Elders Part 5 - Bob Hawke

Bob Hawke

This fifth part of the 'Elders' series features Bob Hawke, Australia's longest serving Labor Prime Minister. From the Prime Ministership to the life lessons he's learned, he is still very much the passionate intellectual.

ANDREW DENTON - VO:We live in a society that worships youth. On television, in magazines, in advertisements and on billboards, what sells and what is sold to us is youth. But in some cultures it is the elders of the community who are valued and whose wisdom is sought. In this series we are going to seek out six prominent elders of our tribe, each over the age of 65 to see what life has taught them. Welcome to the elders.

ANDREW DENTON - VO:He has lived a life out loud and in public. First class cricketer, Rhodes Scholar, self-confessed hedonist, political warrior. All these badges he has worn with pride. From an early age his family believed he was destined to lead the country. For 50 years he has charmed and argued his way into the hearts and minds of Australians. This is Bob Hawke.

ANDREW DENTON: What values did Clem and Ellie raise you with?

BOB HAWKE: My mother had a fanatical commitment to education. She was a teacher and she impressed upon me the importance of developing whatever talents I had and it was pretty clear I had some born sum and she said well just don’t sit back and take it in. Work, develop what you’ve got. She was not just believed in me but she you know drove me and...

ANDREW DENTON: Were you were you happy to be driven?

BOB HAWKE: Not always.

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: You’d rather be outside playing right?

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: But she was persuasive and. . .

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: Persuasive? That sounds like a Yes Minister term.

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: And so that was a big thing and I mean she was way ahead of her time too in regards to� we had my father was a minister of religion, a congregational minister. A lot of farmers for you know, in the congregation and I can remember mum just beating their brains, saying, "You send your sons to school but not your daughters" and she had this absolute passionate commitment for this sort of women’s liberation. This was this was back in the 1930s so she was ahead of her time.

ANDREW DENTON: Also an interesting model for you to see your parent fiercely arguing her case...

BOB HAWKE: Oh yeah.

ANDREW DENTON: To people that may not want to hear it?

BOB HAWKE: Yeah yeah. Very much so. Oh she was she didn’t muck around.

ANDREW DENTON: Were you proud of her?

BOB HAWKE: Oh I was very proud of her yeah and dad was, he was the quieter one.

ANDREW DENTON: Your dad said a beautiful thing. One of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard a father say about his son actually which was that "Bobbie had an out flowing magic about him.

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: You had a very special relationship didn’t you? Can you...

BOB HAWKE: With my dad?

ANDREW DENTON: Yeah. What was that bond do you think? Why was it so strong?

BOB HAWKE: I just loved him and he loved me. He would read to me endlessly of when I can remember I was small and "Read me a story Dad" and he just would go on reading and reading and encourage me to read and when you have a parent that does that the response is obvious and the bond between us was just remarkable. He was a most humble man, the most decent man I’ve ever met in my life and he always looked for the best in people to find positives and he said something to me that always remained with me. He said if you believe in the fatherhood of God you must necessarily believe in the brotherhood of man, it follows necessarily and even though I left the church and was not religious, that truth remained with me.

[Clip]

BOB HAWKE: It was lovely the day of the election that I got elected Prime Minister was his 85th birthday and I remember him saying him saying to me, "Son that’s the best birthday present I ever had" and we came back, he was with us, he came up from Melbourne to Canberra to the tally room and we were staying at the Lakeside Hotel and a few of the journos got talking to me in the morning and they said, "He’s a great man your father, he’s been walking around telling anyone he can find how lucky Australia is."

ANDREW DENTON: There was a belief in your family that you would one day be Prime Minister. Why was there that belief?

BOB HAWKE: Oh I think mum seemed to have had some view about it you know when I was born, I don’t know she said there was something special but that’s a bit embarrassing to talk about.

ANDREW DENTON: Well no it’s interesting because it’s about the power of the parent to shape the child. It wasn’t just a vague belief and it wasn’t a boastful belief, there was a sense of that within your family wasn’t there?

BOB HAWKE: Particularly my mother I think and look in our daily life it wasn’t a you know it wasn’t something that was talked about it but it was you know it was there and the thing that I owe so much to them as that they gave me everything that I could have wanted, a totally loving environment, a sense of self confidence. I can remember as a child they always encouraged me to express a point of view. They said none of this seen and not heard business. If I had a point of view I was to express it but they sacrificed everything to ensure that I had everything I needed in terms of education so I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

ANDREW DENTON: So the power of the parent to shape the child is...

BOB HAWKE: Enormous.

ANDREW DENTON: ...enormous.

BOB HAWKE: Absolutely enormous.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON VO: In 1983 Ellie Hawke’s belief that her son would one day become Prime Minister was proven to be true. Bob Hawke swept to power on a wave of popular support. The only Prime Minister ever elected without having sat in parliament a Leader of the Opposition.

ANDREW DENTON: How intoxicating is the excitement of being in office, of having the Prime Ministership?

BOB HAWKE: I think it’s probably like when you start drinking. I mean you get more easily intoxicated in the beginning and it’s more exciting but certainly on that first day when you wake up and say, "I’m Prime Minister" it’s an exhilarating feeling but the reality is Andrew that the weight of work, the sheer intensity and volume of the things that you have to deal with doesn’t leave much room for exhilaration.

ANDREW DENTON: How do you deal with the actual and emotional intensity of a position like that?

BOB HAWKE: Well by making sure it’s not the work of one man. Look at the duration with Carter, President Carter. Insisted on supervising who was going to be using the White House tennis court. Come on. I mean it’s a question of prioritisation and delegation and if you haven’t got that capacity for prioritisation and delegation then you’ll be on the road to the bin.

ANDREW DENTON: What in your view is the essence of power?

BOB HAWKE: Well the essence of power is the knowledge that what you do is going to have an effect not just an immediate but perhaps a lifelong effect on the happiness and wellbeing of millions of people and so I think the essence of power is to be conscious of what it can mean for others. One of the great things about being Prime Minister was that hardly a day would go by at the end of which you didn’t have the knowledge that you’d been able to do something. It may only have been from one person or may have been from the country as a whole or even might have been an international thing but you’d been able to do something which you thought was going to make someone or a lot of people better off or happier.

ANDREW DENTON: We’ve all seen politicians who to use the colloquial have had to eat a shit sandwich.

BOB HAWKE: Mmm.

ANDREW DENTON: You know we know they’re saying the opposite of what they believe.

BOB HAWKE: Mmm.

ANDREW DENTON: How do you carry that around without it eating away at you?

BOB HAWKE: Yeah it’s a good question and you’ve just got to well I used the phrase prioritisation before. You know there’s got to be a profit and loss account in this compromise business. You just can’t compromise just to make someone happy. For me it’s got to be part of a process of saying well if I give away a bit on that on something which is not a matter fundamental principle but if I give way on that then there’s got to be a plus in it for the bigger purpose.

ANDREW DENTON: I noticed you have in your bookshelves there amongst this vast library Yes Minister, the collected scripts of Yes Minister.

BOB HAWKE: Yeah. [Laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: Now come on, you would never own to this in office but I’ve always felt that the scripts of Yes Minister were fairly close to form, only wittier.

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: Oh it was essential viewing as far as I was concerned.

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: Did you recognise yourselves in there?

BOB HAWKE: Oh I recognised the game yeah sure and I’ve seen it happen with some of my ministers.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON VO: Whether on the cricket pitch, in the pub or in front of the full bench of the arbitration commission, Bob loved to compete and win. Including 10 years as President of the ACTU he spent two decades in the fiercest arenas of Australian politics.

ANDREW DENTON: From observation it is both a brutal and brutalising experience being in politics. What is the effect of that over a long period of time?

BOB HAWKE: Obviously when Paul challenged me and finally won we weren’t bosom buddies. We didn’t get into lengthy social intercourse for some time but we’re friends now and he’s coming to dinner here shortly so I think it differs for different people. Some people, when they have a fight, it becomes personally bitter and lasting but there’s no reason why that should be so and looking back on it I mean I don’t can’t remember any you know fights that I had that finished up with lasting enemies.

ANDREW DENTON: I’m surprised to learn for instance that Paul is coming to dinner because a lot of people do succumb in life in all walks of life to bitterness. They latch onto an argument and they won’t let it go.

BOB HAWKE: Yeah well you see hated and envy are the most corrosive elements in life. I mean you look at people I see people destroyed or enormously diminished by envy and by hatred. It’s I mean life is short.

ANDREW DENTON: What about anger? How have you dealt with your anger?

BOB HAWKE: Well I think I probably dealt with in the sense that I tend to if I am angry I express it, I don’t bottle it up or on some occasions when you’ve got to some extent but if I feel anger I express it and it’s not then something that is biting eating away inside you and it gets back to what I’ve just said, I mean, if bottling up these emotions and so on is a terrible thing.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON: I read an interview with you many years ago where you felt a bit embarrassed about the fact that you showed your emotions so readily. When you look back on it now has that actually been a strength for you?

BOB HAWKE: I’ve always been rather amazed by the that people ah sort of complimentary elements of it like I’ve got curly hair, and I also tend to show my emotions. I mean that’s it. Frankly ah if I could just have a button that I press that’s and say I won’t show tears I’d probably would have pressed that button, not on every occasion but on some. But it’s there, it’s part of you, like your hair. So what?

ANDREW DENTON: How important is it to have a healthy ego?

BOB HAWKE: Well look if you haven’t got confidence in yourself how in the hell can you expect other people to have confidence in you? What is you know really is off putting is where you see people sort of being an excessively proud or seem to be very proud about things that they’ve got no reason to be proud about and I mean I think it’s very silly to be proud or boast about your intellect and you can be born with a squiggly ear or a crooked nose or fine intellect and you didn’t have any bloody thing to do with it. You were born with it. What your responsibility is what you’re born with is to nurture it and make the most of it.

ANDREW DENTON: That’s your mum talking there.

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: Yeah.

ANDREW DENTON: What was a failure in your life that you learnt from?

BOB HAWKE: A failure that I learnt from? I suppose the most obvious and probably the best known was that on occasions I allowed drink to get the better of me. I led an extremely gregarious life at the ACTU and I did some silly things at times.

ANDREW DENTON: Blanche, she didn’t guild lily she described you as when you were a drinker as a loathsome drunk. You were a very full on drinker weren’t you?

BOB HAWKE: Oh yeah I do most things full on and I yeah as I’ve openly said there are occasions where I was certainly less than attractive.

ANDREW DENTON: I’m really interested that you were able to give up because people have problems with alcohol and it bedevils them their whole life. How did you do that?

BOB HAWKE: I just said I’m going to give it up.

ANDREW DENTON: Did you did you literally just stop?

BOB HAWKE: Yes. I stopped and I did it at a time which when I knew it would really test me. It was just I was at the ACTU still and I used to go each year to Geneva for the month of June which was the annual conference of the ILO and you know, really worked hard but I also played hard and got off a plane at Geneva and my friends were there to see me when I arrived. A couple of them said, "Let’s go and have a drink," I said "I’m not not drinking" and look of absolute unbelief on their face but I knew if I could get through that month there I’d be right. And I didn’t have a drink there and I didn’t from then on it was I didn’t. That was from about May 1980 and I just said to myself, "If you’re going to become Prime Minister of this country you can’t afford ever to be in a position where you can make a fool of yourself or of your country" and I never had a drop for the whole period I was in Parliament.

ANDREW DENTON: That’s remarkable will power. The first time to say no is maybe not the hardest because you’re full of determination but I’m feeling that two or three weeks into the decision you were thinking of a frosty one.

BOB HAWKE: [laugh] Ah yeah. The thought was there but no I made up my mind that was it.

ANDREW DENTON: When you drank again what had changed?

BOB HAWKE: They were making wine in Western Australia, Margaret River, I had a taste for it. [Laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: Did you ever go back to that excess?

BOB HAWKE: No. I’ve had a couple of occasions where I’ve drunk more than I should have but no.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON VO: In December 1991 after a long and bitter fight with Paul Keating Bob Hawke became the first Labor Prime Minister to be removed from office by his own Party.

ANDREW DENTON: What did it feel like to relinquish power having thought about it in one way or another?

BOB HAWKE: I was sad about the circumstances as I knew that I was still very fit and able to go on doing a good job and the Government was doing a good job so the circumstances were upsetting. But looking back on it of the end of my Prime Ministership was that it led to the situation where I married Blanche and that has been, you know, just an indescribable joy in my life.

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: And a strength.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON: You’ve described it as a meeting of souls. Is that how it is?

BOB HAWKE: Yeah it’s it’s probably difficult talking about these things and I don’t want in any sense to diminish what had gone before but I must be honest this is something that has brought me in every sense of love all that I can imagine any human being could ever imagine. It’s physical love of course is important but emotional and intellectual communion that we have.

ANDREW DENTON: What makes a good marriage?

BOB HAWKE: Oh well there’s got to be physical attraction�

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm

BOB HAWKE: �obviously, but I think terribly important is having a degree of a considerable degree of shared interest. I mean you just see so many marriages which apart from their kids there’s not a real shared interest and obviously there’s got to be a preparedness to sort of understand the needs of the other if the two of you are like that. It’s those sorts of things that make marriage such a delight. I’d like to take you briefly into what I suspect is harder territory for you.

ANDREW DENTON: You’ve been on the record as talking about walking away at times in your life from the responsibilities of fatherhood because of career. What was the cost of that to you and the cost of that to your family?

BOB HAWKE: Oh it was a heavy cost. It’s one of those areas where you know if you could have life over again you would try and do some things differently. In the early days of my marriage I was at the ACTU as the advocate and then as the president it was indescribably hectic and time consuming and I made it a bit more time consuming than at times was necessary but I was gradually building up my political career and that came at a cost to the family relationship, there’s no doubt about that. You regret that and you then, without trying to, you know, self justification you I think you’re entitled to enter into the balance sheet the plusses that you were able to give to the family as a result of the all these things that wouldn’t otherwise have been available. But that can’t eliminate some of the sadness that comes from feeling that you know you could have been a better father.

ANDREW DENTON: Is it difficult for you sometimes to compare your fathering to that of your own father?

BOB HAWKE: Well the world is the world that which I was operating was so different from that one. It was infinitely, you know, simple world. I feel terribly sorry in so many ways for young kids that are coming and the kids that are going to come. It’s such a difficult world for them.

ANDREW DENTON: It’s a fundamental question. As you say we our ability to create to change our universe has evolved almost beyond imagination.

BOB HAWKE: Yep.

ANDREW DENTON: But do human beings evolve? Os human nature essentially the same as it’s always been?

BOB HAWKE: Well it’s as though we’ve got a lobotomy. We’ve had a lobotomy. There’s one side right which is developed in exponentially in the way you know we can actually produce goods and services and communicate now is just infinitely beyond recognition compared to just less than a century ago. That side of the brain has just blossomed and flourished and given the opportunity for us to have a life beyond imagination. The other side is if anything has withered it certainly hasn’t matched the growth of this side. Our social engineering capacity, our sort of moral conscience if you like the consciousness it hasn’t developed.

ANDREW DENTON: You looked genuinely sad before when you were talking about the world that our children are coming into, are you optimistic for the future of the planet?

BOB HAWKE: I am by nature and I have all my life by nature been an optimist, Andrew, but I’ve got to say that when I look at the facts now in this world there are not many grounds for optimism. We’re you know, take the elements and just take population for a start. Population is exploding. We’ve got to do something about you know getting a sustainable population level and of course this gets back to poverty, it gets back to the education of women and so on. We’ve got the problems of food supply, of global warming, massive increases in the population. Now these are not the figments of Bob Hawke’s imagination. These are facts. Ah you’ve got you know over a billion people in the world of over six million now living in absolute poverty and half the world’s population living in very meagre situations.

ANDREW DENTON: It seems to be an insurmountable problem the question of over-population and over-consumption and that we have finite resources and that we’re finding more and more ways of using them. What is the hope?

BOB HAWKE: The answer to that question is how are developed nations going to be persuaded of the need for action? I mean it’s, how does the message get through? I mean you look in terms of political leadership. There are no great political leaders around.

ANDREW DENTON: We live also in an age of constant distraction where for a lot of people what may have happened to Britney Spears last night is far more interesting than . . .

BOB HAWKE: Yeah. Well it’s I mean I don’t want to be a media basher but there’s obviously the people who run the media and that’s public and private have got an enormous responsibility. I do despair when I see the prioritisation of the issues presented by the media. It’s as you say I mean I just literally cringe whenever I see the name Paris Hilton. Who wants to know about what bloody Paris Hilton is doing when you’ve got half the world living in, you know poverty? When you’ve got the potential for the world blowing itself up?

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON: You’ve referred a couple of times since we talked this afternoon to God. Your journey with faith�you were born into a very religious family.

BOB HAWKE: Yeah.

ANDREW DENTON: But you lost a sense of strict religious belief. Why was that?

BOB HAWKE: It started when I went to India in 19 end of 52. I went as a delegate to World Christian Youth Conference there and there were all these poverty stricken kids at the gate of this palatial place where we were feeding our face and I just had this struck by this enormous sense of irrelevance of religion to the needs of people and it started to unwind from that point but I’ve not become an atheist, I am an agnostic. I mean I just don’t know and I don’t think one should spend too much time thinking about it m simply because there are so much to be done now in the here and now.

ANDREW DENTON: Would you like there to be an afterlife?

BOB HAWKE: What I would say intellectually, if there is an afterlife I’m sure that reincarnation is part of it so that the only way I think about that in terms of afterlife is you know well what would you come back as?

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: What’s your bet?

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: Well I hope I’ve but according to Buddha’s philosophy if you’ve lived a good life now you gradually come up and up the scale until you reach the inevitable Darma world. I hope I’ve lived a good enough life not to sort of go backwards and come back as a caterpillar.

ANDREW DENTON: You’d hope to come back as a test cricketer I know.

[laugh]

BOB HAWKE: Or a good golfer.

[laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

BOB HAWKE: The sort of a bloke there that I’m reasonably pleasantly surprised in terms of how he’s how he’s sort of aging, and I certainly am aging but I feel good. The thing I couldn’t stand is if my mind went so I do at least a couple of cryptic crosswords a day and difficult Sudoku cause I genuinely believe that intellectual exercise is important.

ANDREW DENTON: I’m sure what you’ve seen happen with Hazel as with anyone close to you must have a powerful impact.

BOB HAWKE: Yes I’ve seen so many people including Hazel who’ve been afflicted by Alzheimer’s and forms of dementia and it’s so sad.

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: You know it is absolutely sad and I really can’t think of anything worse than having your mind go where you can’t think, connect and�

ANDREW DENTON: But will you still have a sense of you?

BOB HAWKE: A sense of yourself and a sense of your relationship to other people?

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: It’s death.

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: And it’s a premature death.

[Clip]

ANDREW DENTON: The question of loss is a very hard one and your relationship with Clem was so close. How did you deal with the loss of that man who was probably the greatest man in your life I think it’s fair to say.

BOB HAWKE: Yeah he was my best mate.

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: He was the perfect patient as said in the old people’s home that he was no bother, you know as I knew he wouldn’t be and he was so calm and peaceful about it all. So I had a sense of loss of course but it was right that he went then cause he was it was time for him to go. I knew it was the best thing for him to go. So I was at peace with him in that sense and we just said goodbye and he was, I guess, sure in his mind he’d see me again.

ANDREW DENTON: Mmm.

BOB HAWKE: I couldn’t have the same degree of assuredness but the important thing is that he’s always with me. I mean his impact upon me is always there.

ANDREW DENTON: I find with my father even though neither of us believe in an afterlife I still find myself sometimes thinking, I wonder where you are?

BOB HAWKE: [laugh]

ANDREW DENTON: Do you find that with Clem?

BOB HAWKE: No I don’t find myself thinking where you are. I just have a great when I think of him there’s just two emotions. One, what a great and decent man you were and thanks for being my dad.

ANDREW DENTON: Final question. To a young man, early 20s, the same age you were when you set out for Oxford, what advice would you give them about how to approach life?

BOB HAWKE: The thing I would stress first of all is education because education doesn’t finish at secondary school. Education is a lifelong thing so I’d say to them keep learning, keep learning, keep learning and secondly I would say, helping others to develop their potential is just about the most satisfying thing that you can do so just don’t think about advancing your own interest but in whatever way you can, try and help those around you. This is both the right and the good thing to do. Also it’ll make your own life more satisfying. I think those are the basic things I would say.