Bob Hawke
Bob Hawke was prime minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991, the trade-union president who had held a world record for drinking a yard of beer at Oxford, took the Labor leadership a month before the election of March 1983 and won it, and with his treasurer Paul Keating remade the Australian economy: the dollar floated in December 1983, the banks opened to foreign competition, the tariffs cut, the prices and incomes accord with the unions that held wages down in exchange for the social wage of Medicare and superannuation, and the summit politics of consensus that made him the most popular prime minister the polls had measured. He won four elections and was removed by Keating in a party-room vote in December 1991. He was born in Bordertown in South Australia in 1929, the son of a Congregational minister, was a Rhodes scholar, and joined the Australian Council of Trade Unions as its advocate in 1958, arguing the wage cases before the arbitration commission. He was its president from 1969 to 1980, the most famous man in the country, a drinker and a womaniser who gave both up for the leadership, and entered parliament in 1980. Hayden resigned the Labor leadership for him on the morning Fraser called the election, saying a drover's dog could have won it. The government's method was the accord and the summit, the economic summit of April 1983 that brought business and unions to the parliament, and the deregulation that Keating drove and Hawke sold. He wept on television over his daughter's heroin addiction and over Tiananmen, and let the Chinese students stay. He stopped the Franklin dam, gave the Uluru title back, sent ships to the Gulf war, and fought the pilots' strike of 1989 with the air force. The recession of 1990, which Keating said Australia had to have, and the Kirribilli agreement to hand over that Hawke then would not honour, brought the challenge. He lost the second ballot 56 to 51 on 19 December 1991 and left parliament in February. He made money in business, married his biographer, and died in Sydney in May 2019 two days before the election Labor was expected to win and lost.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Australian
- Roles: prime minister, trade unionist, politician
