It was the big-picture reform that defined the Labor prime minister Bob Hawke and infuriated his opponents with its radical promise of a fairer, healthier society.

Medicare, Australia’s taxpayer-funded system of universal health insurance, established in 1984, has long presented as a paradox. It’s a political winner and a political target. A government-run scheme in an era of marketisation. A constant that has been constantly debated.

Pledges to limit the program have come and gone, and most elections have, at some point, centred on threats to its continuation – whether real or conjured.

For Hawke, it would be his signature achievement – the reform for which his promise of a new national unity or “reconciliation” was to be most enduringly evinced.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six-part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges.

From the vantage of 2026, it’s arguable Medicare has had the deepest personal and social impact of any single program in the nation’s history.

Yet it wasn’t even Hawke’s idea.

Because he had seized the Labor leadership from the luckless Bill Hayden on the very day the 1983 election was called, Hawke, of necessity, campaigned on Hayden’s suite of policies.

Central among these was Hayden’s detailed plan to legislate an improved version of the dismissed Whitlam government’s 1975 forerunner, then called Medibank.

Bitterly opposed by conservatives, Medibank was decried as socialism. It was quickly pared down to a government-owned participant in the medical insurance market from 1976 under Malcolm Fraser’s prime ministership.

As........

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