Hawke the candidate
How Bob became ACTU President
Since he started work at the ACTU in 1958, Bob Hawke had attracted great controversy.
Within the union movement, he was initially viewed with suspicion due to his academic pedigree. Over time, as he demonstrated greater and greater success as ACTU Advocate at the Arbitration Commission, he won grudging respect. But suspicion remained, especially on the movement’s right-wing, which viewed Hawke as a bit of a radical (really).
Material in this mini-series on Bob Hawke is drawn from my forthcoming book, No Power Greater: A History of the Australian Union Movement. You can pre-order the book from Readings booksellers at this link.
By the mid-1960s, it became clear that Hawke was planning the next step in his career: the ACTU Presidency, which at that time was held by Albert Monk.
Monk was a well-respected figure.
Born in 1900, Monk first became President of the ACTU in 1934, when it was still a part-time position. He resigned that post to become ACTU Secretary in 1943, as this was a full-time and paid position. In 1949, he was elected as ACTU President again (after the presidency also became a full-time and paid).
Monk was a calm and assured figure, though not a person of great charisma or forceful character. Hawke would later describe him as:
‘A small, unprepossessing man who never claimed any great intellectual prowess, but he was shrewd and in his younger days had demonstrated personal physical courage in some ugly situations…’ But he was not, by nature, ‘a publicist for the movement.’
While this latter point was one that Hawke was particularly critical of, he did speak with affection of Monk’s steadfast support for the post-war program of migration – even against opposition from within the movement.
By 1969, after many decades of leadership, it was clear that Monk was coming to the end of a long union career. In March 1969, at a Labour Day dinner, Monk foreshadowed his departure after the next ACTU Congress. Who would replace him?
There were just two candidates. Hawke, and the ACTU Secretary Harold Souter.
Souter has often been presented as little more than Hawke’s foil. This is a disservice to a serious and dedicated servant of the labour movement (you can read my entry on Souter in the Australian Dictionary of Biography here).
Souter was 18 years older than Hawke, though he too hailed from South Australia.
At the age of twenty-eight, while working in the maintenance section of the South Australian Railways, Souter became an assistant organiser for the Amalgamated Engineering Union, rising to the position of Adelaide district secretary in 1941.
During World War II he worked on secondment in the Department of Labour and National Service, assigning skilled labour to essential industries. In 1947 he moved to Melbourne to take up an appointment as the AEU’s arbitration officer, representing the union at the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration.
In 1954 the ACTU appointed Souter as its first research officer. The ACTU executive chose him as acting secretary following the death of Reg Broadby in 1956, and his appointment was ratified at the ACTU Congress the next year, when he stood unopposed.
Souter was known for his diligence as an administrator rather than as a public figure. He regularly dealt with wage cases on behalf of the ACTU, making a significant contribution to improved living standards for workers.
He was abstemious (a rarity in the movement’s leadership at the time) and seldom socialised outside of work with other union figures. Another stark contrast with Hawke, on both points.
Souter and Hawke’s relationship had been strained at times. But Hawke noted that in all the key moments, when the chips were down, Souter always placed the movement’s interests above his own and made the important calls that needed to be made. Reading Hawke’s recollections it is clear that he did not have immense affection for Souter, but he certainly had a great deal of respect and regard.
In the contest that ensued, Hawke drew support predominantly from the left of the movement, while Souter was backed from the right. Though it was not in reality so simple – Hawke enjoyed the backing of some in the right, and Souter drew some votes from the left. But in general, this was understood to be a left v right contest.
Hawke’s main backers included legendary figures of the left, such as Ray Gietzelt of the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union and Charlie Fitzgibbon of the Waterside Workers’ Federation.
Among those who opposed him was John Ducker, the legendary leader of the NSW Right and Organiser for the NSW Labor Council (later a strong Hawke ally).
Hawke was a consummate campaigner. One colleague at the ACTU recalled that he was ‘on the telephone all the time, steeling the backbones of people to stand at Congress, and then organising them into a united group … The phone never stopped ringing.’
Souter was not a campaigner of equal dedication or skill. But, it was felt, with the right’s backing he had the numbers.
Souter sought to denigrate Hawke and his supporters, accusing them of being a proxy for communists, labelling them as an ‘opportunist “alliance front” of the so-called “New Left Movement” which seeks to control the Trade Union Movement’.
As Congress approached, the attacks flying each way grew. The union movement was bitterly divided at the time between its factions: on the hard left were the communists, the DLP/Groupers on the hard right.
Congress met at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney in September 1969.
Hawke was confident on his chances, and he was pretty willing to tell anyone who would listen that he was a sure thing.
This was not just inflated ego. Since 1958, Hawke had developed a substantial and consistent record of winning for workers at the Arbitration Commission.
As Hawke said: “I’d been the wages advocate for ten years and had helped change a situation whereby the basic wage had declined in real value by 5%, to one where, by 1967, it had increased in real value by more than 6%.”
But the contest was still up in the air. There were 101 more delegates at this Congress than the ACTU’s 1967 meeting (a total of 754). Both sides felt they had to sure up support during the conference’s inevitable manoeuvrings, and to appeal to the sizeable number of delegates in the centre.
This made the Congress proceedings particularly important for the presidential race.
And then, something remarkable happened.
Hawke and Souter were both given an opportunity to speak on economic policy to the Congress. Hawke would be allowed, as Research officer and Advocate, to speak to the proposed economic policy.
Souter would move the adoption of the executive’s economic policy statement, giving him a chance to deliver an address to Congress straight after Hawke.
Blanche D’Alpuget describes Hawke’s address as ‘rousing and fluent’, delivered with the special type of verve that Hawke could summon on his best days. He also spent a great deal of time attacking the economic record of the Coalition Government – always a crowd pleaser in such forums.
Souter, inexplicably, not only failed to rise to the occasion, but seemed to surrender before he had begun.
Instead of delivering a similarly impactful speech to his electorate, Souter kept his head down and flatly read through the entirety of the executive’s economic policy, word for word, despite the fact that every delegate had a written copy available to them. For over 20 minutes, he incanted the policy line by line.
RM Martin of La Trobe University, who recorded the Congress’s proceedings for the Journal of Industrial Relations, wrote of this ‘quite extraordinary’ performance:
‘His audience, which had begun by paying him the same close attention they had accorded Mr Hawke, soon lost interest. The hum of conversation rose to such heights that the president had twice to call the delegates to order. Mr Souter was quite unable to regain their attention when he tried to end on a rousing note in the last moments of his address…’
The greatest irony in this performance was that the economic policy report Souter read out with such diligence was authored by Hawke as Researcher (a fact widely known).
When voting took place the next day Hawke attained the presidency by 399 votes to Souter’s 350.
Not the landslide some had predicted, but a solid victory nonetheless.
It was a new era for the ACTU, and for Hawke personally.
After the contest, Hawke and Souter did ensure they had a working relationship. Souter remained a diligent and determined ACTU Secretary and servant of the movement for another decade.
As ACTU President, Hawke became by far Australia’s most prominent and well-known union leader. He became one of the most famous people in the country, and was seen as a potential future PM.
But this was also a time of great industrial and economic turmoil, as Australia was drawn into the global economic crisis of the mid-1970s – the next topic for this mini-series of Hawke’s career in industrial relations.
Material in this mini-series on Bob Hawke is drawn from my forthcoming book, No Power Greater: A History of the Australian Union Movement. You can pre-order the book from Readings booksellers at this link.
NOTE: The next article will be out soon – but once the election is called I will be out campaigning for the return of the Albanese Government, so there might be a slight delay once it is called.