Bill Hayden's act of political self-sacrifice in 1983, surrendering the Labor leadership to guarantee his beloved party's victory, cleared the way for Bob Hawke to transform the 1983 election campaign.

Bob Hawke has now also transformed the 2019 election campaign: his death on Thursday effectively bringing the campaign to a close; maybe, pragmatically, also providing a boost for his beloved party.

More than anything, it has left us all to reflect on and mourn not just the death of one of the country's most popular prime ministers but where our politics seems to have gone wrong in the intervening decades.

Hatchets buried, his partner in government, Paul Keating, best framed what was remarkable about the former prime minister's approach to his job.

"Bob possessed a moral framework for his important public life, both representing the workers of Australia and more broadly, the country at large", Mr Keating said in a statement on Thursday night.

"He understood that imagination was central to policy-making and never lacked the courage to do what had to be done to turn that imagination into reality.

"And that reality was the reformation of Australia's economy and society and its place in the world".

Of course, what Mr Keating doesn't reflect on is the contrast with the way political life has been conducted in more recent times; conduct that has led to the great disillusion we have seen among voters in the lead up to this current election; in fact many would question whether we, indeed, have any overall moral framework in our politics; whether our politicians really understand the meaning of public life; whether our leaders have the capacity for imagination and courage, or even value policy making, rather than political game-playing.

Sheer scope of his openness

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Much has been written about Mr Hawke and his government over the years, and there have been thousands of words just in the past 48 hours alone.

Lots has been said about his connection with the electorate, with his leadership of his government.

The only thing to add is an observation only made clearer in retrospect; long after the white noise and the hurly burly of reporting on his government had faded.

This observation is of the sheer scope of Mr Hawke's dazzling flexibility of mind and openness to different ideas.

On the eve of the 1983 election, the business community was considering the spectre of Labor being back in office with dread, very much through the prism of the Whitlam era. The world was agog with monetarism, Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher. Our biggest entrenched economic problem was double digit inflation.

All the pressure was on for policy machismo and Labor was seen as some sort of throwback to the heyday of government intervention and a suddenly out-of-fashion Keynesian economics.

It wasn't just that Mr Hawke and Mr Keating managed to escape a simple comparison with the past. They were more agile in the way they thought about policy, and institutions, and how to use them to get an outcome, than anyone who had really come before.

They went further in some areas than the Liberal Party had ever thought to go. In other areas, they used the policy levers of government to help dismantle government's influence.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating worked closely together on economic reform during the 1980s. ( National Archives of Australia )

Long after he had left politics, it was still striking how Mr Hawke thought outside the box about both politics and policy.

This could put an interviewer off their stride, just as much as his capacity for intellectual detachment, despite an always splendid ego.

He had the capacity on occasion to stand outside himself and mount the most detached of arguments from an opposite position, and consider the pluses and minuses of both cases.

There was never some plodding capital/labour or conservative/Labor divide boxing him in.

He was not some simple-minded ideological warrior, nor a politician driven by cynical seat-by-seat calculation.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 19 seconds 1 m 19 s Tony Abbott speaks about Bob Hawke outside a pre-polling booth in Manly.

'It doesn't matter about party politics'

The depths to which we have sunk were therefore only put in bright lights on Thursday night as Coalition figures continued a bombardment of texts about swings in individual seats, even as word of Mr Hawke's death came through, and with the comments of former prime minister Tony Abbott who, even when supposedly eulogising one of his predecessors, had to try to claim some sort of ideological win.

Compare that even with the night of June 13, 1951 when another former prime minister, Ben Chifley, died at the Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra.

Most of political Canberra was at a Jubilee State Ball being held in Kings Hall in the then Parliament House.

Shortly before midnight, according to a report by the Canberra Times, Prime Minister Robert Menzies told revellers "I don't want to try to talk about him now, because although we were political opponents, he was a friend of mine and yours, and a fine Australian.

"You will all agree that in the circumstances the festivities should end.

"It doesn't matter about party politics on an occasion like this."

No clear sense of change

Mr Hawke's death has ended a largely graceless campaign, and one shaped by the focus on Opposition policies in the absence of all but two from a bitterly divided Coalition, and by an unrelenting campaign by a media organisation against Labor.

It finishes as it began, without that clear sense of change that marked Hawke's election in 1983, Howard's election in 1996 or Rudd's election in 2007.

Polls, betting markets, strategists are all confounding each other with what they think will happen, even after more than a quarter of the electorate decided not to wait for polling day and voted early.

There has not been an election in living memory where a change of government has occurred in circumstances where the political parties were expected to both win and lose seats, nor where preferences and independents could make such a difference to the outcome.

If all the strategists were really honest, they would quietly admit there has never been an election where they have known less about what was going on in voters' minds than this one.

The splintering of modern media platforms might give parties the capacity to target micro audiences, but it also blinds them to what people are actually seeing and thinking, particularly young people.

More than 700,000 new voters have joined the electoral roll since 2016, partially as a result of the marriage equality plebiscite.

A breakdown shows that in some of the most marginal, and/or most contested seats in the country, there are around 1,000 new voters aged 18-24 on the rolls, sometimes more than the margin with which seats were won or lost.

How will they vote? Have the parties been talking to them about issues that matter to them like climate change?

That would require an openness to new ideas and the sort of courage we came to expect from Mr Hawke.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.