RECOMMENDED COVERAGE
RECOMMENDED COVERAGE
HAWKE CALLS ON POLITICIANS, BUSINESS AND UNIONS TO WORK TOGETHER
'Scrap states' to drive reform: Bob Hawke
The former Labor prime minister said it was of lasting regret that he had been unable to forge agreement on a national framework for indigenous land rights while in government, mainly because of the opposition of the West Australian Labor government led by Brian Burke.
"Of course you would be better off without the states," the former prime minister told The Australian in a wide-ranging interview to coincide with the release of cabinet documents from his first two full years as prime minister.
"We have a set of governments that represent the meanderings of the British explorers over the face of the continent over 200 years ago. They drew lines on a map and then said that is how Australia is going to be governed. If you were drawing up a system of government for Australia today, in ideal terms, what we have got now is the last thing you would have."
In his 1979 Boyer lectures, Mr Hawke, who was then ACTU president, argued for the abolition of state governments.
"Land rights is certainly an area where we could have achieved more," Mr Hawke said. "It was very difficult because this was a states issue and all the states had different positions.
"There was a particular problem in Western Australia. While we got up a model which said this is the way we should go, we were unable to get agreement because in Western Australia they found it a very difficult political issue that was being used against them by conservatives."
The period of the cabinet papers release includes the 1984 election, when the government was returned with a reduced parliamentary majority of 16 seats,
down from 25, despite the parliament being enlarged from 125 seats to 148 seats. During the campaign, Mr Hawke, while playing cricket in a politicians versus the press match, was hit in the face with a cricket ball, shattering his glasses. "It was just the worst period of my life," Mr Hawke reveals. "I was in physical agony the whole of the election campaign. Literally. There were pieces of glass that had gone into my eye. I was just in physical pain the whole time. I also had the emotional problem in that I had found out about my daughter's heroin addiction. I've never had such a bad period in my life."
In February 1985, the government faced a backlash from the Labor backbench over plans to monitor the testing of the US intercontinental MX missile. Mr Hawke was able to negotiate a withdrawal of Australia's involvement with his long-time friend, US secretary of state George Shultz.
Mr Hawke said there was still an element of "anti-Americanism" in sections of the Labor caucus at the time, which had also flared at the party's 1984 national conference over uranium mining.
"You had this traditional area of anti-Americanism," Mr Hawke said, "and you had a lot of the emotional garbage around uranium mining and nuclear weapons. It all sort of fused around this issue."
Reflecting on his government's reforms following the national economic summit held in 1983, Mr Hawke said today's business and union leaders could work closer with government.
"You can never have too much consultation," he said. "I was very much dedicated to bringing people together. I had always taken the view, and still take the view, that ignorance is the enemy of good policy.
"I got big business, small business, unions, state government, local government, churches and welfare organisations together. I got Treasury to brief them so they understood what the opportunities and the challenges were. It was on that basis that we got a mandate for change."
Mr Hawke also highlighted the effort that he and Mr Keating went to educate the public on the merits of reform and win support for that reform.
"We didn't just come in with proposals for economic reform, we brought the Australian people along with us," Mr Hawke said.
"As a result of the way we did it, not just the (national economic) summit but the continual education, we had the best, the most economically literate electorate in the world. We had an educative process and people came to understand that what had been appropriate in the past was not only inappropriate now in some cases, but counterproductive."
No comments:
Post a Comment