The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

was the nub of the matter, and Cairns was too relaxed as treasurer about seeing this happen.

Cairns’ record as our most qualified but most unsuccessful treasurer reminds me of the British MP who once told me over a beer in the House of Commons bar that ‘politics isn’t about intelligence, it’s about judgement’. It’s actually about both. Jim Cairns’ period as treasurer is a powerful reminder of what happens when that office holder has one characteristic but not the other.

8

WILLIAM GEORGE (BILL) HAYDEN

A Treasurer Too Late

Born: January 1933, Brisbane

Treasurer: 6 June 1975 – 11 November 1975

IF JIM CAIRNS was singularly unsuited to the role of treasurer, Bill Hayden was one of the most prepared and well-matched men to hold the office. Indeed, if Hayden had been made treasurer much earlier, the history of the Whitlam government would have been very different—Whitlam acknowledged this in 1975, saying that it would have been better if Hayden had been treasurer from 1972. Hayden brought discipline, toughness and a well-developed understanding of economics to the role. It was not enough to save the Whitlam government, but his legacy is substantial given he was treasurer for only six months. His sole Budget dramatically changed the trajectory of what had been exponential growth in government spending, and his approach to economic management became a role model for future Labor governments, both state and federal. Hayden also kept his sense of social justice at the forefront of his deliberations, improving the fairness of the tax system and protecting the indexation of welfare payments.

Hayden restored a professional relationship with the Treasury, repairing what had been so badly damaged over the previous three years. He also established a more rigorous process for budget preparation. He was the first treasurer to chair an Expenditure Review Committee to check spending line by line, a process that remains in place to this day.

The Liberal Party was concerned that Hayden’s ascension to the treasurership and his sensible budgetary approach might mean that the Whitlam government would be able to climb out of the political abyss.1 It is possible that this concern sharpened the determination of the Malcolm Fraser–led opposition to adopt unconventional means to blast the government from office, using the Khemlani Affair as justification for blocking supply. Hayden believes this to be the case.2 He also believes that given a full term and another two years in office, he would have been able to turn the economy around. Given the dire global economic circumstances of the time, it is not clear that this would have occurred. There is little doubt, though, that he would have been able to further repair the federal Budget and, in doing so, markedly improve the economic record of the Whitlam government.

Beginnings

Bill Hayden was born in 1933 in Brisbane, the son of George Hayden and Violet Newbury. George was an American merchant seaman who appears to have jumped ship in Sydney early in the century. Not much is known of his life in America, but in Australia he became a piano tuner. Hayden and his three siblings were raised in poverty.

Hayden attended Brisbane State High School without making much headway academically, and he joined the Queensland Police Force in 1953 (he would remain a policeman until his election to parliament in 1961). When he sat the exam to become a first-class constable, he topped the state. This reassured him that he had academic potential, despite his lacklustre educational start. He began preparing for his matriculation through the State Secondary Correspondence School, studying during breaks on the beat in Redbank, Queensland.

Hayden developed an interest in politics and, in 1961, he nominated for Labor preselection for the seat of Oxley, which had been held by the then Liberal minister for health, Dr Don Cameron, since 1949. Labor had not represented the area covered by the seat of Oxley in federal parliament since 1909. But Hayden was running not so much with an expectation of winning as to build his experience—his hope was to study law and political science, and he thought that running for an unwinnable seat would be a good way of learning about politics. This was to be no normal election, however. The Menzies government had brought about an economic downturn through a credit squeeze (a reduction in the availability of credit), causing unemployment to top 2 per cent—an unacceptably high result by the economic and political standards of the day. ALP deputy leader Gough Whitlam made a special project of campaigning extensively in Queensland in order to pick up seats there, and the result was that the 1961 federal election was the closest up to that point in history (it would remain so until the 2010 election). Liberal Jim Killen’s victory in the Brisbane seat of Moreton, which was finally declared several days after the poll, was the decisive one. Labor won a majority of the two-party preferred vote, but not a majority of voting members. Labor had won the seats of Canberra and the Northern Territory, but under the law in force at the time, members representing territories did not receive a vote on confidence matters, hence Menzies was sworn in as prime minister for another term despite the Coalition not winning the popular vote or having a majority of elected members.

Hayden had campaigned hard and strategically. The swing to Labor across Queensland was 10.5 per cent. The swing to Hayden in Oxley was 11 per cent, giving him 52.6 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. At twenty-eight, Hayden became the youngest member of the House of Representatives. But although young and naive—Hayden’s plane trip to Canberra to be sworn in as a member of parliament was his first ever flight—he didn’t hesitate to interject when prime minister Menzies was speaking. Menzies seemed to resent him for this, referring to him as ‘the boy delinquent from Queensland’.3

As a backbencher, Hayden enrolled in a part-time economics degree at the University of Queensland. He’d switched the focus of his academic