There’s something awfully sad about old men falling out, especially in a public fashion.
To me Paul Keating has not seemed a happy soul for years, and he looks even unhappier now he feels aggrieved at what his old colleague Bob Hawke’s wife has written about him.
It all seems so unnecessary for Paul to even think he needs to defend his record. His achievements are clear and substantial enough not to be tarnished by what a biographer-turned-lover-turned-wife has written about her aging flame.
Off hand I can’t think of anyone associated with Labor governments during the 8os and 90s who does not regard Treasurer Keating as the person who dominated the often courageous decision-making of those years. Nothing in the extracts from Blanche d’Alpuget’s biography I have read is going to change that as the assessment of future historians whether or not Paul ever gets around to writing his own version of the governments he was associated with. His record speaks for itself.
Not that Hawke will go unappreciated. He completed the transformation of the Labor Party from one dominated by the union movement and that has been the foundation on which the party’s ascendancy at a state level and its competitiveness federally has been built.
As a prime minister he did not see the need to centralise all power around himself and, despite the obvious Keating irritation at the Manchu court of Hawke advisers, he allowed his ministers plenty of scope to actually be ministerial and initiate the kind of reforms Keating rightly wants to take a large share of the credit for.
To me that Hawke style of prime ministership was not a weakness but a strength and not deserving of the opprobrium heaped upon him by Keating in the letter published by The Australian this morning.
So what to make of this sad little argument? Very little other than a wish that the wife had not felt it necessary to write a second volume on the life of her lover and that time be allowed to deliver the verdict on two very considerable contributors to Australian political life.
*Richard Farmer worked on the Labor Party election campaigns during the Hawke/Keating years — but did not achieve membership of the Manchu Court by never seeking a position within the government itself.
I think we all know that Hawke was a womanising scoundrel over taken with problems with his family.
Why the botoxed one has to keep writing books about it all is beyond me but she should sue her botoxer, she looks plastic.
My view this ALP tail/tale chasing is a symptom of the shrinking authority of the ALP but also both major parties. It’s a look at me kind of punch and judy show while much bigger tectonics crowd the background.
I mean after a winning PM can be sacked, and post GFC when Friedman style economics looks straight out wrong and dangerous, well the two major parties are singing out of tune: They roll out the rhetoric like the GFC was an accident and it’s back to free marketeering, with tired echoes in the big media as they bleed to web 2.0.Only eveyone knows it’s not same ol’ in their whispering heart.
That a double dip is only one dodgy euro country away.
Add this grating rumble under the bonnet to the Coalition Party under Tony Abbott and their supporters collective amnesia about the moral and strategic disaster of the Iraq war and we have the great shrinking of moral authority of the majors, and their respective heroes.
What has botox got to do with the quality of, or necessity for, a political biography?
“Now listen mate,” [to John Browne, Minister of Sport, who was proposing a 110 per cent tax deduction for contributions to a Sports Foundation] “you’re not getting 110 per cent. You can forget it. This is a fucking Boulevard Hotel special, this is. The trouble is we are dealing with a sports junkie here [gesturing towards Bob Hawke]. I go out for a piss and they pull this one on me. Well that’s the last time I leave you two alone. From now on, I’m sticking to you two like shit to a blanket.
“Old Jellyback.”
“Old Silver.”
“That you Jim? Paul Keating here. Just because you swallowed a fucking dictionary when you were about 15 doesn’t give you the right to pour a bucket of shit over the rest of us.”
– To Former Labour politician, Jim McClelland (on the phone)
“Fucking animals.”
– On the Press
DON’T HATE THE THE GREATMAN WITH SOME GOLD LIKE THIS BOB BETTER BE CAREFUL HE MIGHT GET A DOSE OF THIS .
The silver lining to this former-PM-fracas cloud is that Paul Keating may write his autobiography. Anticipate more than a mere sprinkling of pithy lines.