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

Parliament House corridor, Whitlam brusquely told Keating, ‘You’ve been sacked,’ leaving Keating to wonder what he had done wrong. Keating caught up with the news quickly enough to introduce the now former prime minister on the steps of parliament, where Whitlam would proffer his famous ‘Kerr’s cur’ speech.

The year had been a big one for Keating. Besides going in and out of the Cabinet, he had also married Annita van Iersel, an Alitalia flight attendant whom he had become besotted with on a flight to Europe.

Leadership Speculation

Following Labor’s defeat in the December 1975 federal election, Keating briefly became the shadow minister for agriculture and then the shadow minister for minerals and energy. In many ways, it was this period that he spent as Labor’s spokesman on this important sector that was seminal in the maturation of his economic thinking. He shared Connor’s vision for the development of Australia’s minerals sector, and he spent a considerable amount of time getting to know the chief executives of the mining companies and familiarising himself with the operation of their businesses.

Importantly for the development of Australia’s natural gas resources, Keating strongly backed the granting of export licences for the North West Shelf, giving the investors much-needed certainty that they could allocate the necessary millions without the risk that a change of government would endanger their investment. He also strongly supported a change in ALP policy to allow uranium exports, as part of his efforts to have the Labor Party unambiguously embrace economic growth. He used his customary mastery of acerbic words as he cast the opponents of this policy within the party as ‘Balmain basket-weavers’. He showed that he was prepared to promote policies not necessarily popular with the sector he was interacting with when he called for a profits tax on high-earning resource projects in 1978.

Almost inevitably for a party in long-term opposition, leadership speculation was never far away for the ALP between 1975 and 1983. Whitlam continued to lead the party after he had opened the door to either Hayden or Hawke taking over from him in 1975, and both men had rejected the opportunity—Hayden had retired to the backbench to recover from the trauma of being a minister in the Whitlam government. Whitlam had then defeated Lionel Bowen in the post-election leadership ballot.

Under the party rules in place at the time, an automatic leadership ballot was triggered early in 1977. Keating strongly encouraged Hayden to challenge, telling him that ‘Hawke’s not in Parliament and Whitlam’s not taking us anywhere. You should run for the leadership.’7 He supported Hayden’s subsequent leadership bid, which finally resulted in Hayden attaining the leadership after the 1977 election. Keating was a Hayden loyalist. When Hawke lobbied Keating to get behind his leadership bid after he entered parliament, Keating told him, ‘The first Labor leader I tear down will be the one I replace.’8 Keating knew it was too early for him to run for the leadership, but he was making a clear long-term claim.

By 1982 Keating’s faction was moving to Hawke, even if Keating was not. The faction convenor, Graham Richardson, had become Hawke’s numbers man, and a number of marginal-seat MPs and candidates from Keating’s group had already moved to support Hawke. As the equal most senior member of the NSW Right along with Lionel Bowen, Keating perceived an obligation to represent the views of this faction, and accordingly announced his group’s support for Hawke two days before the ballot that determined the result of the July 1982 challenge to Hayden. Keating, a political realist hungry for power, had also accepted that Hawke had a better chance of convincingly winning the looming federal election than Hayden did. Nonetheless, he was a reluctant convert, agonising over his responsibilities to Hayden. Even after his switch of support, he was not an active campaigner for Hawke in the ballot and did not attempt to influence other Caucus members.

Hayden defeated Hawke by five votes, enough to survive but not enough to be secure. In January 1983, Hayden attempted to secure his leadership and bolster his front-line election team by removing Ralph Willis as shadow treasurer and replacing him with Keating. Hayden’s intentions were twofold: to bolster the political firepower of the shadow economic team by making the Labor Party’s most effective communicator its leading economic spokesman, and to try to placate the NSW Right by having its most senior members as deputy leader (Bowen) and shadow treasurer (Keating). Hayden achieved his first aim, but making Keating shadow treasurer did little to bolster his support in the Caucus.

Keating had little chance to make his mark as shadow treasurer. One of the most dramatic days in Australian political history unfolded on 2 February 1983. On that day, as prime minister Malcolm Fraser was being driven to Yarralumla to ask the governor-general for an election that would see him take on Hayden, Hayden was simultaneously accepting the advice of close backer John Button that his leadership was unsustainable and that he should stand aside for Hawke in the best interests of the party. By the time Fraser was ready to publicly announce the election date of 5 March, Hawke had been installed as leader of the opposition.

The ensuing election campaign was dominated by Hawke. The Fraser government was unable mount a persuasive economic case given the deep 1982 recession and the lack of progress in fighting inflation. Hawke, on the other hand, captured the public’s imagination with his promise of ‘Recovery, Reconstruction and Reconciliation’. The pledge of an economic summit and reconciliation was a direct antidote to the divisions that had occurred because of the blocking of supply and the government’s dismissal in 1975, and the subsequent years of economic and industrial disputation.

Labor achieved a substantial 25-seat majority on 5 March. The new administration was initially known as the Hawke government. It would never be known as the Hawke–Bowen government but would instead morph into the Hawke–Keating government, long before Keating had become prime minister.

In the days following the election, however,