I’ve had trouble with that myself. A couple of years ago I chased Hayden all around the coast to interview him, but he refused to talk except off the record. Last Christmas he relented and spoke, incisively and persuasively, about what he thought would happen to Australia in the ‘80s. For all his coyness, and his delight in an Errol Flynn-like display of verbal swordsmanship with anyone who wants to write about him, I find Hayden a principled, sophisticated, and committed Labor politician. When the election count is finished, he deserves to be Prime Minister.

And if he isn’t, it will show more about the people of Australia, and what is happening to Australian society, than it will about Bill Hayden.

Hayden isn’t an enigma, despite all the puzzled media response to him. Nor is he inconsistent. But he has changed over the years. He entered parliament as a radical – an ‘angry young man’, Murphy calls him – who voted with Tom Uren and the old Left and was impatient to achieve a socialist society; as Hayden himself says, ‘I came down here burning with some sort of zeal: things must change.’ By the time he had been appointed Treasurer in 1975, a few months before the Whitlam government was dismissed, he was saying things like: I believe the biggest challenge we have, and the most important responsibility, is to get the private sector into a fairly prosperous, viable state.

Today, fighting one of the most ruthless and formidable conservative leaders in Australian history, Hayden sometimes merely seems to be saying ‘Me too’; no dramatic welfare initiatives, no tax rises, sane economic management, stable government, no reforms except what the economy can bear.

Like, apparently, the electorate, he’s become conservative.

Denis Murphy’s book mentions this change but doesn’t explore it. Partly it can be explained by Hayden’s own personal development: he has become sourer, more pragmatic, less idealistic as the years have worn on. But Hayden is also tailoring his policies, quite deliberately, to the great grey mass of voters which, he believes, exists in the middle of the electorate and which decides who wins power. Hayden himself has undergone a ‘middle-classing’ (his phrase), and he thinks the electorate has too. His task: keep in step.

The thinking behind this is remarkably close to that of Dr David Kemp, Melbourne political scientist and sometime Fraser strategist, who argues that the middle-class nature of the electorate, and the structural bias against the Labor Party built into the electoral system, makes the Liberal Party the natural governing party in Australia. (Shades of Nixon’s ‘permanent Republican majority’!)

Kemp is dead right about the bias, which returns Liberal-NCP governments even when more Australians vote Labor – but that can be altered. He is also right about the middle-classing of the electorate – but there is nothing new or revelatory about that. Writing Profile of Australia in the early sixties I argued that Australia had gone through ‘a bloodless social revolution’ which had changed the society into ‘a predominantly middle­class one which reflects the attitudes of white-collar workers rather than the old working class’. In 1968 the sociologists L. Broom, F.L. Jones, and J. Zubrzycki concluded, on the basis of sample surveys, that Australia was ‘the most middle-class country in the world’. And a majority of the middle class typically votes for Right rather than Left parties.

But that doesn’t necessarily condemn Australia to a succession of conservative governments, whether Liberal or Labor.

For a start, the Labor government of 1972-75 won two elections despite the electoral and sociological handicaps I have mentioned. It was a reform government, elected with a reform mandate, and fought both elections on reformist policies. A significant percentage of the middle class voted for it – not a majority, if the surveys are to be trusted, but enough to give Labor power. The same can happen again, especially if reactionary Liberal-NCP policies begin to harm middle-class interests in areas such as education, health services, and (particularly) jobs. One is tempted to say that the middle class – to which, of course, most of us belong – will, understandably, never be satisfied with what it has; it will always want more. There will always be a demand for reform, therefore, even from the middle of the electorate. From the fringe-middle and non-middle the demand is even stronger. It only needs a popular Labor leader (Whitlam, Dunstan, Wran – Hawke?) to crystallise that demand for the ALP to win power.

Second, and far more important, is the nature of the process which is now transforming the Australian middle class. As I have argued in detail in The Australian People, we are going through a time of profound social stretching. Not only are the extremes of Australian society growing further and further apart, but the groups in the middle are being stretched and subdivided as well. In a society where most people think of themselves as middle class, they need other ways of identifying themselves: the term has become so amorphous that it is no longer very useful socially or, for that matter, politically. The Great Australian Middle Class now includes a plethora of disparate groups – young people, pensioners, women, outer suburbanites, unemployed, students, migrants – and movements –women’s, environmental, gay, counter-cultural, resident action, etc. – which have very different characteristics and demands. The more you look at ‘the majority’, the more it reveals itself as a collection of minorities (and Whitlam, for one, showed how social minorities could be turned into a voting majority). The great united Australian middle mass, which votes monolithically for one party or another, is a myth. So is the Typical Middle-Class Aussie. There ain’t no such animal.

Though I haven’t the space to detail it here, the sociological research and survey data of the last decade confirms this analysis. The ‘middle class’ now needs to be broken up into upper-middle, middle-middle, and lower-middle if it is to make any sense at all. The working class is split between upwardly mobile groups of skilled artisans and a more traditional unskilled proletariat. Economist J. H. Collins argues there is also a ‘sub-group’ of workers, underprivileged, exploited, and locked into poverty, which is the direct equivalent of America’s ethnic and social ‘bottom’ groups; at the other end of the spectrum, safe behind tax avoidance schemes, family trusts, and the newly formed counter-terrorist squads of the Liberal/NCP government, is what R. W. Connell has called Australia’s ‘ruling class’, though, in deference to a highly eroded national sentiment of egalitarianism, most of its members prefer to call themselves ‘upper-middle class’.

It all makes Bill Hayden’s notions of pursuing the typical middle-class voter pretty meaningless. The heartening lesson to be learnt from the fragmentation of the middle class is that it is unnecessary for Labor theorists to condemn themselves to chasing some conservative consensus: there isn’t any.

Which is why I respond to Hayden when he says he is not a consensus politician, that he is a reformer, and why I withdraw when he says that people don’t demand change any more. That paradox is a recipe for disillusionment.

There are other considerations. Dr S. Encel has argued that no government in the world’s social democracies will be able to solve the current economic crises of Western capitalism; therefore we may expect a fairly rapid alteration of governments as voters constantly seek new solutions, new panaceas. Certainly, the Australian electorate has become more volatile: cross-class voting is common, the old party allegiances have weakened, and ‘issue politics’ have become more important. So has middle class radicalism, which means everything from the women’s movement to Terania Creek.

Finally, there is the nature and historic raison d’etre of the Labor Party itself. For better or worse, it is our best hope. It represents the only chance many people have of achieving a fairer, less exploited, happier life. It stands for change – or it is nothing. Behind all the wheeling and dealing, and politicking, and eternal disappointment, is the need for people who will take this corrupt system on and do something about it.

Bill Hayden was such a man. Maybe he still is. I hope, without reservation, he wins on October 18. Then we’ll know.