Bob Hawke may have 2020 vision, but he does not have 2020 hindsight. It is extraordinary that we listen to former politicians, especially ones that got the top job (I hesitate to call them leaders), who upon retirement suddenly find the vision that they lacked in office.
Anyone with the vaguest political memory would have blushed with embarrassment at Hawke’s inaugural speech to the 2020 Vision forum on Monday.
He called for a return to full employment. Yet this was the Prime Minister who allowed his Treasurer to put the fight against inflation ahead of full employment and who presided over the highest level of unemployment since World War II.
He called for Australians to be more flexible about job-sharing and to move away from the notion of a standard working week. Yet this was the former president of the ACTU who as Prime Minister permitted Australia to lag behind the rest of the world in workplace reform for fear of upsetting the union movement.
He said, “”Central to the restoration of national self-confidence is a proper reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.”
Yet this is the man who in Opposition in 1983 promised to give national land rights to Aborigines and then buckled in Government when faced with opposition from the state Labor Government in Western Australia headed by Brian Burke _ the man who so successfully organised ALP fund-raising from big business.
Small wonder then we find Hawke saying, “”One tier of government _ in my view state government _ has to go.” He dredged out his Boyer Lectures of 1979 in which he said the meanderings of British explorers last century should not be the basis of the structure of Australian Government.”
It is convenient for him in 1993 to reach back to the Boyer Lectures, skipping over his period in government. In government, of course, Hawke, repudiated much of what he said his Boyer Lectures, such as abolition of the states and the more overt socialism expressed in them. He said that with wider experience people’s views mature. (And mature back again, it would seem.)
He condemned the increasing number of politicians and parliaments. Yet his government gave the ACT a parliament and presided over an explosion of ministerial and political staffers
He quoted Yeats as saying: “”The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Well, Hawke at times certainly had passionate intensity.
He said our destiny ought to be shaped by the power of the people _ the producers, the poets, the playwrights, and punters, the parents, the pupils, the positive and the proud.
Under his government, however, these were the very people who lost power to the bureaucrats, the bunglers, big business and big unions.
Hawke says now: “”The root of the problem is that Australia has one too many tiers of government.”
That is a very convenient institutional scapegoat. It is a self-delusion to imagine that his government would have better if it had had more power. It would have had more power to be worse.
It would be nice to imagine that without the states the whole country would have the economy of Queensland, the cultural breadth of NSW and the political morality of South Australia. However, it is as likely the whole country would have had the economy of South Australia, the cultural breadth of Tasmania and political morality of Western Australia.
Federation has its ups and downs. For the expense of lack of uniformity you get the stimulus of competition and small-scale innovation. It is people as much as the system that matter.
Hawke, of course, is not on his own. It is almost a universal characteristic of former politicians to cast around for institutional excuses for their own failures and their own compromises. It is a pity the 2020 Vision forum cast around for a former politician to give him the opportunity.