PAUL HASLUCK – LAUNCHED BY TONY ABBOTT – ANNE HENDERSON

The Hon Paul Hasluck was many things – journalist, public servant, author/historian, academic, Member of Parliament, Minister of the Crown, Governor-General of Australia and a published poet. In the 1940s, he worked with Bert Evatt within the External Affairs Department on the creation of the United Nations. He was also, from his early years as a journalist, a strong advocate for equality for Indigenous Australians, an advocacy that he continued when MP and minister.  As Minister for Territories for 13 years, he left his mark on Papua New Guinea as a fledgling modern nation. And influenced policy on Indigenous welfare in the Northern Territory. On Monday 3 November 2025, The Hon Tony Abbott spoke at The Sydney Institute to launch Anne Henderson’s Paul Hasluck, a new monograph in The Australian Biographical Monographs series published by Connor Court.

PAUL HASLUCK – LAUNCHED BY TONY ABBOTT

ANNE HENDERSON

Many thanks to you Tony – Paul Hasluck could not have wished for more.

A monograph is a very much shortened account of a subject’s life. As such it is a sharpened view. This series of monographs for which Paul Hasluck is Number 26 was created by Dr Scott Prasser and is maintained by publisher Connor Court – we owe them a lot.

As Tony Abbott has just demonstrated with his new book Australia A History, our coming generations need a record of past achievements. And this series does just that. When the generations of today have long passed, an archivist will hand a young scholar a box which will contain one of these books. “No money to digitise it,” the archivist will say. “It is a book. It has an index but no search engine. Are you okay with the alphabet?”

Paul Hasluck was a man of many parts. He began his younger life as the child of Salvation Army parents and knew penury and life in Salvation Army boys’ homes in rural Western Australia where he learned to ride and had Aboriginal lads as playmates. He was scholarly, a scholarship student at Perth Modern School. He became a great achiever. He was a poet. He was a builder who played an important part in the founding of the United Nations as well. And, as Minister for Territories over 12 years, his leadership contributed immensely to the establishment of democratic Papua New Guinea. He was Australia’s Governor-General from 1969-1974.

Paul Hasluck was an uncompetitive man, eventually to make a career in one of the most competitive fields of human endeavour – politics. He reflected once that he had never sought the career moves he had made; they had all been offered to him and he had accepted them. He was thought to be a bit stuffy as a public figure, one who was thorough, efficient and a hard task master – he could have a short temper under stress as his wife Alix revealed in her memoir.

In private, however, Hasluck was a warm conversationalist with an acerbic sense of humour. In later life, he spent many hours with publisher Peter Ryan, sitting by the fires in their respective bush retreats, yarning away the years they recollected. He could perform, on request, for an audience – once giving a fine rendition playing native drums. On another occasion, he amazed his hosts by joining in American folk singing – he knew all the words – into the early hours while spending the Christmas/New Year break in Washington DC.

Once asked in an interview late in life about his time in politics, Hasluck reflected on former prime minister Billy McMahon. He said he regarded McMahon as totally unsuitable for the role of prime minister. Asked why, he replied that McMahon was a treacherous liar. But how was it that McMahon got so far in the Party, asked the interviewer, if he was a treacherous liar? Hasluck responded spontaneously, “Oh, that’s how he got there, by treachery and by lying.”

Hasluck began his working life as a journalist with the West Australian, followed by a brief time in academia. But he took a leap into a much broader world with an appointment in 1940 to the Department of External Affairs – today our Foreign Affairs.

In Canberra, Hasluck found the department to be a rather “daggy office” where, in the ten rooms in Canberra’s West Block that it inhabited, the clerk in charge of records, George Westcott, always had a blue heeler cattle dog under his table. Other members of staff would bring their dogs to work when convenient. Hasluck himself rode to work each day on his mare Edythe who was tethered to munch grass in the bush outside and took him home for lunch. She was illegally stabled in the back yard of his Canberra cottage. At one stage, with Edythe in the shafts, Hasluck and mates helped salvage a nine-gallon barrel of beer to help preserve a Queanbeyan publican’s war time ration.

Labor leader John Curtin, whom Hasluck knew in Perth through their journalistic endeavours, had urged Hasluck to apply for the External Affairs position. With Labor coming to government in late 1941, the daggy department was in for a shake-up. Incoming Minister for External Affairs and Attorney-General H V (Doc) Evatt was seen to be a person of brains and action. Within a few months, Hasluck had become speech writer and researcher for Labor’s Doc Evatt and would be closely involved in Evatt’s representation at conferences related to plans for the post-war world and the setting up of the United Nations. The ride for Hasluck would be a wild one – with Evatt’s mercurial and chaotic management. But it would offer Hasluck huge international experience.

Academic Richard Nile once assessed the great influences on Hasluck as being – “H V Evatt as a model of what not to be, John Curtin as a man who gave himself to the service of the nation, and Robert Menzies the politician he most admired and whom he served faithfully during 12 years of great doubting as the Minister for Territories.”

In 1949, Paul Hasluck was asked to stand as Liberal candidate for the newly created seat of Curtin. He did and he won. Thereafter, over the best part of 20 years, he would serve his electorate as MP and Minister for Territories until, in late 1963, he became Minister for Defence briefly, moving to External Affairs in April 1964.

After the disappearance at Cheviot Beach of Prime Minister Harold Holt in December 1967, Hasluck was encouraged to stand as leader of the Liberals. He did this but refused to canvas the support of his colleagues. He lost narrowly to John Gorton. In correspondence with former PM Sir Robert Menzies, Hasluck revealed how Billy McMahon had white-anted his candidacy in the ballot, but it also revealed his lack of skilled competitiveness and naivety about colleagues’ and rivals’ political scheming. Even then, he only lost narrowly.

In early 1969, Hasluck accepted Prime Minister John Gorton’s request that he become Australia’s Governor-General. Paul Hasluck served as Governor-General until mid-1974 when he turned down Gough Whitlam’s offer to extend his term for an extra two years. This begs the question: how might history have been different had Hasluck stayed on as Governor-General until 1976?

On entering parliament in 1950, Hasluck’s official war history The Government and the People 1939-1941 had been completed – it would be published in 1952 to rave reviews. As such, Paul Hasluck had written extensively about many of the key players he had joined in the parliament. In his view, for some years, this affected Robert Menzies’ coolness to him. But his successful handling of the Territories portfolio in time brought Menzies’ admiration. The second volume of The Government and the People was eventually published in 1970 after Hasluck had retired as an MP.

Thanks to Hasluck’s extensive writing on his various career opportunities, his experiences in those years – especially in the setting up of the United Nations and his part in the development of Papua New Guinea’s system of representative democracy – are well recorded.

Hasluck would write of his twelve years as Minister for Territories as having “killed in me all personal ambition and deadened my political interest”. But he took to the job with determination and a keenness to make change that kept him eager to see results. His time in External Affairs had given him experience of the glacial movement of bureaucracy and an understanding of how to get around public service road blocks. He could be very determined and preferred a stiff note to conversations.

Hasluck’s long interest in the plight of Indigenous people was no doubt his drive in Territories which included the Northern Territory. From the early 1930s until his death, Hasluck advocated, and wrote about, the need for equality for Indigenous Australians whose status in the early twentieth century was parlous.

It was Hasluck’s belief that only as fully embraced Australians, would Indigenous Australians prosper. He argued that Indigenous Australians – Aboriginal Australians as they were then called – should give up being “protected” and work to their betterment through education, skills and aspiration.

For Hasluck, the Aboriginal population of his day lived on the fringes (in many cases below any decent standards) and needed to come into the mainstream. His objection to separate development never wavered. In time, he was criticised for advocating assimilation – something for him that meant betterment, not rejection, of native character. Many Indigenous leaders today would not agree with him. But the result of the Voice referendum seems to suggest that a large majority of Australians agree with Hasluck.

In Territories, it was Sir William Slim who recognised the huge achievements made while Hasluck was minister. As he left his post as Governor-General in 1960, Slim told Hasluck he had accomplished a huge task saying: “Your young chaps in New Guinea have gone out where I would never have gone out without a battalion and they have done on their own by sheer force of character what I could only do with troops.”

To bring communication and connection to remote tribal people across some 500,000 square kilometres of isolated territory, single engine planes landed Hasluck on strips of grass on mountain sides – the pilots making dare devil landings and take-offs. On one occasion, after they landed, the pilot told Hasluck that his only worry was how they might take off after the visit.

It was Hasluck’s description of one Highlands meeting that captured the work being done. The meetings’ speeches were translated through at least two different dialogues:

The orators stood. Their magnificent voices rolled over the valleys and awakened echoes from the opposing slopes. … the grand panorama of the highlands … when they were satisfied that it was over and we had understood, they signalled to their people and a great roar of approval came from six thousand voices. It was more eloquent than words in any document about freedom from fear. We gave that freedom to half a million people who had not known it before.

In this – and much more – Paul Hasluck stands tall in Australian history.

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Anne Henderson’s Paul Hasluck is No 26 in The Australian Biographical Monograph series edited by Dr Scott Prasser and published by Connor Court Publishing, Brisbane.