Australian History: Robert James Lee Hawke
During Bob Hawke’s first 28 years of life, he seemed to be headed for an obscure career as an academic and Labor theorist. An excellent student - and cricketer, schoolyard brawler, drinker and punter - he topped his class in primary school, sailed through the academically prestigious Perth Modern School, graduated in Law and Economics from the University of Western Australia and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. In 1956 he accepted a doctoral research scholarship at the Australian National University and undertook research for the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
The turning point in his career came in 1958 when he turned down a lectureship at Canberra University College in favour of an ACTU post as researcher and wages tribunal advocate.
Born in 1929, in Bordertown, his father was the Congregational minister there and later in a Perth suburb. Hawke spent his formative years in the narrow environment of country and suburban life of that era and in the disciplined atmosphere of a Nonconformist parsonage. Later he reacted by becoming a drinker and an agnostic. An uncle, Albert Hawke, who was a member of the Labor Party, became his political mentor and at 17, Bob Hawke joined the party.
As an ACTU official, Hawke quickly built a reputation as a top-level negotiator and developed political aspirations. He made his first bid for a federal seat in 1963. When he failed, he declined offers of a safe ALP seat and concentrated on building a power base in the ACTU. By 1973 he was president of the ACTU, national president of the Labor Party and well regarded in the international labour movement. Believing trade unions to be instruments of social reform, he revitalised the ACTU and broadened its horizons. By the mid-1970s he had achieved a high public profile and a 1975 poll declared him: "The man most wanted as Prime Minister"
Hawke moved into federal politics in 1979, with a safe Labor seat in Parliament. Three years later he challenged Bill Hayden's leadership of the Parliamentary Labor Party. He lost by six votes, but his vivid personality, ruthless attack and strong public image made party power-brokers see him as the man most likely to topple Fraser.
Hayden stepped aside in February 1983. In four weeks of furious campaigning, Hawke led the party to victory in the March elections. His electoral promises included an end to Fraser's "almost perpetual recession" a centralised wage-fixing system and national reconciliation between employers and unions.
However, tax on superannuation, the Medicare levy, charges for tertiary education, the assets test on age pensions, a capital gains tax, welfare cuts and other measures cost Labor much of the credibility which won the 1983 elections. The export of uranium angered anti-nuclear activists, and an ID card, proposed as a trap for tax and welfare cheats, offended many Australians with its 'police state' implications. The card proposal was later dropped.
But the Opposition was in such disarray, from leadership contests and then the collapse of the Liberal-National Party coalition, that in the 1984 and 1987 elections Labor still seemed the only viable alternative.