Bob Hawke broke unions in Australia

The Americans particularly appreciated Hawke’s willingness to deradicalise the labour movement. As Coventry puts it: “Hawke proved useful in pre-empting and pacifying union disputes.”

After Hawke’s death in 2019, pundits celebrated him as an authentic, strine-speaking ocker, devoted to “unionism, labourism and the Labor party”.

The Americans thought different. For them, Hawke was “an experienced chameleon”, a man who “successfully played down his academic record and bookish background” to present himself as “the ideal Australian Labor leader”.

The cables show that as early as 1974 the US was suggesting to Hawke that he foster a “tripartite committee of unions, employers and government” to reach agreement on wages and other industrial issues.

After becoming prime minister in 1983, Hawke implemented the prices and income accord, a project in which the labour movement embraced wage restraint as part of an ongoing collaboration with employers and the state. In her important 2018 book How Labour Built Neoliberalism, Elizabeth Humphrys argues that Hawke’s accord – with its commitment to market principles, privatisations and user-pay mechanisms – brought into Australia the neoliberal strategies that were elsewhere implemented by the parties of the right.

Anyway our unions are weak and captured at best, but your friend’s husband is a fucking idiot