It was a tremendously moving speech, a magnificent piece of oratory—the best speech I’ve ever heard Bob make, one of the great speeches I’ve heard. And all for nothing.
Hawke, as he always does when the numbers are overwhelmingly against him, had wound himself up to believe that if he spoke forcefully enough he would be able to persuade some of the delegates to change their votes. He pressed hard on ‘my friends from the continent of Africa’, reminding them that ‘members of the Australian trade union movement . . . were prepared to face jail if necessary, in the early 1970s, to take industrial action to support the people of Africa’. He went on to stress that the ALP government had ‘gone beyond sweet words in assisting liberation movements’ and referred to the financial contributions the Whitlam government had made to the liberation movements of Africa. He continued,
So, I am speaking here with clean hands in terms of an absolute, practical and dedicated commitment to genuine liberation movements. It is in that sense that I plead with this Conference . . . All that we are asking in this amendment is that you say to the PLO, as to any other movement: ‘You are welcome to come into the ILO, provided you change your position about the right to exist of an existing member State’. And that is all we ask . . . Delegates, you will never know how close we appeared to come in the work of the Standing Orders Committee to arriving at a position which would recognise Israel’s right to existence . . . unfortunately, the reasonableness of [the Egyptians] was overcome by the blind commitment of some people to the destruction of Israel . . . In making a passionate defence of Israel no one is more conscious than I am of the fundamental problems of the Palestinian people and I believe that they have a right to a State, a right to a peaceful existence in that area of the world, but not at the expense of the obliteration of Israel.
Hawke concluded by warning that if the amendment were rejected,
Delegates, you are going to be the initial actors in the destruction of the ILO—no organisation can have its noble purposes emasculated by being made a political forum which is going to be used for the purposes of advancing the cause of the destruction of a member State. I appeal to you as earnestly as I possibly can . . . if you take this step without voting for the amendment to the proposal before you, then I repeat that you will have taken the first steps down the road to the destruction of the ILO.1
The brilliance of the speech had been in Hawke’s delivery, in his timing and intonation, and the passionate conviction he had conveyed through his voice and body language. People were unanimous that it was one of the best speeches ever made in the ILO and ranked with those of Leon Juro. But there was no clapping at the end of it, just a tense silence. Hawke returned to his seat beside the other Australians for one of the more bitter moments of his life: the only countryman who lent forward to shake his hand was his political opponent, Tony Street. Hawke said,
I knew the Australian voting position in advance, but it was bloody devastating just the same to go and sit down with your mates, with the representatives of your government, and have them all looking the other way. I was disgusted by my own government.2 And others. The leader of the British government delegation came up to me, backslapping and smiling, and said, ‘My word, we’d love to vote for that’. And I replied rather sharply, ‘Well why the hell don’t you?’ And he backed off—‘Oh, dear boy! Our vote would have made no difference . . . .’ Even a Cuban bloke told me and told other people in the ILO that, had he been free to make his own decision, he would have voted for the amendment.
Fortin said later of Hawke’s warning that rejection of the amendment would have dire consequences for the ILO, ‘Bob said what we—the ILO hierarchy—wanted to say, but could not’.
The PLO was admitted to observer status in the ILO, without any provisos. At Blanchard’s request Hawke flew to Washington to try to persuade Meany to change his attitude about American withdrawal. It was fruitless. In November 1975 the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, wrote formally to Blanchard telling him that the USA was withdrawing.
In 1980, a few weeks after Meany died, America announced that it wished to rejoin the organisation, but in the interim there had been a second drastic curtailment of ILO functions. Hawke was often the emissary between the ILO and the United States: ‘He was one of my main channels of communication’, Blanchard said.
While he had been abroad, and Australians at home had known little of his work in Geneva and Washington, a Gallup poll had been published showing that Hawke was now the most popular man in the country. Whitlam’s popularity was declining inexorably; every week was bringing a new episode in the saga of the Loans Affair;3 politics had turned into a national blood sport, with the government a frantic, panting fox. On 26 June the electorate in Bass swung by 15 per cent against the ALP, and the government knew it was done for. The only question now was the time of death.
Within the electorate Hawke became an object of increasing curiosity and, for those sympathetic to Labor, of hope. A month after the Bass by-election he agreed to give Mike Schildberger a national television interview that would focus upon Hawke, the man. Schildberger had known Hawke for a decade and like most other journalists in the country knew that he was objectionable when drunk, but this had never been publicised. Among journalists themselves there is a tradition of becoming as drunk as princes: perhaps this, and Hawke’s reputation as a man who was quick with a libel writ, had inhibited the news media from referring to it. However, by 1975 Hawke’s popularity made his heavy drinking a matter of legitimate public interest. Schildberger had drawn up a list of questions, based upon the assumption that Hawke would in the future be leader of the ALP, questions that covered his political and social ideas and his personal strengths. The penultimate question was ‘What are your weaknesses?’ The final one, ‘It is said you have a drinking problem: comment?’ The show was going to air live. Schildberger offered to tell Hawke his questions in advance but, with his typical self-confidence, Hawke replied he did not want to see them. At Schildberger’s second-last question, Hawke hesitated for an instant then, to the horror of his friends and the disbelief of other political observers, replied that, as for weaknesses, he had a drinking problem. Schildberger could see what the television screens did not show—that Hawke’s hands shook with nervousness as he spoke. Schildberger said, ‘It was probably the most emotional interview I have ever had’. The cameras were switched off and Schildberger passed Hawke his clipboard with the list of questions, pointing to the last one. Hawke gasped, ‘Thank God I told the truth!’
Only those who knew Ellie’s detestation for alcohol, and knew that Hawke, even now at forty-five, was embarrassed if she saw him drinking, realised what an effort it had been for him to admit that he had a ‘problem’. He said later, ‘When we were in Maitland, when I was five to nine years old, and my mother first started work for the WCTU, she had made this connection: that alcohol was death and corruption, that it was destruction’. He had defied her and now had publicly admitted the consequences: he was the captive of alcohol. In his reply to Schildberger, Hawke had gone on to say that if he were to become leader of the ALP he would give up drinking.
The next day and for weeks later the press was full of the story. Hawke’s supporters believed he had made a gaffe equal to Cairns’ ‘kind of love’. On 31 July, two days after the Schildberger interview, Whitlam arrived at Parliament House. Journalists were used to being brushed off by the Prime Minister on the steps of the parliament, and held back. But there was a gleam of merriment in the leader’s eye and his imperial head was turning this way and that bestowing smiles of welcome. Reporters realised the Prime Minister wished to say a few words, and approached him. Someone asked about his drinking and Whitlam, with that straight-faced wit of which he is a master, drew a deep breath and replied, ‘I intend to turn over a new leaf and undertake steady drinking from now on. I realise, of course, that to hold my position I have to undertake a rigorous program of social drinking.’ He added that he expected future ALP executive meetings to be ‘like gatherings of Alcoholics Anonymous’.
The public contempt that Hawke’s supporters feared his admission would arouse did not eventuate. Instead, his popularity increased. In a country of heavy drinkers Hawke had admitted to a national sin. A couple of weeks later a record company released ‘The Bob Hawke Drinking Song’, which referred to him as ‘champion of the underdog’ and had a chorus, ‘Let’s drink to Bob Hawke’. His very ordinariness—his flashy suits, flat voice, friendly manner and vulgar humour—had been among his greatest advantages with crowds, because he appeared so like everyone else, only more so: the quintessential Australian, the little Aussie battler. It was an image that was partly true. But as Hawke had told Schildberger and other Jews many times, ‘If I were to have my life again, I would want to be born a Jew’. And when in high spirits, talking of Israel, he would say, ‘I’m an Israeli’. He knew himself to have many facets. While at home Australians thought of Hawke as a ‘true Australian’, abroad people saw him as a cosmopolitan. Blanchard remarked,
He brought things that were Australian with him—he spoke very fast and used all sorts of expressions which people could not understand—but at the same time he behaved as if he were at home always. I realised he was a man who was at home with the world.
In July Hawke, in a blaze of publicity, launched ACTU–Solo, a petrol-retailing venture that offered large discounts. Souter had done most of the work to establish ACTU–Solo, but left the public relations to Hawke, who reaped immense popularity from it. The petrol discounts saved the motoring public hundreds of millions of dollars—at first, directly, through ACTU–Solo; later because other retailers were forced to discount also. While it is impossible to quantify the effect on prices that the outlawing of retail price maintenance (thanks to Bourkes) achieved, Hawke believes that, like ACTU–Solo, Bourkes saved customers hundreds of millions of dollars. He regards these two enterprises as among the major achievements of his presidency.
The public at large, especially a growing number of people who, in letters to Hawke, drew attention to the fact that they were Liberal voters, had come to see him as courageous and concerned for the national interest, and had abandoned the idea—which had been bandied about constantly in his first two years as president of the ACTU—that Hawke was the cause of industrial unrest. However, within the Victorian ALP his problems were increasing. As the membership of the Whitlam ministry continued to change, rumours flew that Hawke would contest this or that seat of a disgruntled or disgraced former minister at the next election, and every bout of speculation about a seat was followed by warnings from representatives of the Socialist Left faction that Hawke could not win preselection in Victoria. Hawke said,
As we moved into 1974–75 I was one who was, perhaps earlier than anyone else in the party, pointing out the change in economic circumstances and saying that we needed to adapt our thinking and our time-scale of expectations to various objectives. A lot of the Left didn’t like that. They thought it was a sell-out position.
There had been row upon row between Hawke and the Socialist Left in Victorian meetings and one in the federal executive when, earlier in the year, Hawke had made what others described as a ‘magnificently venomous’ attack upon Hartley for an article criticising decisions at the Terrigal conference. The executive strongly censured Hartley. Significantly, Hawke’s major ally in the attack on Hartley was John Ducker. That, in the Left’s eyes, was another black mark against Hawke. Quietly, and as yet without a public name, the Stop Hawke campaign was operating.
Meanwhile, in the trade union movement, Hawke’s position by late 1975 was one of unequalled authority. At the ACTU Congress that opened in Melbourne on 15 September he was at the height of his strength in the movement. For the first time since the Congress of 1939 there was not a single division involving a count of delegates’ votes for or against recommendations by the ACTU executive. In the days leading up to the week-long meeting unionists had been subjected to an unprecedented barrage of comment from the news media and politicians about their responsibilities. Already there was talk that the Opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, would block Supply in the Senate and thus force Whitlam to the polls again. After the scandals, real and counterfeit, that had dogged the government since the election of 1974, nobody in the Labor movement imagined that it could win a third time. Congress had assembled in a thoughtful mood.
Hawke’s presidential address was an appeal for solidarity couched in sombre, Churchillian terms. He told delegates that, since the 1973 Congress, unemployment had increased by 266 per cent, that economic growth had declined by 158 per cent, that inflation had risen by 106 per cent, and that
We ignore these facts at our peril . . . [They are] a reflection in this country of the fundamental malaise which has occurred [since 1973] in varying degrees in every advanced capitalist economic system. Whether their governments have been conservative, as in the United States, or social democratic as in West Germany, all these countries have witnessed acceleration of inflation, rising unemployment and reductions in growth rates.
He devoted nearly all of his speech to developing four themes. First, a defence of the government, in which he refuted the continual assertions that inflation and unemployment were all the fault of Labor. Second, he addressed the responsibility of the trade union movement, asking union leaders to ‘restrain wage pushes well in excess of prices and productivity’, and arguing ‘our affiliates must recognise the full implications of their actions . . . we must balance the self-interest of particular groups against the interests of workers as a whole’. Third, he spoke of the responsibility of the government, and in this context argued that it was up to the government to ‘create the conditions within which [union] co-operation can be maximised’. He went on to ask (for the umpteenth time) for tax indexation and that the government avoid rises in indirect taxes and government charges, and that it expand the Regional Employment Development Scheme if unemployment remained high. And fourth, he spoke of the rights of the unions to free collective bargaining. This is the fundamental tenet and the primary function of trade union movements everywhere. It may seem illogical that Australia has a centralised wage-fixing system while at the same time we have—and have always had—collective bargaining. It is illogical, but then the system has grown haphazardly. Since the introduction of the total wage, in 1967, the illogicality has become more burdensome. Hawke, in reasserting the freedom of the unions to bargain collectively, was soothing their fears that wage indexation would mean a wage freeze. Beneath the surface of his message there lay another appeal: because we are free, we can choose, for a while, to be unfree. It was a skilful piece of manipulation, and it worked.
The Congress followed the sobering tenor of his opening address. In contrast to 1973 there was little open criticism of the government, while defiance and baiting of the ACTU executive, which is a normal Congress pastime, was at a minimum. As chairman of the meeting of 600 delegates, Hawke was at his best: decisive, good humoured and gentle, often offering speakers an extension of time instead of telling them to wind up. The Congress elections returned him an executive weighted twelve to six in his favour. He had taken a deliberate decision to play a small role in debates so that Charlie Fitzgibbon could shine. Fitzgibbon did. By the end of the week he was established in people’s minds as the heir apparent. As well, Hawke had finally won his argument for extra administrative staff, and the appointment of a full-time assistant secretary was approved. Also, delegates voted to increase affiliation fees. By 19 September 1975 the ACTU was healthy enough for Hawke, in good conscience, to leave it and at long last to make his transfer to parliament. The next federal election was due to be held in late 1976 or early 1977.
During the rest of the month and throughout October the crisis in parliament continued to build. The Opposition, controlling the Senate, was there deferring the Budget bills for Supply, and the government’s options for action were decreasing. Hawke’s view was that the most prudent method of breaking the impasse would be a half-Senate election. He discussed this with many Labor colleagues. On 10 November he met Whitlam at a ceremony to lay the foundation stone at a club in Broadmeadows, an oppressed suburb of Melbourne. Hawke, Clyde Holding and Bill Landeryou, the secretary of the Victorian branch of the Storemen and Packers’ Union and an active member of the Centre Unity faction of the Victorian ALP, to which Hawke and Holding also belonged, buttonholed the Prime Minister. They urged a half-Senate election upon him. When Whitlam left Broadmeadows Hawke, Holding and Landeryou were all satisfied that the following day Whitlam would announce this solution to the constitutional crisis.
Hawke had objected to Whitlam over the appointment of the man he used to call ‘Goldilocks’, Sir John Kerr, as Governor-General. Several weeks earlier Hawke had asked the Prime Minister and others, ‘Can we rely on Kerr?’ He recalled, ‘From my years of dealing with Kerr in the Commission I had no love for the man. But everyone was sure he was reliable, and I was convinced.’
Hawke had meetings on the morning of 11 November and at 1 p.m. went to lunch at the Hotel Cecil, on the corner of Queen and Lonsdale Streets, with Jack Kornhauser, the brother of Eddie. Hawke said,
I was feeling a tremendous weight off my shoulders because of the decision, which I thought Gough had made the day before, to break free of the Opposition’s bloody-minded obstructionism and hold a half-Senate election. So I went off to lunch in a great mood and had an onion soup, and had ordered a steak to follow. It had just arrived—I can still see it now, a beautiful T-bone—when the telephone rang. We were sitting at a corner table, beside which Jack Kornhauser had a private phone. Jack answered and his face dropped. His voice sounded incredulous. He passed the phone to me and his daughter said, ‘Kerr has sacked Whitlam’. She had to repeat it before I took it in. I think I said, ‘Oh God’ and got up, left the steak and went back to my office. Within an hour I was on a plane to Canberra. We’d gathered up a lot of union blokes and went immediately to John Curtin House, the ALP headquarters, and into an ALAC meeting . . . From the moment the news had spread there had been calls for a national strike. People were ringing me, demanding that I call one. Demands were broadcast on the radio. And I obviously had to think seriously about it. I had to make a judgment very quickly. It was quite clear in my mind that the idea was nonsense—for a couple of reasons: first, we were arguing that the Opposition was violating the constitutional and parliamentary processes of government, therefore, how could one logically take over the processes of government by bringing the nation to a halt? Second, and a more pragmatic consideration, was that I did not believe we could call a successful national strike. And there would have been nothing more futile and counter-productive than calling a national stoppage which failed. So, there was the consideration of principle and of pragmatism. In the ALAC meeting there was a consensus that there should be no national strike, but that we should mobilise the trade union movement to support what we still called the government. The ALAC meeting was like a group of stunned mullets, stunned by the enormity of what had happened, while at the same time feeling as if it were unreal. Gough was still furious, but he had slipped into a different gear. Now that he had a real fight on his hands the professional campaigner in him came out. So, while he was still tremendously angry, he was talking coolly about tactics for the election campaign. The rest of that day is a bit of a blur—I think we organised a protest rally in Canberra and that I spoke at that. Maybe I went to Sydney . . .
Hawke did go to Sydney, either that evening or the next, and addressed a rally called by the New South Wales Labour Council at the Town Hall. Pat Clancy, who was already estranged from Hawke, remembered,
Bob gave a magnificent speech: a stinging attack upon capitalism and a declaration in support of socialism, a classic Left speech and beautifully delivered. The Town Hall was packed and when he walked in there was a standing ovation, and throughout the speech people were clapping and cheering. There’s no doubt that the workers in New South Wales hero-worshipped him, Right and Left. I only wish I’d taped it so that I could ask his views about it now.
Hawke recalled, ‘I got back to Melbourne and went straight into the process of arranging a campaign’. On the nationwide radio program AM, on 12 November, Hawke, speaking in a voice described as uncharacteristically ‘light and clear’ appealed for calm and urged ‘controlled and orderly involvement’ by the trade unions in the election. He called upon unionists not to strike, but instead to ‘give a day’s pay for democracy’, the same plea he made to the Sydney union rally, and that had been agreed upon at the ALAC meeting. He was in dire fear that the emotional reaction to the government’s sacking could lead to riots. Whitlam, still flushed with rage, had stood on the steps of Parliament House in the early afternoon of 11 November and roared to the crowd that had spontaneously surrounded the entrance to the building, ‘Maintain your rage!’ Later that afternoon Hawke, in marked contrast to the Prime Minister, had given a news conference, saying, ‘Australia could be on the verge of something terrible . . . We don’t want to substitute violence in the streets for democracy.’ As far as the Left were concerned, Hawke’s determination to try to calm the situation was another black mark against him. Even in early 1982 members of the Socialist Left were quoting the leadership Hawke gave to channelling anger into calmer modes of expression as another of his perfidies—although one of their number, Jim Roulston, had been at the ALAC meeting and had expressed no opposing view. In their outrage over the sacking people forget, or perhaps have never known, that it was the massive, botched strike campaign of the 1890s that desolated the Australian trade union movement. Sir Richard Kirby, who by 1975 had a half-century’s experience of industrial affairs, said later that Hawke’s finest contribution to the union movement was that then and throughout the bitter months that followed, Hawke kept an iron grip on militancy: ‘I’ve no doubt’, Kirby said, ‘that without the leadership Bob gave, the unions would have pulled on a national strike which would have fallen to pieces and Fraser would have stepped in and smashed them. I don’t think the unions have ever realised what Bob saved them from.’
Hawke recalled of the election campaign that began immediately after the dismissal:
I was up to my ears in it. The things that were most striking were the overflowing, overwhelming enthusiasm of the audiences and the composition of the audiences. They weren’t the normal party faithful, but people from all walks of life who had been deeply insulted by what had happened. Party membership soared. The meetings were the biggest and most enthusiastic of any in the 1970s. From the crowd response I thought right at the beginning that we would win, but the longer the campaign went on the more clear it became that the circumstances surrounding the government’s sacking were being subsumed by disaffection with the government. By the end of the campaign, I knew that we’d lost.
Again, even Hawke’s enemies acknowledged that next to Whitlam he had done more than any other during the campaign to try to win government.
On the evening of polling day, 13 December, Hawke, Hazel and the children all flew to Canberra. Hawke was to be a television commentator on the election result. He said,
I didn’t have any perception of the magnitude of the defeat we were facing. That election night was one of the longest and loneliest nights in my life. I couldn’t get up and walk away from the TV cameras, but had to sit there for the whole horrible performance. It was obvious by 9 p.m. that we’d lost, and I conceded defeat very quickly, but then it just piled up and up, defeat after defeat.
At one stage Hawke began to weep and told the television audience, ‘We’ve had the guts ripped out of us’. He said,
There I was looking out at the shattered remains of all the hopes of 1972 and 1974, and being surrounded by gloating Tories. The only redeeming feature of it was that for quite some time Bill Snedden was the commentator sitting next to me and I was able to point out to him that if he had been a little more patient and not blocked supply in 1974 he perhaps would have been Prime Minister . . .
I remember the moment when Gough arrived in the tally room: when people saw him, a sense of tragedy spread through the hall. I felt terribly sorry for him as a person, a sorrow separate from what had happened to the Labor Party. There was this giant of a man, smashed to pieces—you know, greatness brings its own set of emotions. Including, I suppose, jealousy, envy. Whatever feelings one had about Gough’s mistakes at particular times one could not but be enormously sad for him. It wasn’t just defeat that night; it was the end. It was a question of time, but he knew it was the end. And he conducted himself admirably: he acknowledged the dimensions of the defeat and then, fairly quickly, withdrew. We drove back from the national tally room and on the way passed The Lodge, where Whitlam was still in residence, and thought about going in and trying to give some consolation. But there was no sign of life there.
Next morning David Combe telephoned Hawke to say that Whitlam wanted to see him at The Lodge. They sat by the swimming pool. Hawke recalled,
The essence of what Gough said to me was that his leadership had been rejected and that he had to accept that he was finished. And that in his view Bill Hayden was the man to take over as leader, that he’d spoken to Hayden already, and Hayden had rejected the leadership. So that now I was the person to lead the party, and that we had to talk about getting a seat for me as quickly as possible. I was surprised, on two counts: first that he’d so quickly accepted that his leadership should come to an end. I think he was right, but was still surprised that he’d decided so quickly. And I was also surprised that he’d turned so quickly to me. Not because I disagreed with his judgment, but because I wasn’t even in parliament. I thought Gough was quite right in wanting Hayden to take over—Bill had been an excellent minister and had gone through the hard grind of getting Medibank established, then, as Treasurer, had begun to turn the economy around. Gough’s jump from Bill to me, while I could see a logic in it, was surprising. I understood quite clearly, as did David Combe, that the leadership was not Gough’s to bestow, and that we would face some difficulties. We discussed a few seats. The general thrust of the conversation was that if it was going to be on, then getting a seat would not be an enormous difficulty—that someone would be prepared, in the circumstances, to step aside. Well, things started to go wrong.
The chain of events and actions following Hawke’s discussion with Whitlam remains unclear.
Bill Landeryou was in Canberra and returned to Melbourne with Hawke; Landeryou, who strongly supported the idea that Hawke should lead the party, was anxious to prevent the issue becoming public before detailed plans could be made, and a seat arranged for Hawke. It would seem that Hawke was highly excited, for Landeryou later said that he stayed at Hawke’s side that afternoon and evening, and next day, in order to prevent him talking to the press. He knew Hawke well and was familiar with his impatient overconfidence and his tendency to confide his hopes, as if they were realities, to journalists. Landeryou also knew Hawke’s enemies. However, on the afternoon of the Whitlam–Hawke discussions a statement was issued by somebody either on Whitlam’s staff or working for the party in Canberra, to the effect that Hawke would be replacing Whitlam as leader. The following night Hawke was invited to appear on television in Melbourne. There he confirmed that Whitlam wanted him to lead the party. He went on to say that with his leadership the party would be back in government in three years. It was an error to have made any comment.
A Caucus outcry greeted the news: indeed, the leadership was not Whitlam’s to confer, nor was it Hawke’s to claim. And in Victoria, the place where the notional seat for Hawke should, obviously, be located, the Socialist Left was furious. They had hated Whitlam. But as their actions were to reveal, they now hated Hawke more. After all that Whitlam had been through he was now the underdog and therefore a just object of sympathy. Hawke was pictured as a man snatching at the crown of a mortally wounded king. At last the Stop Hawke campaign had a name and was out in the open.
Hawke said,
Besides the natural reaction of groups of people in Caucus, Gough himself changed his mind. Quite clearly, what he had said on the day after the election was post-operative shock, and once the patient had settled down he assumed a different view . . . The Left said later that it was wicked of me not to have called the Revolution on 11 November, but the real guts of their dislike for me was my stand on the Middle East. Conversely, Whitlam was their hero, for the stand he had taken on the Middle East. The Left found it convenient to blur their reasons; much of the criticism I copped at that time, on the leadership issue, was a cloak for other things. And, of course, I did not know then, and was in blissful ignorance for another two months, that there had been certain hanky-panky with Iraqi money, and that a number of people must have been apprehensive, by then, about the facts emerging. I think it was very convenient to have a diversion and a figure, me, upon whom to vent hatred.
Whitlam decided he would continue to lead the party.
His moment of opportunity vanished, Hawke went off for a holiday and returned in late January 1976, ‘all fired up’, in the words of Jean Sinclair, ‘about getting the Liberals out. Bob’s view was that politics in Australia were now unstable and that the electorate could easily switch back to Labor at the next election.’ It was a widely held view. What it discounted was that the ALP was now a demoralised, embittered party, led by a man who had lost his self-confidence—the vitals, the heart and liver of political leadership. Commentators made much of the fact that Whitlam had once said, ‘You must crash through, or crash’, as if such a daring attitude were unique to him, and some fatal flaw, but in fact the words could have come from Curtin, Chifley, Menzies, Gorton, McEwan and, most certainly, from Malcolm Fraser. Compared to Fraser, Whitlam had lacked daring.
There was an ALP campaign committee meeting in Canberra on 28 January that was a sad and pedestrian affair. Then, on Thursday, 12 February, Hawke noted in his diary: ‘3.25—Egerton rang re financial trouble’. Hawke had no time to talk, for he was rushing to catch a flight to Canberra where he was to tape a Monday Conference television program. He went from the airport direct to the ABC studio. When he arrived at his hotel in Canberra at about 9.30 p.m. there were several telephone messages for him, including an urgent one from Egerton. Hawke returned the call. What Egerton had to tell Hawke sounded
like a fairy story. Jack said that Whitlam and Combe had arranged to get $500 000 from the Iraqi government, to pay our campaign costs. The dough had not arrived, and the party therefore was in deep financial trouble. David Combe was on a holiday cruise. Ken Bennett, the assistant federal secretary, was waiting downstairs to see me, in a state of nerves . . . I said we’d have to get Combe off his cruise ship and have a meeting of the senior officers—the president, vice-presidents, the secretary and his assistant, to find out what the hell was going on.
In brief, this is what had happened: some weeks before the government had been sacked Bill Hartley, who was a Senate candidate, had the idea that the ALP’s slender campaign purse could be plumped up with money from the government of Iraq, for which he worked as a press correspondent. He had a friend, Henri Fischer, who offered to go to Baghdad and raise the money—between a quarter and half a million dollars. It would not be a loan, but a gift from the Ba’ath Socialist Party, which was in government in Iraq, to the ALP. Had the Ba’ath Socialist Party been composed of seraphim with six wings the idea would have been improper; as it was, the Iraqi government was notorious for certain blood-curdling executions of its political enemies. For example, in the early 1970s a group of Iraqi citizens who had spied for Great Britain had been hanged by piano wire, in public. Currency black marketeers were shot. Iraq’s legal system was different enough from Australia’s to make any close association between the ALP and the Ba’ath Party an embarrassment in Australia. However, the more important point was that it was a violation of ALP principles even to consider financial indebtedness to a foreign government, whatever its complexion. But in the confusion and fury that followed the sacking, Whitlam and Combe agreed with Hartley’s suggestion that he could tap funds from a special source. It seems that details were vague: the money could come to the ALP, Whitlam was told, via the Reuben Scarf Foundation. Scarf was a respected Sydney clothing manufacturer, who had made donations to the party in the past. Fischer was associated with the foundation. He recommended himself to party officials, and especially to Hartley, as a fund-raiser, because of his often-declared loathing for Rupert Murdoch, the news baron and enemy of the Whitlam government. Fischer was a man of persuasive charm.
By 12 February Combe knew that the money had not arrived from Iraq but neither he nor anyone else knew the reason as yet. Combe assumed he would be sacked for being among those who had agreed to involve the ALP in such an unseemly venture—though, as he commented wryly later, ‘I often wondered what view the party would have taken if the money had arrived and we’d been able to use it to pay our debts’. As it was, the ALP election campaign had been run on the premise that a massive injection of dollars was on its way, and the real budget had been overspent by some $300 000. Hawke took the view that Combe had made an appalling error of judgment but one that, in the secretary, was forgivable. At first, when Hawke reached Combe by telephone and told him to abandon his holiday and return immediately, Combe refused, saying that since he was going to be sacked anyway, he may as well enjoy himself. Hawke replied that if Combe would co-operate he would do all that he could to save him. Combe said later,
Bob’s a helluva loyal bloke. He’d stood by me in the past. I didn’t have much hope about this one, but he was very strong in saying that, while I’d been a stupid bastard, I’d been trying to do my best by the party in a crisis.
Combe flew to Melbourne and the meeting of senior officers was held in secret, in Hawke’s house, on Sunday, 15 February.
By then Hawke had heard some more of the fairy story and was dismayed for the ALP. During the meeting he argued that a special conference of the federal executive should be summoned immediately, for two reasons: first, the issue was grave, and second, it was not a matter that could be kept secret long. Already it had been necessary to involve bank officials and employees of the party’s advertising agency, which was owed a fortune, in the affair. Hawke was due to leave a few days later for the ILO. He feared that the story would break in his absence and would be allowed to run wild, worsening the image, created by the Loans Affair, that the Labor Party was of its nature conspiratorial, devious and incompetent. Egerton and Ducker argued that it was safer to let matters rest for the time being, and to deal with the problem, in secret, at the next scheduled federal executive meeting. Hawke said,
I was vigorous in replying to them that they were bloody crazy, that there was no way in the world that the news wouldn’t leak, and when that happened it would be even worse for the party, for it would look as if we were trying to cover up.
Hawke lost the argument, but there was a certain savage pleasure for him in the meeting, for when Combe arrived he told the others that the scheme had originated with Hartley. Hawke saw his chance to have Hartley expelled. Other officers agreed that this should happen; Combe, however, they all agreed, should be allowed to stay on as secretary. They doubted that the federal executive would want Whitlam to remain leader.
Combe disagreed. He said if the officers were serious in wishing to see him continue as secretary they must adopt the principle of equal culpability and not distinguish between the gravity of his error on one side, and Hartley’s and Whitlam’s on the other, and that all should be punished equally. In Hawke’s mind, however, Whitlam had for the last time ‘played around with the future of the ALP’, as he put it. Hawke was convinced that Whitlam should and would be sacked as leader. The discussions broke up with an agreement on secrecy.
That night or the one after, Combe and Egerton went to dinner at Eddie Kornhauser’s home and told him of the scandal. Kornhauser was horrified: by the facts, because he was fearful that the story would break in the press and he could be blamed as the leak; and for another, special reason. After the argument between Schildberger and Hawke in Kornhauser’s office two years earlier, Kornhauser had decided that Hawke should be given a lasting honour in Israel and had hit upon the idea of a forest. After months of planning he had arranged for a gathering of distinguished members of Australian Jewry, who had pledged to contribute to the cost of the forest that would be planted in Israel and named after Hawke. The gathering at which the plan for a Hawke forest would be formally unveiled was to be held on Thursday, 19 February. Kornhauser feared that if it became known in the interim that the ALP had been prepared to accept $500 000 from Iraq, a country demanding the obliteration of Israel, his guests would think twice about donations for the president of the party.
Kornhauser recalled,
Bob said nothing to me and I didn’t tell him that I knew about it already. I was having heart attacks on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Finally Thursday night came and there had been no story in the newspapers. Bob came to the function and was very subdued. He had to make a speech to all the people I’d invited to be supporters. He gave his speech without once lifting his eyes to the audience. People thought he was reading from a prepared speech, but I was sitting behind him and could see that he had no speech, just one line of notes. Later, when the story broke, he told me: ‘I was too ashamed to look at them. That my party had done that . . .’
A day or so later Hawke left for the ILO, stopping first in Singapore, where he lunched with an Australian diplomat, Richard Butler. Butler told Hawke, in confidence, that he had applied for the job of Whitlam’s private secretary. Hawke told Butler, in confidence, that he had better reconsider before resigning from Foreign Affairs, for Whitlam was unlikely to be leader much longer. He told Butler why. Hawke continued his journey towards Geneva, stopping next in Israel.
The morning after his arrival in Jerusalem he was in the lobby of his hotel chatting to a group of students who were the first beneficiaries of another eponymous honour in Israel: Hawke was one of the twenty-four Gentiles in the world, up to the time of writing, after whom a research fund at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem has been named. He was summoned away from the students to take a telephone call from, he thinks, London, from Rupert Murdoch. Hawke said,
I thought, ‘Oh, just as I predicted’. I didn’t feel smart about having been right; it was just so bloody obvious that the story would break. Murdoch said enough to me for it to be clear beyond question: he knew. He asked me to comment and I told him I had no comment. At that stage I didn’t know where he’d got the story, but as we discovered later, Henri Fischer had told him. I thought, ‘Well, we’re done for—it will be in the Australian press in a day or so’. I was going to lunch with a group of senior Israeli Labour Party people and decided that now the cat was out there was no point in pretending.
One of the Israelis at the luncheon, which was at a famous restaurant in Jerusalem, was the defence minister and later leader of the Labour Party, Shimon Peres. He recalled,
When Bob told us, we could not believe that a fraternal party would do such a thing. Bob was depressed about the state the Australian Labor Party had reached. He said it had lost its character and ideology, and that he would stand for parliament soon because he wanted to bring back character and ideology to the party. But, he had personal problems . . .
Hawke contacted Blanchard in Geneva to tell him he could not, now, attend the International Labour Conference, and caught a plane to Athens that evening. From there he telephoned ‘either one or all of Combe, Ducker and Egerton’. They confirmed that Murdoch’s flagship newspaper, the Australian, had a front-page story about what was already known as ‘The Iraqi Money Scandal’. Hawke returned to Australia, arriving back during the final week of February.
The senior officers of the party had a succession of discussions to decide upon a recommendation to the federal executive, a special meeting of which had been summoned for 5 and 6 March. The Iraqi Money Scandal was, beyond debate, a genuine scandal. For more defensible errors Whitlam had sacked Rex Connor and Jim Cairns from his ministry. The officers recommended that the federal executive of the ALP should expel Bill Hartley from the party and severely reprimand Combe and Whitlam.
Then, on the weekend before the federal executive was due to meet, Hawke made a faux pas. He allowed a news conference to be held at his house and after his tight-lipped formal announcement of a thorough inquiry, continued to talk, off the record, to a few journalists who stayed on, drinking. During the conversation Hawke, in conveying the common belief of the officers that Whitlam would not survive as leader, remarked, ‘Gough’s gone a million’. The next morning Sydney’s largest-circulation daily newspaper, the Telegraph, had a front-page story headlined ‘Hawke to Axe Whitlam’. It was the second breach of journalistic ethics from which Hawke suffered. Matters were made worse by the fact that he was seen as pre-empting the decision of the federal executive. The reporting of Hawke’s remarks helped to create a surge of sympathy from ALP branches for Whitlam, who suddenly was the very image of pathos: sacked as prime minister and now to be sacked as leader of the Opposition. The party, wallowing in self-pity for its defeat, transferred that pity to Whitlam—and not without logic. For if he were sacked as leader that would seem to justify his sacking as prime minister. For the second time in less than three months Hawke appeared to be overstating his importance, and this time deliberately humiliating further a humiliated man. Already, back in January, he had stimulated a frenzy of paranoia in the Left by calling on Fraser in Canberra, wearing his ACTU president’s hat. It was proper for Hawke to do this, as ACTU president. It was, however, objectionable that the ALP president be photographed smiling and chatting to the new Prime Minister. Under a Liberal government, Hawke’s two hats were as difficult to wear as under a Labor one.
Whitlam’s staff made many photostats of the ‘Hawke to Axe Whitlam’ story, and distributed them widely. Hawke was harassed by the news media to confirm or deny. ‘It was a very windy moment for Bob’, John Ducker recalled. Hawke made a statement that came perilously close to tarnishing his deserved reputation for truthfulness. Meanwhile, Hartley rushed in to the breach. During interviews with the print and electronic media he suggested that it was Hawke who had leaked the story to Murdoch, and went on to imply that the CIA and Israeli Intelligence were really behind the whole thing. The public could be forgiven for thinking, from what Hartley said, that Hawke was an agent of the CIA or Israeli Intelligence, or both, and had at their instigation set up Hartley and Whitlam for a phony deal, in order to bring them down, which he had then tried to accomplish by using Rupert Murdoch. It is a measure of the paranoia that the names ‘Murdoch’ and ‘Hawke’ could arouse in the Left that many believed this demonological nonsense, for years.
A further complication was that on 25 February, the same day as the Murdoch story had broken, the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial also had a version of the scandal, written by a political journalist and author, Laurie Oakes. It was well known that Oakes and Hawke were friendly. Hartley announced, ‘I know who gave the story to Oakes’, which suggested to many ALP people that Hawke had. However, from certain details in Oakes’ story, Combe and Ducker were convinced that an official of a state branch had been responsible, especially because the man had been overheard talking to Oakes. The man later left his job in the ALP, with a little help from John Ducker.
The federal executive met in Canberra on 5 March in an atmosphere of acute distrust. David Combe, since returning to his home, Canberra, had been besieged by the news media. He recalled,
We had journalists camped on the front lawn and were under police custody for the best part of a week, with paddy wagons out the front and the family unable to leave the house. It was terrific! I first went out on the night of 4 March, for the officers’ meeting. Then the next morning, when the federal executive meeting opened, everyone was as jumpy as hell. There was a buzzing noise. We were all so spook-conscious that we thought the room must be bugged. Bill Hartley clambered around trying to find bugs. After a while [Senator] Arthur Geitzelt owned up. He had a new hearing-aid and he didn’t quite know how to work the thing, and it was that which was making the noise. I moved that the meeting be taped, because X was there and I knew he had dudded me to Oakes. In case I was going to be dismissed, I wanted the tapes as an accurate record of proceedings. The meeting rejected my request, but as things started to unfold Egerton made one of his masterful interjections. He said, ‘The secretary asked us to tape proceedings. We refused. We should have bloody well sold the film rights!’
Indeed, with a theme song and some special effects, the story that emerged could have been A-L-P, The Musical.
Hawke recalled,
It was a meeting that defied imagination. People were punchdrunk by the revelations. For instance: during the election campaign Frank Crean was still occupying the rooms of the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, and Hartley had installed in this office the telex machine he used as the Iraqi press correspondent in Australia. So while the election campaign is going on, telex messages from Iraq about hundreds of thousands of dollars are pouring into the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. We heard all this, then I said, ‘Are there any more questions?’ and there was one, directed to Hartley, who then told us that the telex messages started going astray—to some major business office. Messages about the ALP were coming off a machine in Westinghouse! Then there were the stories about Henri Fischer. They were told to ring him in London; London said he was in New York; New York said he was in South America. It was Keystone Cops! That the Labor Party’s future was being played around with, like that! We gave each of the three people involved, Combe, Hartley and Whitlam, the opportunity of making a full statement.
Combe said,
Hartley, in his statement, said things like, ‘But I don’t think the leader would have been aware of that’ and ‘I’m sure the leader didn’t know . . .’ It became obvious from fairly early on that a deal had been done to save Gough and to dump me. During Gough’s statement he said, ‘It was perfectly proper for Reuben Scarf to give a donation. I thought we were only talking about ten, twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars’. I went white, and gawped. We broke for morning tea. Bob and I were furious. Bob called Ducker over and I said, ‘If we’re breaking from the principle of equal culpability, then the gloves are off. I’m going in to give fresh evidence.’ Ducker said, ‘I’ll talk to Gough’.
So a great earnest discussion between Ducker and Whitlam took place, then Whitlam came over and said, ‘Well, comrades, John seems to think that you’re concerned about the amounts’. I said, ‘Yes, Gough. You’ve conveyed the impression to the executive that it was just a normal donation. I must insist that you knew that we were talking about a very large sum of money.’ Gough replied, ‘I should clarify that’. So from then on the whole thing was run on equal culpability. Each of the three of us was as guilty as hell of gross lack of judgment . . . I should mention that I don’t think Reuben Scarf ever knew about the Iraqi money . . .
The motions ranged from the officers’ recommendation that Hartley be expelled, to one from Neil Batt and Ken Wriedt that we all three be expelled, through various alternatives. From the time that the principle was established that we must all be truthful and tell the whole truth the executive operated magnificently. There was a genuine endeavour on the part of everyone to face up to the problem and resolve it, and to forget about factional differences. Bob played a big role in preventing a faction feud. While he had strong personal views about Hartley, and while he would have liked to pursue them, he didn’t. He backed off very quickly from the idea that Hartley be expelled. He kept that executive under a tight rein for two days, determined to elicit all possible information about what had happened, determined to get a genuine, non-factional discussion. If only Whitlam had handled the Loans Affair in the same way that Hawke handled that executive—getting everything out in the open, admitting there had been an error—then the Loans Affair would never have damaged us the way it did, with bits and pieces of information dragged out like teeth, and the suspicion in everyone’s mind that the full story was never revealed.
Within two days the drama was over. The party knew all that it could know from Whitlam, Hartley and Combe about what had happened. The federal executive decided that the three men be severely reprimanded for what they had done and that it should tell the nation the facts. After some discussion about whether it was safe to allow Hawke to speak about Hartley, the executive decided that Hawke’s sense of justice could be trusted, and he was given the task of divulging information to the public. The news conference was the biggest ever held by the ALP, and Hawke was at his best: he was frank, decisive and just. He did not go into any of the opéra bouffe details but revealed all the important elements of the affair. The paper on which was written the officers’ recommendation to the executive that Hartley be expelled had been shredded, as had other pieces of paper recommending expulsion for all three. Hawke was alert in his handling of the news media: the best journalists in the country did not sense that there was a chink in the armour-plating of party solidarity that Hawke projected, or if any did, none had a chance to ask questions that would expose it. Hartley attended the news conference and at the end of it congratulated and thanked Hawke, saying he could not have wished for fairer treatment.
Hawke said,
I had no doubt about the integrity of Combe and Whitlam, I merely thought they had been stupid beyond belief. But I believed one could distinguish between their actions, and Hartley’s. I think there were other considerations in Hartley’s mind. The surprising thing was that he seemed unable to comprehend the magnitude of his actions. When he told us those Keystone Cops stories people began to laugh, they couldn’t help themselves. And Bill joined in the laughter, but he did not seem to know that we were laughing at him, and not with him. I realised that he honestly did not understand what he’d done . . . I was quite happy to go along with those who thought that it was unfair to make a distinction between the three. I didn’t feel, as I have on some occasions, that those opposed to me were just wrong and stupid.
The Iraqi Money Scandal was, literally, a nine-day wonder. The Australian story appeared on 25 February; Hawke’s press conference was held on 6 March. The speed with which the federal executive had dealt with the issue had minimised the public damage to the party. But within the upper echelons of the ALP the little self-confidence that remained had suffered further attrition, for members of the federal executive suspected that as with the Loans Affair, the Gair Affair and the Kerr sacking, the Whitlam government had been the naive player in a very sharp poker school. They believed that the Iraqis had donated about $250 000 to the ALP, the money had been sent via Beirut to Tokyo for laundering, and got lost in the laundry.
The whole affair had affected Hawke much more deeply than he cared to admit later or, publicly, at the time. He loved the party and felt keenly protective of it. Privately, he was outraged that Hartley had remained an ALP member. He began to think of Hartley and other extreme members of the Socialist Left as malignant growths within the body of Labor politics, and among friends would have outbursts of invective against Hartley, during which he shouted, ‘I will destroy him!’
Hawke fell ill with a respiratory tract infection soon after the special federal executive meeting. David Combe and his wife, Caroline, sent him some flowers and a message thanking him for all he had done on their behalf. Combe recalled,
Next time I spoke to Bob he mentioned the flowers and then went into a tirade about how unfair it all was, that the only person who’d suffered out of the whole deal was himself. What had happened was that the Murdoch press had run a massive campaign promoting Bob, against Gough. Within the party anybody who was in favour of the Murdoch press was, ipso facto, a louse. In those days it was not only purists who refused to buy Murdoch newspapers—ALP members in general boycotted them.
Murdoch had barracked hard for Whitlam in 1972. During one of the campaign meetings Hawke had said to Whitlam, ‘You’re going to regret the day you got into bed with Rupert’, a prophecy that was speedily fulfilled. Murdoch’s news empire became the nemesis of the government it had once promoted and Murdoch himself was elevated, in the party, to membership of a trilogy of demons, the other two being Malcolm Fraser and Sir John Kerr. As Combe remarked, ‘To be a friend of Murdoch was a sin’.
Hawke did not stop buying Murdoch newspapers, but few party loyalists knew this. All were aware, however, that Hawke was opposed to the party’s obsessional hatred of Kerr. On several occasions early in the year he said publicly that he believed it was futile to dwell upon the past, and that the party should be concerning itself with the future. But hell hath no fury like a true believer scorned. Hawke’s attempts at encouraging the ALP away from negativism towards a positive and expansive frame of mind were more black marks against him. Stroke by stroke, the picture of a traitor was growing. Hawke was now, for the Left, protagonist in a play plotted by unknown forces, all his actions taking place under a lurid light, or in deep, sinister shadows. For them he was turning into a Demon King himself.
Since he had become president of the ACTU Hawke had sometimes, when in his cups, shown exaggerated sensitivity to slights. For example, Richard Carleton, the television journalist, recalled Hawke arriving late and drunk at the Taiping Restaurant in Sydney for a dinner celebrating the 1972 election victory, and asking loudly of the Chinese waiter who blocked his path, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ His sense of power had grown bigger when he became president of the party in government, so much so that Hazel was worried that he had lost his sense of perspective in relation to others. An air of vulgar self-importance often surrounded him, and was accompanied by a discounting of other people. He had come to treat much criticism as humbug; he was habituated to flattery. Few had the temerity to object to Hawke’s face when he was rude to them, but when, very rarely, someone would tell him afterwards of some outrageous act of his, he would at first refuse to believe he had behaved so badly, asserting, ‘That’s not me!’ If he could be convinced he would slump into melancholic silence.
When Rupert Murdoch invited Hawke to dine with him in early 1976, in a Sydney restaurant, Hawke did not feel inhibited about accepting, although they were destined to be overseen. The meeting was widely reported and caused a scandal within the ALP. There was a detectable whiff of opportunism in Hawke’s reception of the press baron’s overtures, but his meetings with Murdoch were also an example of Hawke’s consistent behaviour pattern of attempting to transcend differences and to reconcile opposites. He wanted Murdoch’s support not merely for himself, but for the institution that Murdoch had so mercilessly savaged, the ALP.
By late March, Whitlam had made public his change of mind about the leadership, saying that Hawke’s support in Caucus had declined in the past fifteen months and that, ‘He is not, I believe, as intellectually well equipped for leadership as I know Bill Hayden to be’. By April, Hawke’s popularity rating was 62 per cent, compared with 53 per cent for Fraser and 41 per cent for Whitlam.
For pragmatists within the party, the figures spoke for themselves: if the ALP were to win back government, Hawke would have to enter parliament. A pressure campaign upon him began, and was to last for the next three years. Countering it, there was now the openly declared Stop Hawke campaign of the Socialist Left. The period between 14 December 1975 and 23 September 1979 were the most difficult years of Hawke’s life. He was severely overstretched physically; emotionally he was becoming unstable from physical exhaustion, political battles and a deteriorating personal life; intellectually, he was weary.
He read at least four newspapers every day and stacks of committee reports, but it was years since he had read thought-provoking books, and the effect of a barrage of shallow ideas and trivial facts was becoming obvious—in his speeches, for example, at the National Press Club in June 1976; in the few articles he wrote, for example, in Heyday or Doomsday: Australia 2000;4 and in his conversation. His mind was still extraordinarily quick and logical, and he could still perform astonishing feats of absorbing and analysing quantities of information at a speed that awed those who worked with him. However, his natural inclination to solve immediate, practical problems had caused a narrowing of interests. Hawke fell silent, or looked bored, when discussion moved away from current events or politics. Paul Munro, Hawke’s friend from New Guinea days, said,
Bob is without small talk. If people can’t talk to him about things he’s interested in, he can’t talk to them about things they are interested in—you know, theatre, books. He’s often plain awkward in company until he’s figured out what role he can play. He needs to have a defined purpose in any social situation.
Hawke’s social values were sound—like second nature to him—but his ideas often flimsy. A major cause of his physical, emotional and intellectual weakening was his gregarious drinking. Hawke would rarely drink alone, but he spent hours drinking with mates and he had come to depend upon alcohol to help him relax. Hours that could have been passed in thought were given over to the bogus intellectual stimulation of boozy argument. The fact that the Anglo-Australian legal system is one based upon debate about right and wrong in the eyes of the law and not, as for example in the French system, upon determining truth, encouraged in Hawke, as it has in all our lawyer-politicians, a love of scoring points in arguments.
While the forces upon him to enter parliament—and those threatening him against trying—built up, the more serious dilemma for Hawke was a private one: alcohol. He had made a public promise to eschew it were he to become leader of the ALP, and his sense of honour made fulfilling the promise unavoidable. But with or without a promise, he knew that he could not achieve his dream unless he moderated his drinking. Already television interviewers were covering up for Hawke, by scrapping film of him recorded when he was drunk. When he was to be broadcast live, or to take part in important pre-recorded debates, Hawke by 1976 would sometimes mutter, ‘No. I mustn’t drink. I mustn’t drink.’ He had arrived at a stage when he had to confront a conflict that was as old as he was: his relationship with Ellie. It was she who had inspired him to seek power, to seek the prime ministership; it was she who had instilled in him an image of the bottle as black god.
By June 1976 he had replied to the importunate press that ‘this might be the year’ he would enter parliament. A week later he led an ACTU delegation to Canberra for talks with Fraser and the Cabinet, held in the Cabinet room. Out of the meeting sprang one of the most unfair of the Socialist Left attacks upon Hawke. He said, in the presence of ACTU executive members, the Prime Minister and some senior Cabinet ministers, that if wage claims were to be moderated the trade union movement would require a reform of taxation, to guard its spendable income; Hawke proposed that if the government would change the taxation structure it could anticipate a lessening of wage claims. Fitzgibbon, a member of the delegation, turned to another ACTU executive member, Jim Roulston of the AMWSU, a leader of the Socialist Left in Victoria and Fitzgibbon’s senior in the ACTU executive hierarchy, and asked, ‘Do you know about this? Do you agree with it?’ Roulston replied he did not. Fitzgibbon asked, ‘As a senior officer of the ACTU are you going to say something?’ and Roulston replied he would not. Fitzgibbon then addressed the meeting, saying he disagreed with Hawke’s proposal, that it would be difficult to persuade the rank and file to accept such a trade-off. Fraser, the Cabinet ministers, Hawke and others formally took note of Fitzgibbon’s warning. That evening Fraser invited Hawke, Ducker and Dolan to dine at The Lodge.
Earlier in the day the ACTU team had learned, from a note sent in to the Cabinet room from David Combe, that Egerton, president of the Queensland branch of the party, had accepted a knighthood from the Fraser government. The news was another stunning blow to Labor morale. John Ducker was so distressed that he drank a good deal before dinner; he, Dolan and the other guest, Tony Street, who was now Minister for Labour, all left The Lodge early. Hawke stayed on, drinking with Fraser, engaged by the Prime Minister in what Hawke believed was a challenge to last the distance with bottle after bottle of port. At last Mrs Fraser appeared in a dressing gown and said to her husband, ‘Dear, it’s time you went to bed’. Hawke recalled, ‘Tamie Fraser was the most beautiful sight in the world. By then my legs were pretty wobbly, but I’d been determined not to give up.’
The next day Roulston announced that Hawke had cooked up a $650 million tax–wage trade-off with the Prime Minister. The story was spread, and reported, that this had been done tête-à-tête over dinner at The Lodge. It was even believed by some more gullible members of the party, and hinted at by the press, that Hawke’s meeting with Fraser had occurred in secret, without the knowledge of the ACTU. At the next ACTU executive meeting Fitzgibbon angrily denounced Roulston and recounted Roulston’s refusal to speak against the proposal when he had had the chance to do so in the Cabinet room. But the damage to Hawke had been done. In the next major meeting of the Victorian ALP the Socialist Left faction was joined by the Right faction to pass a motion condemning Hawke for his supposed ‘deal’ with Fraser. Handbills appeared in Victoria headlined, ‘HAWKE HAS SECRET MEETINGS WITH FRASER AND MURDOCH TO BETRAY WORKING PEOPLE’ and saying:
Hawke is a most despicable person. Hawke cannot be called a ‘traitor’ because he has never belonged to or supported the working class. He was selected by the capitalist class to be President of the ACTU in order to strengthen the control of that class over the trade unions. Hawke is a close confidant of US labor attaches (CIA) and the greater part of his activity is secret. Who knows—apart from his bosses—what he does overseas? Who knows his precise relations with the fascist Israeli leaders? Who knows what he talks about with Fraser? Who knows what he talks about with Murdoch? Who really knows what his business connections are? This despicable person whose rotten outlook is reflected in his private life should be exposed for what he is . . . DRIVE HAWKE OUT!5
The garbage bins at his house were searched for evidence about Hawke’s lifestyle and the readers of a radical newspaper were informed that Hawke had ‘disgusting’ rubbish: cartoned orange juice, for example. The house itself excited a frenzy of condemnation for its size, location and the fact that it had a tennis court and swimming pool. One night in mid-1976 somebody painted in black on its front wall: ‘WEALTHY PIGS LIVE IN LUXURY’.
Such sentiments were not confined to the new breed of semi-educated baby puritans, bearded-up like Victorian curates, whom the 1970s had spawned. One evening in 1980 a clean-shaven, middle-aged professor of history from a Melbourne university delivered himself of the opinion that it was ‘disgraceful’ that Hawke lived in Brighton. When informed that Hawke lived in the less expensive suburb of Sandringham, the professor replied that made no difference: Hawke’s life was luxurious. Upon inquiry, the professor divulged that he lived in the fashionable and expensive suburb of Kew, adding, ‘But I’m only renting’.6 Whatever that reveals about the quality of intellect of a senior academic, it is a demonstration of the success of the smear campaign against Hawke, who, until the end of the decade, was continuously in overdraft. Only when Hazel began working full time could they afford to hire somebody to do the heavy household cleaning and the ironing.
The paranoia of radicals about Hawke was matched by enthusiasm among non-radicals. In July 1976 the Reverend Lillian Livingstone, a Congregational minister, asserted during a sermon in Sydney that Jesus Christ resembled Bob Hawke more than ‘the gentle Jesus meek and mild’ of popular fancy. Letters and telegrams arrived at the ACTU urging upon Hawke various actions:
Should you enter Parliament the people of Australia will be exposed to the risk of having their greatest hope taken hostage. The Australian has needed a mate for nearly half a century.
Although opposed to your political views I sincerely believe your destiny is on the world scene, for God and the Good of all kind.
You have got a definite spiritual character about you that is hard to define . . . I say a special prayer for you each Sunday at church . . . I’ve got a photo of you from a local newspaper and I always carry it with me wherever I go. It gives me spiritual and emotional strength . . . I’d gladly die for you, if I had to. It’s guys like you who make the Labor Party a great party.
For the sake of your Party and the country I urge you to go for pre-selection.7
By September 1976 speculation about when and if Hawke would enter parliament had reached such outlandish proportions that he decided to hold a news conference on the issue. The Victorian branch of the ALP had forced a showdown by deciding that nominations for preselection for the election due in December 1978 must be lodged by 30 September 1976. Normal practice was to call for nominations twelve months before an election was due. The rule change was designed to nobble Hawke, because if he put himself forward as a parliamentary candidate he would be a ‘lame duck’ president of the ACTU for—as it was then believed—two years. (As events turned out, Fraser held the election one year early.) Two days before his news conference was scheduled the Socialist Left announced, presumably in case some deaf person had not heard the sound of the grinding of axes, that they would ‘oppose completely any bid of Hawke’s for preselection’.
Fifty journalists gathered in the Melbourne Trades Hall on 15 September to learn Hawke’s decision: Not this time. The Age commented editorially,
Mr Hawke said . . . his move would create a lame-duck ACTU presidency for the next two years. We suggest the logic of that argument can be taken a step further: if his effectiveness as the leader of the trade union movement would be destroyed by his becoming an officially declared candidate, it will surely be at least diminished by his remaining a potential candidate.
It was a perspicacious comment. Hawke had been standing, unchallenged and unchallengeable, on a mountain top of trade union support: beneath his feet the rock was to subside.
By late 1976 senior officers of the ACTU were so alarmed by the campaign against him, and by Hawke’s drinking, that they agreed he needed a chauffeur–bodyguard. The ACTU had no funds for such an extra staff member, so it was arranged that a job be found in ACTU–Solo, and that the man employed would work for the petrol discounting company when not driving and protecting Hawke. The person chosen was Chris Crellin, a young, physically beautiful giant—he weighed 100 kilograms—who had been a policeman. While still a member of the force he had been chosen as a bodyguard for Fraser during the 1975 election campaign, which was cause for hilarity among police, since Crellin was known for his Labor sympathies. He speaks quietly and moves with the silent grace and menace of a panther. He told Hawke he would feel honoured to work for him, then when Hawke asked him to wear a pistol, refused—‘with passive resistance, and after a while Bob didn’t mention it any more’. Hawke doted upon Crellin; when Crellin would appear noiselessly in a doorway Hawke’s eyes would soften. ‘Chris. Chris . . . he loves me’, Hawke would say sometimes.
Hawke has always craved love, and those he loves he trusts wholeheartedly. Kirby remarked,
Once Bob accepts you, that’s it. I could say to him I thought the Earth was flat and he wouldn’t fly off the handle at me, but would say, ‘Well, Dick, I’m sure you have some reason for believing that’. There’s a special quality in his friendship.
By the end of 1976 John Ducker and Hawke were friends. It was a friendship that saved Hawke’s political life in 1977.