There are many reasons to celebrate the life and prime ministership of Bob Hawke – Medicare! Saving the Franklin! More than doubling high school retention rates! The Sex Discrimination Act! His uncompromising opposition to racism and support for non-discriminatory immigration! Protecting Antarctica from oil exploration! The National Parks system! – but there was one which might have gone overlooked and which saved countless Australian lives.
AIDS was probably already stalking Australia by the late sixties but escaped detection until the early 80s. And since the disease seemed to be largely confined to marginalised communities of gay men, sex workers and injecting drug users – groups which governments were generally happy to ignore, or occasionally demonise for easy political points – governments around the world were happy to drag their feet.
UK PM Margaret Thatcher refused prevention campaigns as being “in bad taste” and warned that then health minister Lord Fowler would be known as the “Minister for AIDS” if he kept making such a song and dance about it. In the US, the administration of Ronald Reagan’s response to the growing death toll was largely limited to making homophobic jokes.
‘They’re so swishy, am I right?”
In Australia, however, the response was very, very different.
Grassroots community groups snapped into action around the country, but it was the Hawke government that ensured that Australia would have a lower rate of HIV transmission compared with the rest of the western world by ensuring that the public health system worked with those groups to treat the epidemic as an urgent health issue rather than a moral punishment for people that were totally asking for it. And if anyone says that government never does anything to help people, this is a perfect comeback.
That was thanks to Hawke’s trust in his then-health minister, Neal Blewett, who fought pressure inside and outside the government to ensure funding for AIDS education, prevention, treatment and support.
Also, there was this ad:
We’ll never know how many lives were saved, but we can speculate on whether any of the subsequent PMs would have actively worked to address AIDS had it emerged under their watch.
Would the man who literally changed the marriage laws specifically to exclude same sex couples have leapt into action over a disease that largely affected gay men?
Would the Labor PMs that personally voted against marriage equality grasped the nettle? Can you imagine the Liberal leaders that oversaw the same sex marriage postal vote (including two who advocated for the No side and then scurried out of parliament to avoid voting on the actual legislation) leaping into action, including the one that took a day and a half to address the question “do gay people go to hell?”
Rest well, Bob. You earned it.