Morrison chases history in the footsteps of Hawke

“While we talked, he kept reaching for the sun lotion, basting himself so he glistened like a turkey gobbler about to go into the oven. I couldn’t help but admire his capacity to stand back, look at himself and like what he saw.”

This priceless description of Bob Hawke is contained in former industry minister John Button’s autobiography, As It Happened. Little did anyone know at that time in early 1983 that within weeks of their meeting Hawke would be Labor party leader, prime minister five weeks after that, and by the end of the year would be paving the way for the transformation of the Australian economy.

Possessor of a formidable intellect and deep understanding of how Australia works, which he developed during a decade at the head of the trade union movement, Hawke was nevertheless a flawed man, with an overweening vanity bordering on narcissism. But he changed Australia for the better as Prime Minister, pumping new energy through the nation’s economic arteries.

A generation later, the question is whether Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison can perform a similar historic task. Australia is confronting its greatest crisis since Japan’s army swarmed south in early 1942, capturing Singapore in a jiffy, invading Papua New Guinea and bombing Darwin.

Despite an outstanding record so far in curbing the COVID-19 virus, the 2020-21 road to recovery is perilous. We are confronting a severe economic contraction, with soaring unemployment, and ballooning public and private debt, resulting from an enforced shutdown of large sections of the economy, and a (now being gradually dismantled) strict social distancing regime in the six states and two territories.

Just as Hawke back in the 80s reached out to business for help to “bring Australia together,” Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison is reaching out to the trade union movement to try and achieve the same cooperative result. Channelling Hawke’s words 37 years before, he said on Tuesday: “We now have a shared opportunity to fix systemic problems.” At a domestic level, they are/were in fact both channelling US President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Mao Zedong’s China by reaching out to ‘the other.’

Morrison has tasked Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter to come up with a plan to streamline the system and make Australia “fit for purpose” to survive and even prosper in a pestilence-ravaged world. Porter will chair five working groups to produce a JobMaker package including award simplification, enterprise agreements and enforcement, a fast-growing ‘gig’ economy, and work-place deals covering greenfields developments.

A big ask

Morrison’s plan is for Porter, who is also Attorney General, to report by September – when the government intends to take Australia off its $150 billion-plus of fiscal life support, including the JobKeeper program. The clear intent is that there will be compromise all round, with unions agreeing to a streamlining and simplification of the rules, and employers putting more corporate skin in the game. The hoped-for result is that we’ll all just get on with it. It’s a big ask.

Vague and feel-good as some of the rhetoric is/was, the stakes were high/could not be higher now. At the same time, a cursory examination suggests the two key figures – Hawke in 1983 and Morrison 2020 – could not be more different.

Hawke was a Rhodes scholar, long-term ACTU advocate and then ACTU president for a decade before entering Parliament in 1980. A brilliant, though mercurial, operator, he hailed from the great larrikin tradition of Australian politics, a coterie that included former Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, former Liberal Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, and Labor’s Eddie Ward.

Hawke was also a notorious womaniser and a serial drunk. At times, he seemed to be dancing on the lip of the volcano, but he never quite fell in. Later, as the ultimate prize loomed, Hawke forsook the grog and womanising, and became one of Australia’s most successful prime ministers.

Morrison is the upright son of a NSW Police superintendant and local councillor, who worked his way through industry and tourism groups and as a NSW Liberal party functionary, to become an MP in 2007 and Prime Minister 11 years later. He leads an exemplary home life, and is an instinctive political and social conservative, abstaining from the parliamentary vote to legalise same sex marriage at the end of 2017.

Closer examination reveals some intriguing similarities between the two. Morrison and his wife, Jenny, belong to the Hillsong evangelical church in Sydney. Bob Hawke was the son of a Presbyterian minister, and went through an evangelical phase in his late teens, even attending an evangelical conference in India before taking up his scholarship to study at Oxford University. There he distinguished himself by setting a beer-drinking record.

'Blood on his hands'

There are also some similarities in their approach to politics. Hawke came across as a friendly but he could be ruthless. After destroying Bill Hayden’s leadership of the ALP, he turned apoplectic when asked by the insouciant TV reporter, the late Richard Carleton, if he had “blood on his hands.”

Morrison is also a ruthless operator, and has been accused of being Machiavellian by his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull. Big and bluff, he is, like Hawke, a sport tragic and obsessed with his beloved Cronulla Sharks rugby league team. Bob Hawke was more of a cricket fan.

Both also have/had an ambivalent relationship with the media. Hawke enjoyed enormous media coverage as ACTU president, with his ready quotes, flamboyance, and combative demeanour. But there were also frequent, at times drunken, outbursts. Morrison has a marketing background, and enjoys good relations with some journalists.

However, like Hawke, he can be combative. As Immigration Minister, he shut down questions about naval interception of refugee boats approaching Australia from Indonesia by saying it was an “operational” or “on water“ issue. Since becoming Prime Minister, he has dismissed probing questions as coming from the “bubble.” He refused to acknowledge he had put on the invitation list his Hillsong pastor, Brian Houston, as a guest to an official White House Dinner, saying the question was based on “gossip” before finally relenting. Houston was in fact vetoed from being a guest by the US side.

What both have/had in common is an innate capacity to break out of the ideological box of their own political parties. Like no other Labor leader Hawke understood business and related well to significant corporate figures in the 80s like TNT’s Sir Peter Abeles and media moguls Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch.

Morrison is a political conservative, but at the end of the day he, too, is a pragmatist. He has a political persona – and, crucially, a post-election victory and post COVID-19 authority - that makes him more able to deal with the fact that the pestilence is pushing the world into a post ‘Washington consensus’ view on economic policy. The final contours have not been settled, but the state will be more involved in the short-to-medium term.

The great difference between the two is context. Hawke was elected at the tail end of a recession, exacerbated by the seeming economic policy paralysis of the Malcolm Fraser-led Coalition government and the sudden end of a late 70s-early 80s mining investment boom.

But the challenge was a veritable walk in the park compared with Scott Morrison and his government dealing with the aftermath of the COVID-19 contagion.