Parliament resumed for a week immediately after the by-election, and there was relief and mild hope at the Christmas drinks in my office for colleagues. It proved to be a false dawn, for the by-election outcome had been precisely the wake-up call which the Labor Party required to galvanise the forces needed to change its leadership.
For me, the beginning of 1983 was a sad one. My mother died on 9 January, just a few weeks after her 83rd birthday. Mum had survived my father by more than 27 years, and had lived for most of that time with extremely good health. She had taken a quiet pleasure out of my political success, but with the typical caution of a person of her generation, who felt that success for themselves or their family was always somewhat unexpected. Mum’s tenacity and single-minded fidelity to things in which she believed had left its mark on me.
My parents’ lives had been a world away from my own, and even more so from those of my children. My mother was buried from the Earlwood Methodist (by then Uniting) Church, which had been such an important part of our earlier lives. My three brothers had each married there, and my father also had been buried from there.
It soon became obvious that Malcolm Fraser had not lost his desire to have an early election. He believed it was only a matter of time before Hawke replaced Hayden as Labor leader, and was determined that the poll should take place before this occurred, leaving him facing a much stronger opponent. During his convalescence he had developed a campaign theme, based on the belief that Australia could not wait for the rest of the world to deliver it economic recovery. It was something he pounded home to me when I visited him on holiday in January. The election slogan became ‘We’re not waiting for the world', complete with lyrics sung by the popular Colleen Hewitt.
Our January holiday at Hawks Nest was interrupted by my having to go to Canberra on 2 February for a meeting with the major banks to discuss issues relating to the proposed entry of foreign banks into Australia. That was a useful blind for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Tony Eggleton, the party’s federal director, and Peter Nixon, whose advice Fraser always respected. Fraser wanted a poll on 5 March. He remained preoccupied with the possibility of Hawke replacing Hayden and intensely pessimistic about rural Australia, speaking as if he believed that the drought would never break. The mood at that point was optimistic about our prospects, due to the Flinders result and the belief that Fraser would face Hayden. Eggleton said to both Nixon and me, ‘I think we should win.’
I returned to Hawks Nest that evening, and over dinner I disclosed our plans to Janette, including that Fraser would announce the election the following day. In response she said, ‘Are you sure that they won’t change leaders on you?’ I said that that was highly unlikely. Janette’s assessment had been based on a most equivocal response she had heard Lionel Bowen, the then deputy Labor leader, give to a question about the leadership on radio earlier that day.
The very next day, 3 February, Janette’s prophecy was realised, as we learned listening to the radio on a drive to the beautiful Myall Lakes, not far from Hawks Nest. In a highly dramatic turn of events, Hayden, that morning, had succumbed to the pressure of his colleagues and stood down from the leadership in favour of Hawke. What it meant to the political landscape was best summarised by a remark of another Hawks Nest holidaymaker who ran a small business. Passing me outside our unit that evening he simply said, ‘So we’ve got an election. Now you’ve blown it.’ He was a Liberal supporter, concerned that the change to Hawke had made it very likely that the Government would be defeated.
I spoke to Fraser after he had held his news conference and knew that he would face Hawke and not Hayden. He sounded upbeat and remarked that we would be knocking off two Labor leaders at the same time. Yet, he, most of all, must have been totally unsettled by what the Labor Party had done. The truth was that in the space of just 24 hours Fraser had lost control of events. Labor had struck with remarkable boldness, and the dynamic of Australian politics had been turned on its head.
Janette and I both knew how much Hawke’s accession had changed things and it was very likely curtains for the Government. Australia was in recession, and Bob Hawke had strong public support. We pinned our hopes on the possibility of Hawke blowing up under the pressure of a campaign, with the Australian people deciding that he was too volatile to be entrusted with the prime ministership. He had already obliged with his bad-tempered response to Richard Carleton’s question on Nationwide: ‘Mr Hawke, could I ask you whether you feel a little embarrassed tonight at the blood that’s on your hands?’2 That proved to be wishful thinking. Apart from that intemperate outburst on the day that Hayden had quit, Hawke was a model of balance and restraint during the campaign. He gathered strength as the days went by. The switch had a near-euphoric effect on large sections of the public.
It was impossible not to feel sorry for Hayden. I sent him a personal note expressing the empathy of a political rival who guessed the agony through which he would be passing. There was one especially poignant TV image of Hayden looking on as a quite adoring crowd of people mobbed Hawke at some public gathering.
Despite this, it took a while into the campaign before I accepted the strong likelihood of defeat. As a political competitor, that, after all, is a natural state. One keeps hoping and fighting until the end. If nothing else, Australian politics had proved to be remarkably unpredictable during the previous year. A lot of my mood flowed from my respect for Fraser’s campaigning abilities. He had won three elections and, up until then, had been the most successful Liberal leader since Menzies.
In an election campaign, there are two ways of testing public opinion. There are the published and private polls and then there is what I call the field evidence. The published polls were bad, having strengthened for Labor once Hawke took over. I learned, after the election, that Gary Morgan had done some private polling for Fraser two weeks out from the election which showed that the Government was in a hopeless position.
The field evidence was uniformly bad. The day after the campaign launch in Melbourne, I flew to Brisbane for a small business luncheon in support of Don Cameron, the member for Fadden. It was a poorly attended event; there was a marked lack of enthusiasm, which troubled me, given that small business was part of our traditional base. Later, passing through Tullamarine Airport, I was stopped by a party activist from Casey, a Melbourne electorate held by Peter Falconer. He was in small business and told me how badly we were doing and that high interest rates had done great damage with small-business proprietors. Grant Chapman, the Liberal member for Kingston in South Australia, invited me to address a public meeting in his electorate, which three people attended. Whilst public meetings at 8 o’clock on a weekday night had long since ceased to be flavour of the month, this was ominous. Cameron, Falconer and Chapman all lost their seats in the 1983 election.
Both Doug Anthony and I wanted Fraser to take up an offer from Rupert Murdoch, who then owned the Ten Network, for a debate with Hawke. The three of us thought that it could help Malcolm, but he refused.
I spent election day visiting polling booths in Bennelong, thanking my helpers for their support, but sensing by then that the election was gone. We gathered at our Wollstonecraft home to watch the results. Once the result was clear, I rang Fraser, who was plainly shattered by the outcome. It was a difficult conversation. He was the fallen giant, who had for so long seemed invincible.
Hawke’s win in 1983 has been the best of any Labor leader at a change of government. He won a majority of 25 in a house of only 125. During the campaign, Hawke had captured the imagination of many Australians with his talk of bringing people together. In contrast, Malcolm Fraser often sounded shrill, with exaggerated claims that Australians should put their money under the bed if Labor won.
Overwhelmingly, though, the Coalition lost because Australia was in deep recession, and Labor was led by a person in Bob Hawke whose blend of larrikinism and intelligence had long appealed to lots of Australians. The fates had conspired to deliver Hawke the leadership at the