Politics & Power Quote by Bob Hawke

Calling it "stupid economics" is Hawke at his most disarming: a blunt, almost dad-like put-down that pretends the argument is purely technocratic while quietly smuggling in a moral and political worldview. He doesn’t say anti-union governments are cruel, ideological, or vindictive. He says they’re dumb. That framing matters because it flips the usual script. Instead of unions pleading legitimacy, the state has to justify why it would sabotage a major institution of wage-setting, training, and workplace coordination and then still expect stable growth.

The key phrase is "a strand of thinking", which paints anti-unionism as sectarian dogma rather than reality-based policy. Hawke is tagging a certain economic orthodoxy - market purity, managerial prerogative, labor as cost center - as something like a cultish habit. It’s an argument about incentives and system design: treat unions as enemies and you invite permanent industrial conflict, wage suppression, and productivity problems that no amount of spreadsheet discipline can fix.

The context is Hawke’s Labor prime ministership and the Accord era, when Australia tried to trade confrontation for a negotiated settlement between government and organized labor: wage restraint in exchange for social wage improvements and a seat at the table. The subtext is pragmatic corporatism, not romantic unionism. Hawke isn’t sanctifying unions; he’s insisting they’re a governing fact. In a modern economy, pretending otherwise isn’t tough. It’s self-harm dressed up as principle.