Gold Standard?: Remembering the Hawke Government

Name: Gold Standard?: Remembering the Hawke Government
Start: 2026-05-30T15:30:00+10:00
End: 2026-05-30T15:30:00+10:00
Location: Gardner's Inn Hotel Blackheath

About

3.30pm for 4pm Saturday 30 May 2026

Bookings essential - either through Trybooking or directly at the shop
$20 ticket, includes a drink upon arrival

Frank Bongiorno & Joshua Black in conversation with Naomi Parry Duncan

Was the Hawke government ‘the gold standard’ for federal government in Australia? In Gold Standard?, a stellar line-up of historians, social scientists, politicians and journalists sheds valuable new light on the policies, politics and personalities of the Hawke government. In reflecting on the ways in which the Hawke government responded to the problems and opportunities Australia faced in the final decades of the 20th century, this collection asks: What lessons can it offer in the art of reformist government? And how do its legacies continue to shape Australian society?

FRANK BONGIORNO AM is Donald Horne Professor of History and Public Ideas at the University of Canberra and Distinguished Fellow of the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University. His books include The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2015), Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (2022) and A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (with Nick Dyrenfurth, second edition 2024).

JOSHUA BLACK is a political historian, policy researcher and speechwriter. He has published widely on Australia’s political culture in scholarly and mainstream forums.

NAOMI PARRY DUNCAN is a Professional Historian, current president of the History Council of NSW, and senior researcher at the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at the University of NSW. Her latest book Musquito (June 30) uncovers the dramatic and tragic story of Musquito, one of the better known First Nations resistance warriors of the early colonies