Former Labor leaders Kim Beazley, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, Bill Hayden and Gough Whitlam Credit:Paul Harris "In that great ledger of national credits, on this basis alone, Bill Hayden deserves a big and enduring entry." The former prime minister said that as Labor leader from 1977 to 1983 after the tumultuous Whitlam period, Mr Hayden restored method and brought "a process and matrix of discursive reason, the likes of which, pre-Hayden Labor had never had". "It was that process that ultimately, the Hawke government was built upon. The success of Bill Hayden's leadership of the Labor Party was, in the end, personally disappointing, as he watched the prime ministership slip away. But his leadership was hugely successful for the Labor Party. It was its turning point. The turning point from Labor's perpetual confusion between its post-war political ends and its proffered policy means," Mr Keating said. Mr Keating also praised his one-time boss as a crucial ally in gaining cabinet agreement for a series of groundbreaking economic reforms once Labor was in power.

Bob Hawke and Bill Hayden shake hands after Hawke's unsuccessful leadership challenge in 1982. Credit:David Bartho Among the examples he revealed was Mr Hayden's specific encouragement for floating the dollar on the day before it went to cabinet in December 1983. In foreign policy, Mr Keating said Mr Hayden had used his unique credibility with the party's left wing to secure support for US joint intelligence facilities in Australia. He said Mr Hayden had become "intellectually convinced" of the need for the joint facilities such as Pine Gap, to maintain the balance-of-power between the US and the Soviet Union, concluding that without Australian support, the global situation would be more problematic, less stable. But he said, despite this view, Mr Hayden was sufficiently deft to establish Australia's "respectable independence" with the Americans while also reinforcing Canberra's intention to "vigorously push ahead with our arms control objectives" up to and including the nuclear disarmament of the US itself.

Mr Keating depicted Mr Hayden, who was cruelly replaced by Mr Hawke as opposition leader just a month out from the 1983 election, as the unsung hero of the period because he modernised the ALP, and ushered in changes in thought, policy, and culture, that transformed the country. Mr Keating also credited Mr Hayden with his own success acknowledging the then opposition leader's courage in selecting him to be shadow treasurer in early 1983, at the age of just 39. He described that as "a big call, some said at the time, a wild call". "I have always appreciated Bill Hayden's interest in me; more than that, his faith in me. I was perhaps an unlikely character for him to vest such confidence and regard," he said. But while Mr Keating was heaping praise on Mr Hayden, he used the occasion to condemn subsequent Australian governments for allowing the ANZUS treaty to "militarise" the entire Australia-US relationship and the current tendency to depict those who question the alliance as apostates.

"Howard's embrace of the Americans up to and into Iraq had the effect of militarising the alliance and as a consequence, we began talking about our long and broad relationship with the Americans as though the relationship itself was the alliance – or had become the alliance. "And this is from where the now sacramental quality of the alliance emanates. As Bill labelled it in his biography, 'consecrated territory'." Follow us on Facebook