Hawke showed Whitlam how to lead It's the economy, stupid ... The new prime minister, Bob Hawke, arrives at his national economic summit at Parliament House in 1983. The Hawke government took office 30 years ago, on Friday, March 11, 1983, after a double-dissolution election on March 5. It was little more than a decade since Gough Whitlam had picked up the reins of government, and just over seven years since Whitlam's government had been displaced so dramatically in the great parliamentary confrontation of October-November 1975. Both were Labor governments but their performance and, more especially, their conduct and operation, is more a matter of contrast than comparison. That this is so is not a matter of accident. As Bob Hawke himself wrote, reflecting on the speed with which Whitlam took office with a two-man administration: "I had no intention of imitating the frenetic early days of the Whitlam government." Whitlam considered himself bound, chapter and verse, by the mandate, the party's platform and the policy speech - the old and new testaments respectively, as Kim Beazley snr expressed it. Hawke, on the other hand, felt no such constraint. When alerted by the Treasury of the size of the impending deficits of 1982-83 and 1983-84, and the counsel of then Treasury secretary John Stone that there was "no room for profligacy," Hawke was immediately "painfully aware of the implications for our program, and for our economic management of the country." Privately, according to his biographer and wife, Blanche d'Alpuget, he soon "decided to jettison most of the spending promises in Labor's platform." Hawke gave highest priority to establishing his government's credentials in managing the economy and in security matters, two fields in which the Whitlam record had been conspicuously wobbly. The Treasury news was a "huge economic headache" for the prime minister-elect. But, in one sense, it was "political gold" - it provided a "huge stick" with which to beat the Coalition. The double-dissolution election gave Labor a far greater majority in the House of Representatives than it had secured under Whitlam (25 for Hawke; nine for Whitlam). The Senate, in which the Australian Democrats held sway, was far more manageable than that which the Whitlam government inherited, where Labor, without a majority, was buffeted by the combined forces of the Coalition and the Democratic Labor Party. Whitlam had come to Canberra on the Sunday afternoon following the election like a victorious Roman general relishing a triumph. In reality, all he could boast was a Pyrrhic victory: office, undoubtedly, but power? For his part, Hawke, together with several senior colleagues, was already there, having claimed victory at the National Tally Room itself on election night. Within little more than 12 hours of the polls closing, the new government was getting down to business. Whitlam's immediate preoccupation was foreign policy, in particular some upcoming votes in the General Assembly of the United Nations. More than a day elapsed before he had the briefest of meetings with Treasury secretary Sir Frederick Wheeler, bearer of grim tidings about the nation's economic prospects. Hawke had early discussions about the transition and organisation of government with senior officials of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. But by early afternoon, in an unlikely setting - the saloon bar at the Lakeside Hotel - incoming ministers and sundry advisers were deep in discussion with Stone, who had been Treasury secretary since 1979, and Treasury deputy secretary Dick Rye, ostensibly about the Prices and Incomes Accord that Labor was negotiating with the trade unions, but actually about a run on the currency. In Sydney, later in the day, there were discussions with the Reserve Bank, which from the start had argued for an early and substantial devaluation. This eventually took place a few days after the election while the Fraser government was still officially in office. The Whitlam government, as already alluded to, arrived in office with a massive program to which it seemed absolutely committed come what may. Extensive as the program was, it gave little attention to the economy or to the means whereby the very large augmentation of public spending was to be financed. Nor had much thought gone into organisational arrangements for the new government, and what little there had been was unhelpful and, indeed, negative. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this facet of the Whitlam plans was the decision of the caucus to maintain a ministry of 27 and to revert to the pre-1956 situation in which the ministry and the cabinet were co-terminous. A particular advantage of the incoming Hawke government was experience. Four of its ministers had held office in the Whitlam government, though, in the case of treasurer Paul Keating, only for a matter of weeks. Another 12 had been in Parliament in those fateful years. The new prime minister himself had seen the predecessor Labor government at close quarters, both as the Australian Council of Trade Unions president and as the Labor Party's national president. Yet others had also seen the government close-up, as ministerial staff or, in Kim Beazley jnr's case, from a family angle. Generationally, the Whitlam government was very much a product of the 1950s and the long years of opposition - in the case of many of the senior ministers, bitterly divided opposition. Nearly half of them had even sat in Parliament during the flawed leadership of Dr H. V. Evatt (1951-60). Hawke's ministry was much more a product of post-Menzies politics; it is far from inaccurate to think of them as Whitlam's children. The Labor split was history to many, and they had had at least some taste of government. They knew government was better than opposition and, now that they had recovered office, they were not in any mood to surrender it easily. Many may have been admirers of Whitlam but they had no illusions about his talent for cabinet government. In the view of Hawke's health minister, Neal Blewett, "most subscribed to the demonology which saw him as the chief architect in his government's demise." Through party processes it had been decided to revert to the Whitlam formula where the cabinet and ministry were one and the same. Blewett's opinion in 1982 was that it was "unlikely that a Labor caucus would tolerate any formal distinction between Labor ministers." Yet no one in the caucus demurred when Hawke decided to adopt a cabinet/ministry structure in the Coalition fashion, nor to his intention to decide which ministers would be in cabinet. This represented a thus-far permanent change in Labor practices in government. Hawke was likewise not much in awe of other cherished Labor traditions, such as what Blewett described as the "sovereignty of the caucus," whereby cabinet needs the "specific approval of the caucus for its major schemes." This doctrine had damaged the Whitlam government and had been seriously destructive of the Scullin Labor government during the Depression years. Hawke nevertheless insisted that cabinet solidarity applied in the caucus as elsewhere. Despite some agonising at the time by sympathetic academic commentators, especially in relation to non-cabinet ministers, this has proven a durable change (perhaps too durable) in national Labor governments. Again, it was not coincidence. According to Hawke: "If we were to manage the economy efficiently, we had to manage ourselves competently. Here again, the Whitlam government was an object lesson in what not to do. Whitlam presided over a cabinet which was in a permanent shambles ... far too big and unwieldy ... the government was continuously rent by a lack of cabinet solidarity. The making and unmaking of policy was conducted in the media with maximum bloodshed for the government and the party. A major legacy of Bill Hayden's period as Labor leader - from late 1977 until early 1983 - was priority given to economic management and financial responsibility. This sat well with the dispositions of the new prime minister. There was little argument about the key role soon played by the expenditure review committee of cabinet in scrutinising public spending and related matters (as it happens, the committee was a legacy from the late Whitlam period of government which had proven a permanent addition). The new ministry was instinctively suspicious of attempts to resuscitate Whitlamism. Senator Peter Walsh reports that Tom Uren, the ministerial chief of the great bureaucratic icon of the Whitlam government, the Department of Urban and Regional Development, "diligently set about using his minor portfolios to rebuild his old Urban and Regional Development empire, in which much of the Whitlam government's most financially disastrous monument-building in social engineering had been incubated." Another, the minister for education and youth affairs, Susan Ryan, was cast as an "unreconstructed Whitlamite" who refused to accept responsibility for financial targets. After the exchange-rate question had been settled, at least for a time, Hawke, with his preoccupation with "reconciliation, recovery, reconstruction," turned his attention to general economic issues, which he planned to address through the medium of a national economic summit. It met in April 1983, despite opposition, in the chamber of the House of Representatives. The national economic summit brought together many of the key figures in Australian industry, business and commerce, including the unions, as well as state and local government, and welfare agencies. There has been much debate, then and later, about its effectiveness. In Hawke's view, the government and bureaucracy developed "an instant rapport" in organisation of the summit, both in policy and administrative terms. "One of the great spin-offs of that early period in government," he later wrote, "was the melding of the new government with the career public servants." The parliamentary Labor Party had had extensive discussion leading to detailed reports on government and administration in the lead-ups to the 1980 and the 1983 elections. Both these documents in retrospect bear the clear marks of trying to work out how the Whitlam government should have worked so as to avoid the calamities which befell it. Hawke had little to do with these exercises, in which lead roles were played by such future ministers as Gareth Evans, Blewett and Ryan. He did not feel bound by their conclusions or recommendations, and made a number of significant departures. The planning processes do, however, appear in hindsight to have been instrumental in fostering a capacity among leading Labor figures to think about the workings and structure of government. Where the planning process was especially influential was in the public service side of the transition. The arrival of the Whitlam government had brought a massive reconstruction of the departmental machinery of government. There was no comparable restructuring on this occasion. There was, on the contrary, a marked desire to minimise disruption. Change was generally more apparent in departmental nomenclature than in substantial reorganisation. It was a different story when it came to heads of department. Some in Labor ranks looked forward to a night of the long knives. They were disappointed (temporarily at least). Only three were displaced: one, A. R. Neaves, of the Attorney-General's, went to the Federal Court; another, Sir Peter Lawler, of Administrative Services, was appointed ambassador to Ireland and to the Holy See; and a third, M. H. Codd, of Employment and Industrial Relations, became chairman of the Industries Assistant Commission. After the 1984 election, Codd returned to the secretary ranks as head of the new Department of Community Services before succeeding Sir Geoffrey Yeend at Prime Minister and Cabinet in 1986. In the event, all additions to the departmental secretary cadre at this time were drawn from the career public service. In only one instance, that of Employment and Industrial Relations, was an appointment from outside the Australian Public Service a serious consideration - and that was of a former officer of Britain's Home Civil Service who had joined the Victorian Public Service. That appointment did not eventuate; the post thus went to a deputy secretary in Finance, Dr Michael Keating, who, like Codd before him, subsequently became a secretary of PM&C. Dr Peter Wilenski, one of the very controversial appointments of the Whitlam government, was restored to the public service as head, briefly, of Education and Youth Affairs, before even more controversially replacing Sir William Cole as chairman of the Public Service Board. Another of the controversial Whitlam appointees, John Menadue, was at Immigration following a tour of duty as ambassador in Japan. He was looking for "a change and a chance to head a reasonably senior department." There was apparently some ambivalence in Labor ranks about Menadue, stemming from his time as Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser's department head immediately following the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Menadue has described his relations with Hawke as "courteous but never close." As he put it, he "marked time" as head of the Department of the Special Minister of State where his close friend, Mick Young, was minister. He later headed Trade before becoming the managing director of Qantas for a period. Most interest by far centred on the fate of Stone at the Treasury; it continues to be a subject of interest. Hawke reports great pressure to remove Stone, "an object of hatred for many in the Labor Party." Stone retained the post. Hawke says he "started from the presumption that people in the bureaucracy were loyal public servants who understood that there had been a change of government and that they had a duty to serve the new government as faithfully as they had the old." Hawke adds there was much pressure to replace not only the ambassador in Washington, Sir Robert Cotton, and also Fraser's driver, Noel Hansen! Not the least interesting part of this story is the role played by Dr Peter Sheehan, the head of Victoria's Department of Management and Budget under the Cain Labor government. He was, Hawke relates, one of a number of individuals being "touted" for the Treasury post. A media release he had drafted, alas, contained a "fundamental arithmetical mistake." Any prospect of the Treasury was "completely closed off after that slip." Hawke anyway concluded that, with the deficit blowing out to record levels, "big-spending Keynesian economists were not the need of the day." Sheehan returned to Spring Street. There was no night of the long knives but most departments soon had new secretaries, largely accomplished smoothly. And most of their successors, if not transferred from another department, came from the public service. Another weakness of the Whitlam government had been ministerial staff. The Hawke government established recruitment and vetting procedures for this group, and later added a statutory basis for the category. It seemed that this form of ministerial support had been absorbed into the body of federal administration. J. R. Nethercote is an adjunct professor with the Public Policy Institute at the Australian Catholic University. His earlier Informant article on this theme was "The 'first' Whitlam government."