Kim Beazley

Leader of the Australian Labor Party, 1996-2001, 2005-6.
Succeeded Paul Keating after the ALP's loss of the 1996 Federal Election. Retired to the backbench after failing to oust John Howard in 2001.
Reinstated as leader following Mark Latham's 2005 resignation; rolled by Kevin Rudd a year later.

Australia's fattest, jolliest Prime-Ministerial candidate in living memory.

Beginnings

Kim Christian Beazley was born on December 14, 1948, in Perth, Western Australia. His father, Kim Edward Beazley, was ALP member for Fremantle. Kim Sr is notable in his own right for being one of the longest-serving members of the Federal Parliament (32 years), rising to become Gough Whitlam's Minister for Education.

Kim Jr was born into not only a red-ribbon Labor household, but a devout one: the family followed the Moral Re-Armament movement, an American Christian conservative school focussed on personal spiritual values. At 17, Kim spent time on a missionary tour of India. His deeply moral youth would echo through his political career: he was and is remembered with adjectives like "good-natured", "honest", and "loyal".

Kim studied at the University of Western Australia, taking a MA and a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in 1973. There he met and married fellow Rhodes Scholar Mary Ciccarelli. He returned a Master of Philosophy to tutor and lecture in Social and Political Theory at Perth's Murdoch University, and raise a family.

It was during his academic years that Kim followed his father into the world of left politics. He was active in the UWA Guild of Undergraduates (eventually President) and the Australian Union of Students (Executive Member); through the Municipal Workers Union he became a delegate to the ALP State Executive, where he would later serve as Vice-President and Treasurer.

Parliament

Kim's political activities led him, like his father, steadily toward Canberra. His first chance at parliamentary representation came with the Federal Election of 1980, in which he stood as ALP candidate for the inner-Perth seat of Swan. The Liberal-National government held the day, but Kim was elected convincingly (as was his friend, then-ACTU president Bob Hawke) in a swing that heralded Labor's coming domination of the Eighties.

That domination began in 1983, when a disarrayed and desperate Liberal Party forced a double dissolution election. Bob Hawke, freshly installed ALP leader, won comfortably. Kim joined Prime Minister Hawke's first cabinet as Minister for Aviation and Minister Assisting the Minister for Defence. Within months he was also Special Minister of State.

Kim's marriage to Mary did not survive his parliamentary commitments. 1984 saw Kim, chastened by divorce, ready to quit politics. Two things stayed his hand. One was his subsequent relationship with Susie Annus, a 38-year-old TV producer, who is now his second wife. The other was a gift from Hawke. After the election of December, 1984 (held to realign Lower and Upper House terms after the double dissolution), Kim was handed his dream job: Minister for Defence.

Defending the nation

Kim is a confessed war nut, a lifelong student of all things military. His sister Merrilyn recalls:

This interest in defence was there almost from the age of eight on. I remember him writing in his books, "Kim Beazley, Lord of the Universe, Admiral of the High Seas", etcetera, etcetera, and I thought, "OK, right."¹

A friend from Oxford remembers Kim confiding to him in 1974:

"My ultimate ambition in life is to become Australia's minister for defence. I can think of no higher calling, no greater pleasure, than organizing our nation's security." [What about Prime Minister?] "No, defence minister would be what I'd want, if ever I could get there."²

Accordingly, his six-year tenure as Minister for Defence was distinguished by outstanding enthusiasm and aptitude. He worked closely with the military and Foreign Affairs to reappraise and reinvent defence policy. He fought for Australia's strategic realignment as a self-reliant Asia-Pacific power, rather than an antipodean UK or US satrapy; he was at the forefront of the 1986 renegotiation of the ANZUS treaty. It was his relentless pursuit of increased defence spending that earned him the epithet "Bomber" Beazley - a nickname he still bears proudly.

The election of 1990 saw Labor's majority dangerously reduced. Hawke faced disquiet within the party and pressure from his ambitious Treasurer, Paul Keating. Kim lost his Defence post in a strategic cabinet reshuffle, moving to Transport and Communications. Hawke insisted that he was broadening Kim's political horizons, but "Beazley's colleagues would say later he was almost inconsolable, playing with his models of tanks and ships he used to keep, like a boy, on his desk as defence minister."³

Climbing the ladder

Hawke's historic mid-term overthrow finally came in 1991. Kim was alone in remaining loyal to Hawke to the end, but this earned him no enmity from new prime minister Keating: it was well-understood in Parliament that it was just Kim's way. Indeed, Keating regarded him as a valuable factional ally and was eager to continue his political education. Under Keating, Kim held the key portfolios of Finance (1991), Employment, Education and Training (1991-93), and Finance again (1993-96). He is remembered only as agreeably competent in these roles; nobody, however, was allowed to shine under the imperious and charismatic Keating. As Minister for Finance, Kim was in fact a powerful agent in Keating's ambitious economic reform program.

In 1995, Keating installed Kim as his Deputy Prime Minister. At the time, Labor's 12-year hold on power was looking increasingly tenuous - Keating's haughty style, his reforms and his "recession we had to have" had eroded his popularity to embarrassing lows. The 1996 Federal Election was a foregone conclusion. On March 3, Liberal leader John Howard assumed the office of Prime Minister more-or-less by default. Keating resigned from politics, and Kim shouldered the thankless job of Leader of the Opposition.

Leadership (part 1)

Kim floundered. His mild manner and committee-style approach to leadership left him open to accusations of weakness. His prolix Oxford-educated oratory alienated the media and the masses. Howard, meanwhile, took to government with uncanny strength and savvy, dominating the national agenda with his own controversial package of reforms. His two key, ongoing battles - the privatization of the national telecommunications carrier, and the enormously unpopular Goods and Services Tax - were fought largely against the minority Democrats and Greens. The GST alone should have sealed Howard's fate in the election of 1998; as it happened, the ALP merely made ground. The electorate went with Howard's typically down-home, soundbite-friendly assessment: Kim Beazley doesn't have the ticker for the job.

Floundering was tempered with fortune. The new tax system was implemented, accompanied by a raft of hideously burdensome compliance regulations - Labor scored points with the backlash from small business. Howard lost ground over regressive moves in health and education, wilful dithering over Aboriginal reconciliation, and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. It seemed that, at worst, Kim's fortunes would follow those of Howard and Hawke before him: he had only to hang on while his opponent fell out of favour. Pundits began seriously tipping him as Australia's next Prime Minister.

Image consultants began work in earnest: massaging his TV skills, cutting the big words out of his speeches, ironing his suits. But he could never match Howard's mastery of the media. The central plank of his 2001 election platform - "Knowledge Nation", a comprehensive review of education and research policy - was run to ground with one catchy epithet: "spaghetti and meatballs". And then, three months before the election, came "the Tampa crisis". The rescue of 438 refugees from a sinking boat off the Australian coast was deftly manipulated by Howard into a tide of anti-"illegal immigrant" hysteria which swept all other issues before it. Howard's "tough stance" on immigration was a winner. Labor, in a staggering tactical concession, followed Howard's lead; their slightly-different-tough-stance-on-immigration failed to impress anyone, least of all the rump of refugee-sympathetic voters who fled to the minor parties in disgust. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 compounded the hysteria and sealed Howard's victory. On election day, November 11, the Labor Party polled its lowest primary vote in 66 years. That night, Kim handed leadership of the party to his deputy, Simon Crean.

In the wilderness

Kim Beazley retreated to the backbenches, professing no interest in returning to party leadership, or even Cabinet. He concentrated on representing his Perth seat of Brand while his party descended into a chaotic funk.

Crean proved an ineffectual and unpopular leader, and meagre attempts to set policy were overshadowed by party infighting. As the next election loomed, Kim made two formal challenges to regain leadership. The first, in June of 2003, was a popular and well-orchestrated bid to unseat Crean, which the Labor Caucus voted to decline. The second came only five months later, when the party executive finally convinced the still-languishing Crean to stand aside; Kim narrowly lost the Caucus vote to Crean's Shadow Treasurer, the brash and enthusiastic Mark Latham.

Latham at least succeeded in getting the public's attention, and worked hard to return Labor to credibility and Government. Kim had initially declined a place on Latham's front bench, but in July 2004, with the election campaign underway and with Australian troops in Iraq, he was persuaded to take up his beloved Defence portfolio as Shadow Minister. The appointment was to prove temporary: Labor was routed in the October election, and the factional bloodbath which followed saw Kim, along with much of the shadow cabinet, ignominiously exiled to the backbenches.

Labor returned to the political doldrums, and Latham, laid low by recurrent pancreatitis and creeping unpopularity, quietly resigned from office and from politics in January 2005. Kim announced his candidacy for leadership within the hour. No formal challenges were entered, and Caucus endorsed Kim's accession on January 28. Immediately, he set about challenging the Government's defence policy.

Leadership (part 2)

Bearing the lessons of his election losses, Kim focussed on a program of "differentiation" - meeting Government policy with clear, rigidly contrary alternatives. (Cynics astutely called this tactic "opposition".) Iraq was a case in point: where Kim had previously argued points of military strategy, he now played to growing public unease with a simple promise of withdrawal. His response to the Government's contentious overhaul of industrial relations in 2006 was even more brazen: "We will rip up these unfair laws." - a soundbite slogan worthy of Howard.

The broad-strokes approach served the party well. Even before the Government became mired in the Oil-for-Food scandal, polls regularly showed Labor challenging the Government in popularity. The same polls, however, consistently placed Kim's popularity somewhere around that of bird flu. The majority saw him as old hat, a failed contender.

Labor's calamitous history of leadership changes was a strong motivator for party unity, but it was clear that little excuse would be needed to squeeze in one more revolution before the next election. The excuse came: "Rovegate". In November 2006, Beazley began a press conference with a reference to the funeral that day of Belinda Emmett, wife of über-popular TV entertainer Rove McManus; in a disastrous slip of the tongue, he expressed sympathy for Karl Rove. Kim was instantly an out-of-touch, bumbling pariah.

The inevitable leadership challenge was mounted by Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd and Health Minister Julia Gillard, breathlessly dubbed "The Dream Team" by the media. On December 4, Caucus handed the reins to Rudd. In a tragic twist, shortly after the vote Kim was informed of the death of his brother David that morning.

The fat man sings

Kim declared his political career over, likening another comeback to "Lazarus with a quadruple bypass". He remained as outgoing Member for Brand until the Federal Election of November 24, 2007, then quietly retired. The election was a Rudd landslide.

Kim has three daughters, Jessica, Hannah, and Rachel.

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sideways says i met the man at my local fish and chip shop. he was wearing sweaty grey trackies. top bloke really.