To what extent should we attribute both the achievements and the problems to Bob Hawke himself? He had charisma, a capacity to attract the public eye and persuasive power, but he was not a political thinker. For all his gifts as a strategist, negotiator and tactician, he had little interest in ideas. Nothing in this book tempers Neal Blewett’s judgment that Hawke was ‘a complete pragmatist with only a few passions and less ideology’. Did this matter, since it was offset by extraordinary talent in other realms? Hawke was a skilful chair, able to crystallise cabinet debate to point the way ahead; a brilliant negotiator; a broker able to persuade diverse interests to confer and to build a consensus; an analyst able to distil the argument in any brief; a leader who gave productive latitude to a talented team; and a fighter who would do whatever it took to win. In any case, there were others who took on the ‘ideas work’: Gareth Evans in foreign affairs; Blewett, Brian Howe and Barry Jones in the delivery of social equity; Ralph Willis and Bill Kelty in the development of the Accord; and Paul Keating as the voice of the main game – economic reform. This was not a government that lacked ideas. But without a leader prepared to voice a unifying vision, directions could only be expressed in terms of economic imperatives. This was to shape the achievements and to fuel the failures.

The innovations were Hawke’s skill in placing consensus building at the heart of political life, and the way the Accord was deployed to couple wage restraint with the delivery of social benefits, winning cooperation from business and unions in the pursuit of reform. Two of the best chapters, by Willis and Kelty, detail intentions and the evolution of relationships so that we see how central the Accord was to the rapid change of the Hawke years. The achievement of compromises, where each interest gained some (but not all) of its demands, was Hawke’s speciality. If the Accord was the high point, the national summits aimed at the same result. These were also, partly, an educative process. Peak bodies came together to talk, and the media reported their exchanges as part of the story of necessary change. Time and again, this book shows how effective such tactics were for gains in health, social policy, community services, immigration and multiculturalism, and education – even while the main game remained the economy. The paradox was that inclusiveness was achieved through dialogue between élites, but this ‘élite pluralism’ (to use Tony Moore’s phrase) took policy making out of party channels and removed politics even further from ‘the punters’.

To suggest, finally, as Geoff Kitney does, that the Accord eventually failed because it could not deliver ‘the last big structural change demanded by the financial markets’ – the deregulation of the labour market – is to reveal that negotiated consensus was tolerated only so long as it led in the direction sought by business. Wage earners were, for a time, protected from the extremes of deregulation and market caprice, but this was not, in the end, a battle that the labour movement could win. When push came to shove, the commitment to economic reform was transcendent; and a number of contributors share Julian Disney’s assessment that ‘even staunch believers in the eventual success of the readjustment tend to agree that it was unnecessarily harsh’.

The question this book raises is: could it have been done differently? Notwithstanding critics included here (Disney, Jones, David Day, for instance), this book overwhelmingly presents the case for the defence. The writers on economic policy and public sector reform are certain that the government was driven by a commitment to make the best of globalisation. An argument is made that this was a government that accepted the inevitability of change, but that also sought to yoke a social agenda to economic reform. Chapters by Stephen Duckett (health), Howe (social policy), Mary Kalantzis (multiculturalism), Patrick Dodson et al. (indigenous affairs), among others, develop a case that that this was not a government that abandoned traditional ALP concerns, but one that addressed them in new ways. (Curiously, Day mounts the conventional critique of the ‘tradition abandoned’ without acknowledging the counter views of fellow contributors.)

A former coalition cabinet minister once remarked to me that the early Hawke government had been the best since the early Menzies government. This book can sustain that view, while giving credence to arguments that social concerns were not submerged.

In the end, though, disquietingly, not only was readjustment ‘unnecessarily harsh’ but this government created the conditions for all that was to follow. Kalantzis praises Hawke’s multicultural policy development, but fails to acknowledge that it was the ALP’s experiments in managing immigrant intakes that led to the detention of asylum seekers and culminated in John Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’. Michael Keating shows how public sector reform increased efficiency and responsiveness, but hints that it provided tools for Howard’s government to politicise the bureaucracy. Willis suggests some of the benefits of privatisation, but privatisations inaugurated by Hawke were the first stage in what has since been a massive transfer of public resources to the private sector, with arguable results in terms of efficiency and, in some cases, higher costs to the public. The inception of user-pays principles would undermine health provision and eventually fuel the dismantling of universal coverage in favour of ‘private insurance’ (massively subsidised by government rebates for the well-off).

One could add to these examples, but, above all, it was the harshness of readjustment that generated a deep social malaise, which has increased since the Hawke years. In spite of Hawke, Keating and Howard (and despite endeavours to respond to community concerns, by insiders such as Blewett and Howe), people persist in believing that government can and should do more.

Jones highlights the subsidiary problem: Hawke’s lack of interest in big ideas and his scepticism about ideology unsettled a conventional belief that parties and governments should stand for something. In the end, as Jones suggests, the public is entitled to ask: ‘Are there any core beliefs we would never abandon?’ The parlous state of the federal Labor Party now, its craven ‘me-too’ capitulation to populism, its failure to communicate principles to inform coherent policy, its resignation to absurd factional wars, suggest only one answer. Arguably, this, too, is the residue of the Hawke years.

That said, this book is capacious enough to sustain many interpretations. It is a rich resource for understanding politics, policy making and leadership in the Hawke years, and it provokes deep reflection on the state of politics now.