Bill Hayden, who has died aged 90, was the working-class Queensland copper and leader of the Labor party who seemed destined to become prime minister of Australia, but was controversially pressured to relinquish the leadership just before the snap 1983 election.
Described as the best man never to have become prime minister, he was a successful leader of the opposition. His party’s decision to deny him a chance to become PM has been called a moral turning point in its history, a victory for a “whatever it takes to win” philosophy that cursed it with leadership turmoil in subsequent years.
Hayden went on to serve as foreign minister from 1983 to 1988 under his antagonist Bob Hawke. He then surprised the nation by agreeing to become Queen Elizabeth II’s representative as governor general from the following year.
Born in Brisbane, Hayden grew up in the proudly working-class industrial town of Ipswich to the west of the city, and represented the area all his political life. He described himself as a democratic socialist who became a social democrat as he mellowed, over the course of a long career in politics that began in 1961. It included a spell as treasurer, equivalent to chancellor of the exchequer in the UK, in 1975, in the ill-fated government of Gough Whitlam. When Whitlam retired two years later, Hayden became opposition leader.
He took the Labor party close to toppling the Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser in the 1980 elections, with a 4.2% swing to Labor, but was progressively destabilised by the plotting of Hawke, the charismatic and ambitious union leader turned MP. Following a key byelection loss in December 1982, Hayden was leaned on by his colleagues to resign in favour of Hawke. There were no other candidates. Hayden was effective and well liked but he summoned little of the confidence of an election victory the party knew Hawke could deliver.
Hayden then made an offhand comment at a press conference which was forever to define him. “A drover’s dog could lead the Labor party to victory, the way the country is,” the chagrined Queenslander said of Fraser’s unpopular government.
Hoping to capitalise on Labor’s troubles, and knowing a change of leadership was imminent, Fraser had tried to call the poll to force the party to fight with Hayden as leader, but he was too late: Hayden had resigned just hours before. A month later, Hawke won the election on a landslide. He was accused by one interviewer of “having blood on his hands” but he went on to be prime minister for the next eight years.
In his 1996 autobiography, Hayden wrote of the leadership loss: “It hurt like hell revisited several times.” But he also admitted he was not cut out to be a natural party leader, seeming cautious, diffident and remote. Perhaps in a reference to the messianic Hawke he wrote: “Above all, I did not have an abounding faith in my own infallibility or in my providential selection above all others to lead my colleagues to salvation.”
In other, more personal, ways it has been argued that Hayden did not have what it takes, lacking what the political historian Paul Kelly called the personal vanity the television age had bred. In his 1984 book The Hawke Ascendency, Kelly described Hayden thus: “ … the man being projected as the alternative prime minister would just stroll into his Ipswich barber; [his wife] Dallas would buy his shirts at the local shops; Hayden would appear on television with his uniquely Queensland sense of colour contrast: open-necked blue, white and pale blue sports outfits.”
Hayden grew up in a poor family, one of five children. His Irish-American father, George, had been a merchant seaman who settled in Australia, where he met Bill’s mother, Violet Quinn, and worked as a jobbing piano tuner during the depression. Bill went to Brisbane State high school, leaving at 15. His father died not long afterwards and in 1953 Bill joined the Queensland police, partly to help support his mother, and served for eight years while studying economics and politics part-time at the University of Queensland.
He became increasingly active in Labor politics and in 1961 ousted a Liberal minister with a large swing in the federal seat of Oxley, which he was to hold without loss until his retirement from politics in 1988. A hard-working MP, he joined the opposition frontbench in 1969, as spokeman for health and welfare. Three years later, Labor came to power under Whitlam and Hayden became minister for social security. He brought in the nation’s first universal health insurance scheme, Medibank, and introduced pensions for single mothers.
But the government was racked by scandals and poor administration and in 1975 he became treasurer for just five months before Whitlam’s dismissal on 11 November, by Sir John Kerr, the governor general, at the height of Australia’s constitutional crisis. The landslide against Whitlam in the subsequent election was so bad that Hayden was the only Labor MP left in Queensland.
Speaking in 2014 of his time as opposition leader from late 1977, he said, “I put my leadership on the line without consulting anyone. I just did it. We had to; the party was going nowhere.” He reformed it and opened it up to more middle-class professionals to counter the factional influence of trade-union bosses. He also oversaw reforms which made Labor adopt a quota of 30% of women as MPs.
After Labor’s return to power under Hawke in 1983, Hayden became a prominent minister for foreign affairs and trade, advocating greater integration and understanding with Asia neighbours. He openly looked forward to Australia’s destiny as a Eurasian nation over the next century or two.
In what was seen as a consolation prize for replacing him as leader, Hawke – after winning his second term as prime minister – offered Hayden the ceremonial role of governor general. Like many in Labor, Hayden was a republican but he accepted the position, resigning his parliamentary seat and ministerial role in order to take up the post in early 1989.
He was a popular and distinctive governor general with a genuine common touch. His term lasted for seven years, and the offers it brought him included that of the post of chief scout of Australia, which he turned down because his atheism conflicted with the scout promise to do duty to God. Instead, he became the association’s national patron. Hayden sided with monarchists in the 1999 referendum on a republic because he – and the public, as it turned out – disagreed with the republicans’ model for a president to replace the Queen.
Hayden is survived by his wife, Dallas (nee Broadfoot), whom he married in 1960, and three of their four children, Kirk, Georgina and Ingrid. Another daughter, Michaela, predeceased him.
• William George Hayden, politician, born 23 January 1933; died 21 October 2023
