The Way We Were - 1983 From the Archives
Posted 23 August 2025
In 1983, Paul Johnson CBE [1928 – 2023] visited Australia and wrote a piece for The Age newspaper (Figures 1 & 2). He was a British journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian later in life.
In his article, which we turned up during some recent archival research, Johnson perceptively observes the social and economic forces at work in 1983 Australia, with Malcom Fraser as PM and Bill Hayden as Opposition leader.
With hindsight, Johnson was correct that the economic, social and cultural effects caused by the ‘Four Horsepersons of the Left Apocalypse’ would be profound.
Yet he missed that great ability of Australia and its people to ‘pull a rabbit out of our hat’ when times were dire and our country’s challenges of drought, ‘banana-republicism’, political gridlock and world trade wars seemed insurmountable.
For, within three weeks of Johnson penning his article, the Lucky Country had found another ‘rough diamond’ in the form of Bob Hawke. Hayden resigned on 3 February before he was pushed and, with Hawke in the process of being installed as Labor Opposition Leader, Fraser panicked and called a snap election for 5 March 1983 hoping to thwart Hawke’s ascendency to Opposition Leader. But it was too late, and Hawke led Labor from Opposition to a landslide victory, achieving a 24-seat swing and ending seven years of Liberal Party rule.
And ironically, for all his currupt rat-baggery Hawke turned out to be one of Australia’s best ‘Liberal’ prime ministers in history. He woke us up to a consensus on many issues - and once again in our history we went on to undertake the painful political and economic changes required to get the country back on track. The country then boomed and surged ahead to success for forty years until now, once again, we find ourselves languishing under four new and considerably more corpulent and dangerous Horsemen of the Left Apocalypse - The Trannies, The Net Zeroes, The Entrenched Bureaucrats and the anti-Semites.
Today, we have plenty of ‘Paul Johnsons’ warning of our problems, but we are desperately searching for the next ‘rough diamond’, that magician with a fat rabbit in his hat and the ability to knock some consensus into us.
Figure 1 - Paul Johnson, The Age , Melbourne, Saturday 22 January 1983, p3. Full pdf File p3 here
Figure 2 - Paul Johnson, The Age , Melbourne, Saturday 22 January 1983, p6. Full pdf File p6 here
