Bill Hayden

But, look, terrific.

If he's saying that, look, you know all those great economic reforms we had in the 80s? It all started with Bill Hayden when he was the opposition leader before Bob Hawke.

He was the one who... who said, look, what's working around the world is what Margaret Thatcher is doing.

Let's have a small government.

And, yeah, I went there in the old Parliament House, much smaller, of course, than the new Parliament House.

So, for example, you'd go into the urinal across from the Leader of the Opposition's office and you might bump into Ian Sinclair and Bill Hayden.

Yeah,

right.

That was with journalist Sally Loane.

So we got sent a week beforehand, um, before Hawke and, um, Hayden arrived to do kind of color shots, and it was 23 below when we arrived, and, uh, we didn't realize.

We had vouchers to get into the hotel, but we didn't have food vouchers.

So [laughs] we didn't realize we needed food vouchers to eat.

It was pretty amazing, all these refuseniks at the Australian Embassy.

And then they left, as they do, in a kind of flurry of, you know, Canberra, the Canberra crowd leave.

And Sally and I and, um, Mr. Hayden and his wife were on a plane with a, it was a number of KGB officers.

[laughs] I can't remember how many there were.

The other one is called the Jackson Committee.

It was set up by Bill Hayden as a foreign minister into Australia's foreign aid.

And one of the things it managed to pick up on in its wide-ranging terms of reference was, and this came from Helen Hughes, who was a development economist on that committee.

And she said, scholarships available through things like the Colombo Plan is a form of industry protection and should be scrapped.

He knew Indonesia was the key to Australia's acceptance in Southeast Asia at a time when we came within a whisper of being a Southeast Asian South Africa because of the White Australia policy.

right? What was Australia to do? We know that the Labor Party overturned that policy in the late 70s under Bill Hayden, but then when Hawke was elected in 83, they went back to basically recognising the du jour incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia.

But I just ask the question, you know, when, even if a country does not condone what is being done, If it doesn't have the will nor the power to change it, then what is the proper policy? And I would recommend that if you haven't read it, you should read John Hurst's article in Quadrant of 1996 called In Defense of Appeasement about this whole policy on East Timor.

And he says, look, you can't have DFAT running around being the Mormons of the diplomatic circuit when if we get into, are you talking about going to war with Indonesia? Now, Australia played a very important role in ending apartheid South Africa.

He said that the, the kind of soft diplomacy, the cultural exchange that comes from overseas students cannot be underestimated, and we shouldn't turn this into something transactional.

Uh, on the other hand, there, there was a report that was commissioned by the foreign minister, uh, Bill Hayden, into the entire setup of foreign aid across, across all the Australian government departments.

And, uh, Helen Hughes was also on that committee, and she believed that the Colombo Plan scholarships were a form of industry protection for universities and stymied the entrepreneurial spirit of universities.

So she said, "We need to have full fee-paying overseas students, and this is a potential export industry." The compromise that was eventually reached was to have a small quota on the number of, uh, scholarships, and then anything above that was full fee-paying.

Yeah, yeah.

To, to, to your point, um, I look back on what I think was one of the more famous political questions in Australian politics, and it was in 1983, the day after Bob Hawke had taken the leadership from Bill Hayden.

And Richard Carlton from the ABC, first question.

I think it was the first question that Bob Hawke took as leader.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It, it, it was a brutal way of putting it, but what he was s- demanding was an interpretation from the Prime Minister himself, a response as to whether or not he felt he had some responsibility for taking the leadership of, of Bill Hayden, or was it somehow done by others on his behalf.

You know, that was the nature of the question, and it, and it, it, it, it was powerful in the way that it was put, and to this very day, people, uh, people still recall it who might've been around at the time.