Bill Hayden’s foreign policy was his finest hour

In his memoirs, Hayden recalled the “dwindling remnants of Labor’s anti-Americanism” still present in the party in the early 1980s, the very sentiment that had contributed to Labor staying in opposition in the 1950s and ’60s.

Like Hawke and Keating, he had no wish to see Labor marooned on the wrong side of the national security debate.

Blanket support was not an obligation

So he began as foreign minister with a bold move, unimaginable today: by subjecting ANZUS to a lengthy critical review.

That delivered on Hawke’s election promise to “re-examine the ANZUS alliance to see if it still meets Australia’s purposes”.

The review allowed Labor’s Left to voice its concerns, but it also let Hawke shore up his alliance credentials before going to Washington as prime minister for the first time in June 1983.

When the review was complete, Labor ministers, unlike Coalition predecessors, found comfort in the imprecision of the treaty’s articles, which provided “some deterrent benefit in regard to possible adversaries” but “did not derogate from Australia’s right of national decision-making in foreign and defence policy matters”.

Indeed, they concluded that Australia had “reservations about giving blanket expressions of support for US strategic perceptions and activities and would be reluctant to have the ANZUS treaty invoked as justification for such blanket support”.

Yes, today’s world is different. Hayden did not have to deal with a China that is now a global power. But the point holds: the Labor cabinet then – in stark contrast to the Gillard and Albanese cabinets – preserved the imperative, in private and in public, of advancing distinctive national interests. They also worried that Washington might “take for granted our support for their thinking on other areas, and not recognise underlying differences of perspective”.

When Hayden delivered the review’s findings to parliament, he launched a full-frontal assault on the shibboleths that had put Labor on the defensive during the Cold War. He wanted Australians to see beyond these “lurid paradigms” of a “spectral China filling the world with terror”, to offload the “persiflage and humbug of the 1960s”.

Eerie echo of today’s strategic debate

Then he took umbrage at the “cynical enterprise by conservative politicians in the past designed to encourage the Australian people to believe that ANZUS would apply in all circumstances upon a simple call being made”. It was simply “not correct”.

And in an eerie echo of today’s strategic debate, Hayden continued: “In those days, governments treated ANZUS as though it were a kind of Holy Grail. So all-embracing was the reverence for it that any dissension about it or even just objective analysis of it was thought to be downright sacrilege.

“The offenders were treated as though they had some kind of political AIDS – incurably ill and hysterically contagious. This reaction was craven and servile. It substituted bombast where there should have been thoughtful exposition of ideas about the alliance and its impact on us and the region.”

No foreign minister of either political persuasion today could say that. And as Hayden added: “We are not a mob of defence groupies under the terms of the ANZUS treaty … we are not left to hold the Americans’ coat if and when trouble comes. The treaty imposes on us obligations. It also gives us rights.”

This stance was manifest in Labor’s reaction to the 1983 US invasion of Grenada, its eventual opposition to MX missile testing, the backing it gave to a South Pacific nuclear-free zone, and its frustrations with protectionism in US trade policy.

But arguably one of Hayden’s finest hours in foreign affairs came as opposition leader in February 1980, in a withering parliamentary critique of the Fraser government’s response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

He worried aloud then that the conflict would only reinforce for Washington that its primary area of strategic interest lay in Europe and the Middle East, “and that our own region is of lesser priority”. So the “best contribution we can make to our own interests and those of our allies is to focus our attention more than ever on the South-East Asian and South Pacific region, Australia’s area of primary strategic concern”.

That day, Hayden also laid out his coda for Australian foreign policy: “These are times,” he intoned, “in which Australia needs hard-headed assessment, not wilful fantasising; sober judgment of interests, not self-indulgent global posturing; a prudent calculation of military capacity and sustainable commitments, not wild and empty rhetoric.”

These were words of realism and restraint, balancing ends and means. They were much needed then. They are needed even more now.