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7 - Economic rationalism under Hawke and Keating

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2011

Tom Bramble  and
Rick Kuhn
Tom Bramble
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Rick Kuhn
Affiliation:
Australian National University
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Summary

The Hawke Government has proved itself to be, not only a great reform government, but a government in the highest traditions of Labor reform. It is a Labor Government not only in the true tradition; it is a government restoring and renewing, strengthening and entrenching the best traditions of Labor reform.

Neville Wran, 1986 John Curtin Memorial Lecture

If the Whitlam government is upheld by many ALP supporters as the shining example of postwar social democracy, the Hawke and Keating governments evoke a much more ambiguous response. There are their defenders, such as former New South Wales Premier Neville Wran, and there are those, such as long time ALP member and academic Graham Maddox, who lamented in his 1989 book The Hawke Government and the Labor Tradition that Hawke

gladly presided over an economy in which, as the fortunes of our richest people rose and fell by hundreds of millions of dollars and entrepreneurs made millions in overnight deals, real wages continued to decline, poverty traps closed sharply over the unemployed and the employed poor and propertyless pensioners despaired over an inadequate subsidy.

Then there is the fact that, between them, Hawke and Keating won five successive elections, a Labor record. Set against that achievement is the stunningly low Labor vote in 1996, when the Party lost office with its lowest primary vote in 65 years.

Type
Chapter
Information
Labor's Conflict
Big Business, Workers and the Politics of Class
 , pp. 104 - 125
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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