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

Fraser used the ongoing revelations of Cairns and Connor’s involvement in the procurement of foreign loans without proper authorisation as justification for refusing to support the appropriation Bills that accompanied Hayden’s Budget in the Senate. Unlike in 1974, Whitlam was not prepared to call an election because the opposition was blocking supply. He argued that a government that had recently been re-elected, with a clear majority in the House of Representatives, was entitled to go on. The governor-general, Sir John Kerr, disagreed, using his reserve vice-regal powers to dismiss the government in a way that had never been done at the federal level in Australian history. Hayden warned Whitlam of his concerns that Kerr would dismiss the government after he became suspicious during an audience with the governor-general. But Whitlam dismissed Hayden’s apprehension, declaring that Kerr ‘wouldn’t have the guts’ to sack the government. Caretaker prime minister Fraser would go on to call an election for 13 December 1975. The result would be a disaster of historic proportions for the ALP.

Afterwards

Hayden was the only Labor member of the House of Representatives in Queensland to hold his seat in the 1975 election. And he only narrowly won the seat of Oxley. Whitlam checked with both Hayden and Bob Hawke as to whether either of them would like the leadership of the party before he recontested it in the aftermath of the election. Hayden was exhausted from his tumultuous period as treasurer and declined the opportunity. Hawke was not in parliament, so any immediate transfer of power to him was not possible. Whitlam subsequently defeated Lionel Bowen for the leadership by thirty-six votes to fourteen, with Frank Crean winning eleven votes.

Hayden decided to take some time on the backbench after the bruising experience of government and electoral defeat, but he returned to the front bench when a vacancy arose. Under the rules at that time, the ALP leadership was declared automatically vacant mid-term in 1977, and Hayden decided to challenge Whitlam, largely with a view to consolidating his leadership before Bob Hawke’s inevitable arrival in the parliament. Whitlam’s view was that having declined the leadership when it was offered to him in 1975, Hayden was now going to have to fight for it. Whitlam went on to beat Hayden by two votes. If Hayden had won, it is conceivable that Labor would have done considerably better than it ultimately did at the 1977 election, and it would have given Hayden a much better position from which to contest the 1980 election.

Whitlam resigned the party leadership after losing the 1977 election and Hayden was subsequently elected in his place, beating Lionel Bowen by thirty-six votes to twenty-eight. Hayden led Labor to the 1980 federal election, securing a swing of more than 4 per cent and a net gain of thirteen seats. Although Labor’s two-party preferred vote was a respectable 49.6 per cent, the Coalition’s seventy-four seats comfortably bested Labor’s fifty-one seats. Labor had been tracking to perform considerably better, and perhaps even win, when an effective scare campaign run by Fraser about the potential for a capital gains tax under Labor robbed Hayden of momentum in the final week of the campaign. The ALP’s concerns about Hayden’s popularity, however, had already been underlined by the decision to have Hayden, Hawke and the extremely popular premier of NSW, Neville Wran, campaign as a leadership triumvirate, with Hawke and Wran receiving equal billing in the party’s campaign material.

Hawke challenged Hayden for the party leadership in 1982, but he fell short by five votes. Hayden was then one of three central players on one of the most dramatic days in the history of federal politics, when he decided to resign the leadership in Hawke’s favour, noting in the announcement of his resignation that a ‘drover’s dog’ could lead Labor to victory in the 1983 election, but that he accepted Hawke would do better. Fraser, meanwhile, unaware of Hayden’s resignation, was simultaneously advising the governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen, to call an election for 5 March. Fraser thought he was pre-empting a likely move to install the more popular Hawke as leader. In fact, it was Hawke he faced during the election campaign. Labor under Hawke won an extra twenty-four seats in the House of Representatives on a swing of 3.6 per cent—less than the swing Hayden had achieved in 1980, but enough to take it into government.

Hawke gave Hayden his choice of portfolios after the election victory, and Hayden chose foreign affairs. There does not appear to have been any inclination on the part of either man for Hayden to return to the Treasury portfolio, with the only discussion being whether Paul Keating or Ralph Willis should take the job. So Hayden joined Percy Spender, Richard Spender and Les Bury as the only Australians to have served as both foreign minister and treasurer without becoming prime minister. He performed creditably in the foreign affairs field until 1988, when Hawke appointed him governor-general. Hayden followed only Lord Casey in having been treasurer and then governor-general, though he was the first (and will likely be the only) Labor treasurer to occupy Government House. Hayden’s term as governor-general was also generally regarded as a success—although he caused controversy by becoming the first governor-general to affirm his oath rather than swear on the Bible—and the Hawke and Keating governments extended his term through to 1996.

Following his retirement, Hayden published his autobiography, in which he (to a degree) defended the actions of Sir John Kerr in dismissing the Whitlam government. He also wrote for the right-wing magazine Quadrant, influenced no doubt by the fact that his former adviser Paddy McGuinness was its editor.

Bill Hayden was made a life member of the Queensland branch of the Australian Labor Party in 2007.

An Evaluation

More than any other treasurer except Theodore, Hayden’s story is one of what could have been. He was the best qualified of all the Cabinet to be treasurer, and it is a tragedy that the rigour