Governing in the nude

Politicians in the old days sure were a lot more interesting.  If you missed it, Paul Keating took great joy in disclosing that Bob Hawke used to like to get his kit off back in his days in the Lodge yesterday at the launch of Gareth Evans’ new book, A Cabinet Diary which remembered the years from 1984 until 1986.  But he’d not only get his kit off, he’d also invite Ministers to pop by and discuss things with him while he was nude.  He said that Gareth Evans one joked that “it does take a certain chutzpah” to meet your ministers in the nude.

In what to me sounds like a rather entertaining 50 minute speech, Keating told the stories of how Mr Hawke would enjoy sunbathing nude, and also reflected on the years of leadership when he says Hawke was nowhere near as “present” as he should have been following the learning of his daughter’s heroin addiction which caused him an emotional breakdown that lasted for many years longer than perhaps even Mr Hawke realised.

“To be prime minister of Australia, you have got to be lucky,” Paul Keating said to the group

“To be prime minister for Australia, with five years down time, you’ve got to be more than lucky – and history deserves to know that that’s the way it was.”  But to me it seems sad to think that any political pain like this might need to be dredged up 30 years later.

“In his book, Bob says he was down for a month or two. In fact, Bob was down for about five years,” Mr Keating said redressing the feud that the country knew so well for so long.  “But I won’t have people say that he ran the show from ’84 to ’89. He didn’t.”

“The job of the leader is to nourish the government with ideas. You run the debate, you set the framework and push on. In the end, most of that job fell to me in those years,” Mr Keating said.

“We probably get to 1989 before things start to get normal. But this is nearly five years.”

“I got on well with him, I still talked him into things, the camaraderie between us was good. I wanted the country to get the changes, more than to get Bob’s job.

“Any treasurer is lucky to have a prime minister who will do mostly what he wants, and I had that in Bob Hawke. I acknowledge that freely, completely. We were a great partnership together.”

The two who had a longstanding agreement for Hawke to step aside which Keating says was dishonoured have never built a bridge, and famously battled in the public eye for decades.

Politics aside, who was your favourite Prime Minister of the two and what were your memories?  Were you a Hawke or a Keating fan?