Many thousands of the Wests Tigers rugby league fans who attended last Sunday’s game against the Canberra Raiders at Leichhardt Oval in Sydney, and many thousands more who watched it on TV, must have wondered why a large pre-game tribute flashed up on the big screen for a bloke they’d never heard of.
But as the crowd stood and the two teams huddled during a minute’s silence for Allan Hawke AC, there would be few in Canberra who didn’t know who he was – the Raiders board chair whose life’s achievements were writ large as a public servant and who died on August 31, his last game lost to skin cancer.
How he would have relished the Raiders’ demolition of the Tigers as his final hurrah on this earth.
If footy is a religion to normal fans, it’s also a metaphor in Canberra through which public servants vent their passions, heartbreaks, triumphs and biases in a way they can never do at work.
And Hawke was the ultimate professional public servant, as straight as a die. He was not, of course, perfect. For a start, he had a raucous laugh that could have launched a few missiles. Once you’d heard it you imagined you could hear it kilometres away. He loved the finer things of life – good food, good wine, good company and also golf. He was a member of the exclusive Royal Canberra Golf Club and liked to claim golf didn’t love him back, but as he played off a very low handicap this fooled nobody.
Everyone has an anecdote about “Hawkie”. His greatest mentor, a former long-term secretary of Defence, Tony Ayers, who died in 2016 and who also served as chair of the Raiders, used to say Hawke was “on everyone’s shortlist, because he’s so short”. He loved that. He also thought it hilarious when former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford teased him about his 1976 PhD thesis at ANU as being on “the sex life of locusts”. Hawke never spoilt a good story by quoting the actual topic – “Genetic studies of polymorphism in laboratory and natural populations of the Australian plague locust, CHORTOICETES TERMINIFERA”.
There was, in short, far more to him than many people saw and yet he did not hide himself. You’d never die wondering what he thought. Even while playing shamelessly on his “boy from Queanbeyan” humble origins, you could see Hawke’s formidable, shrewd intellect churning. This had always been the case. He might not, for example, have been the best squash player physically or technically, despite being a cousin of Australian squash GOAT Heather McKay, but, as one former teammate says of those bygone days, he could out-think and out-strategise most adversaries, often to their shock.
Although educated as an empirical scientist, people were his great love. Trained at the then-Public Service Board, Hawke never saw the Australian Public Service as a soulless, slavish machine but a complex ecosystem of human beings brimming with potential. He despised performance pay and other divisive management approaches, always maintaining that people were government’s greatest asset and must be invested in.
Guided by Ayers for years as a future secretary of Defence, Hawke spent six months in the office of then-prime minister Paul Keating before both conceded it wasn’t working. Hawke was one of the toughest players in bureaucratic institutional politics, but party politics were another ballgame. Still, lessons learnt, he went on to cut his secretarial teeth on two departments – Veterans Affairs and Transport and Regional Development – before getting the job he had always wanted in October 1999 after the controversial sacking of Paul Barratt.
Many people don’t understand that under the Defence Act, the secretary and the chief of the defence force operate as a ‘diarchy’. Hawke, who had immense respect for the great institutions of government, if not always for those who operated them, observed this arrangement to the letter. He kept strictly out of military operational affairs that were, in law, the remit of the CDF, then admiral Chris Barrie. It was this refusal to blur lines that would lead to his greatest disappointment.
Criticised in the marathon senate inquiry into the children overboard affair for not ensuring the record was corrected over Defence operational photographs that had been wilfully misrepresented by the office of the then-minister, Peter Reith, Hawke was ousted by Reith’s successor (his third Defence minister in as many years), Robert Hill, in October, 2002, just three days before the report was tabled.
But this may have been more about personality and style than politics: Hill, who had never been appointed minister for foreign affairs, evidently wanted a diplomat and got one – Ric Smith, who retired four years later.
Among other things, the change meant the momentum for the massive multi-year “investing in people” reform training program that Hawke had put in train, running not, as is usually the case, from the top down but also from the bottom up so that every layer of the highly hierarchical department’s then 20,000-odd staff would be actively involved, was rudely interrupted. More here from deputy CEO of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute Michael Shoebridge.
Despite the heartbreak, Hawke took it on the chin, accepting instead the role of high commissioner to New Zealand – a job he thoroughly enjoyed – before retiring from the APS and moving into wider public service, including as chancellor of the ANU and conducting multiple reviews for government. Hill remained, however, on his shortlist of least favourite people.
He trusted very few journalists and if anyone “dudded” him, as he put it, they’d never get a second chance. He hired the best people he could, didn’t micromanage them and was never afraid of not being the cleverest person in the room, even if that was quite rare.
A particular quirk was his strict 15-minute diary, organised by his outstanding executive assistant, Sharon McCluskey.
Once, for a feature story in The Canberra Times, he invited this reporter to spend a “fly on the wall” day in his office, in the executive suite at Russell Offices shared traditionally with the CDF.
That day, several captains of Defence industry flew in for private meetings with him. Imagine their surprise to find not only that 15 minutes really did mean 15 minutes, but that their sought-after introduction to the Defence secretary, which had probably taken months to arrange, would be witnessed by a journalist.
What they got was a respectful and cheerful introduction to a man who had a mind like a steel trap and made no bones about the boundaries between industry and public service.
If they had hoped for more, such as a subtle nod to a squillion-dollar contract, they’d have been disappointed. But they would also have realised, as his brain ticked along visibly behind the formal pleasantries, that he was not a man to be trifled with.
He is survived by his adored wife Maria, daughter Stephanie, son-in-law Matt and grandchildren Rosa and Harry.
Vale Allan Hawke, good and faithful public servant.
:
