The ghost of Bob Hawke supports Pauline Hanson? I saw first-hand how wrong that notion is

OpinionAssociate editor and special writerJuly 30, 2026 — 7:30pmOn the night of June 12, 1988, Bob Hawke sat by a campfire in the Northern Territory scrub about 80 kilometres north of Katherine and accepted from a gathering of painted Aboriginal elders a declaration on bark calling for a treaty between white and Indigenous Australia.Hawke, much moved, made a promise.Prime minister Bob Hawke accepts the Barunga Statement from Galarrwuy Yunupingu in 1988, and promises a treaty.Fairfax ArchivesHe’d do all in his power to deliver such a treaty within two years.Three and a half years later, Hawke was defeated as prime minister, the promised treaty undelivered.Expressing remorse that no treaty had been completed, Hawke’s last action in the minutes before Paul Keating was sworn in as prime minister was to enshrine that bark request, known as the Barunga Statement, on the wall of Parliament House. He insisted it remind successors of unfinished business that must not be ignored.It happened that I was around that campfire at Barunga in 1988 when Hawke promised to work towards a treaty. I also reported first-hand Hawke’s emotional last minutes as PM as he hoisted the Barunga statement and expressed personal regret that his promise was not fulfilled.“The important thing is what’s in our minds and in our hearts,” he said.All these years later, Hawke dead since May 2019, the Institute of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank, purports to know what was in Bob Hawke’s mind and heart in relation to Aboriginal identity and tradition.Ludicrously, the institute’s deputy executive director, Daniel Wild, claimed Hawke would have supported Pauline Hanson’s call for a ban on Welcome to Country and Acknowledgment of Country ceremonies.“There is no doubt Labor’s greatest political figure, Bob Hawke, would have supported Senator Hanson’s call for racial equality through the termination of Welcome to Country and acknowledgment of country ceremonies,” Wild said in a statement issued this week.His evidence?It was a fragment of Hawke’s speech on Australia Day in 1988 – Australia’s Bicentenary – in which Hawke, attempting to define modern Australia’s identity, declared “in Australia there is no hierarchy of descent: there must be no privilege of origin. The commitment is all.”Precisely how this might translate to Aboriginal Welcome to Country ceremonies is to draw the longest bow beyond breaking point.Wild and Hanson might feverishly fantasise that such ceremonies equate to some form of inverted racial privilege or “hierarchy of descent” favouring Aboriginal people. But the fragment of the speech ignores that Hawke was speaking to those who had immigrated to Australia in the 200 years since the First Fleet sailed in.He said it out loud immediately before Wild’s artfully chosen tract, declaring he was referring to “that common commitment which binds the Australian-born of the seventh or eighth generation and all those of their fellow Australians born in any of the 130 countries from which our people are drawn”.Hawke at the National Press Club in January 1988 – a speech that Tony Wright witnessed first hand.Richard BriggsFour days previously, at the National Press Club, Hawke made clear he accepted that Aboriginal people had rights separate to immigrants.They had a special relationship to the land, which they had always owned, he declared, and said his government’s policy, Foundations for the Future, was a landmark of “tremendous significance”. And he framed it as an Acknowledgment of Country.“It acknowledges the descendants of the Aboriginal people of Australia as the prior occupiers and original owners of this land; it acknowledges the dispossession of their land by subsequent European occupation; it acknowledges that the dispossession occurred without compensation and with no serious attempt to reach agreement with the Aboriginal people on the use of their land,” Hawke said.“It acknowledges the deep disadvantages and deprivations the Aboriginals have thereby suffered and continue to suffer.“And it pledges the Australian government and the Australian people to an earnest and continuing effort of rectification and reconciliation.”Wild might, almost, be forgiven for distorting Hawke’s words and misrepresenting his stance on Australian Aboriginals, as it was so many years ago.I reported first-hand on Hawke over many years, travelling Australia and the world with him and listening to him, and it was never difficult to discern what was in his heart and mind concerning Australia’s original inhabitants.A lifetime of opposing racism in Australia and abroad built in him a deep disdain for those who denied that Australia’s Aboriginal people had a right to their own identity and traditions.He reserved, in his years beyond politics, a special contempt for Pauline Hanson’s views.In 1998, when Hanson’s influence was rising for the first brief time, Hawke, Keating and fellow former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser issued a joint statement aimed primarily at her approach and by implication that of John Howard, who was avoiding direct condemnation of Hanson.Former prime ministers Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd after Rudd’s apology to Indigenous Australia, specifically the stolen generations.Andrew Taylor“Racism,” Hawke and his fellow signatories declared, “is an unmitigated evil, it is immoral, it does Australia significant harm through Asia and the wider world, it destroys our self-esteem and self-respect. In Australia, it would pit Australian against Australian. It would be destructive of our society.”It was a follow-up to a scathing statement organised by Hawke and signed by Keating and Whitlam the previous year, directed straight at Hanson.They described her views as “bigoted, uninformed, simplistic and subversive nonsense”.And now Hawke is being accused of supporting Hanson and her mean-minded jihad against Aboriginal people extending a Welcome to Country and others acknowledging their respect for traditional owners and their ongoing connection to the land?On behalf of Bob Hawke, who has been gone these seven years, may I offer a response?Bloody preposterous.Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.From our partners