the former ACTU President Bob Hawke as leadership tensions between the two men began to mount; he later explained that part of his reasoning was that he privately hoped to succeed Hayden himself in the near future. However, by 1982, the members of his faction had swung behind Hawke, and Keating endorsed his challenge. The formal announcement of Keating's support for Hawke was written by a fellow Labor politician, Gareth Evans. Although Hayden survived the challenge, pressure continued to mount on him. In an attempt to shore up his position, Hayden promoted Keating to the role of Shadow Treasurer in January 1983. However this did not prove sufficient and Hayden resigned a month later, after a poor by-election result in the federal electorate of Flinders in Victoria. Hawke was elected unopposed to replace him and Hawke subsequently led Labor to a landslide victory in the 1983 election just six weeks later. Treasurer of Australia Early days Following Labor's victory in the 1983 election, Keating was appointed Treasurer of Australia by Prime Minister Bob Hawke; he succeeded John Howard in the position. He and Hawke were able to use the size of the budget deficit that the Hawke government had inherited from the Fraser government to question the economic credibility of the Liberal-National Coalition over the coming years. According to Hawke, the historically large $9.6 billion budget deficit left by the Coalition "became a stick with which we were justifiably able to beat the Opposition". Although Howard was widely regarded at this time as being "discredited" by the hidden deficit, he had in fact argued unsuccessfully against Fraser that the revised figures should be disclosed before the election. In the ensuing years, Hawke and Keating developed an extremely powerful partnership, which proved to be essential to Labor's success in government; multiple Labor figures in years since have cited the partnership between the two as the party's greatest ever. The two men proved a study in contrasts: Hawke was a Rhodes Scholar; Keating left high school early. Hawke's enthusiasms were cigars, betting and most forms of sport; Keating preferred classical architecture, Mahler symphonies and collecting British Regency and French Empire antiques. Despite not knowing one another before Hawke assumed the leadership in 1983, the two formed a personal as well as political relationship which enabled the Government to pursue a significant number of reforms, although there were occasional points of tension between