Over 50 years ago, another flatfoot in the federal parliament had begun making waves albeit of a more humanist kind, waves still relevant today.

In so doing, William George "Bill" Hayden announced himself as an independent thinker, and a courageous advocate for the marginalised - notably, given the current debate, of homosexual Australians.

Now 84 and infirm, Hayden was the subject when on Friday former prime minister Paul Keating gave the 2nd Hayden Oration.

In his speech at the University of Southern Queensland, Keating outlined an extraordinary contribution underplayed by most historians, ranging from Hayden's reforming influence over a tribally configured party, to his policy prescriptions for the national economy, his recalibration of the US alliance, and disarmament.

Hayden first achieved prominence in 1975 when he was named as Gough Whitlam's "corrective" treasurer - too late to right that ship - and assumed the leadership of the ALP himself in 1977, following two of Labor's worst electoral routs.

Hayden would immediately drag his bedraggled party to the edge of national competitiveness in 1980 and in the space of just one more term, Labor would be back - winning handsomely in 1983, albeit by then, with a new "messiah" at the helm.

In a late twist, the gregarious, charismatic, Bob Hawke, who'd laid seige to Hayden's unspectacular leadership, had replaced him just a month out from the March poll.

Understandably gutted, Hayden had fully expected to become prime minister. His famous observation that a drover's dog could lead the Labor Party to victory, simultaneously conveyed his disappointment but also his reserve.

If a drover's dog was not actually ensconced in The Lodge, it had certainly entered Australia's political lexicon.

Contemporaneous accounts gave Hawke the win, but those closest to the action through Whitlam's turbulent rise-and-fall, the dark post-dismissal years, and the extraordinary success that delivered 13 years of Labor from 1983, recognise Hayden's primary role.

Most younger Australians campaigning for marriage equality in 2017 would not know Hayden from Adam. Incredulous at the glacial pace of change, even fewer would know that way back in 1967, it was Hayden, now 84 and infirm, who was pushing forward, largely by himself within federal Labor, to repeal dehumanising laws which rendered homosexual love illegal.

Even now in 2017, it is not uncommon for embarrassed Labor MPs to explain their denial in parliamentary votes as a "journey" - the unspoken point being it might have harmed their career prospects. But consider this. The former social security minister, treasurer, opposition leader, foreign minister, and ultimately governor-general, achieved all of that after he spoke out, long before he was leader, long before there was a majority within Labor, long before it was fashionable to do so.

The post-war ALP may have been "left wing" according to the political taxonomy, but in practice, it was working class, male, overwhelmingly Christian - socially conservative by disposition.

So when in 1971 at his party's state conference in Surfers Paradise, Hayden challenged these shibboleths by proposing the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and end to professional boxing, he was asking a lot.

The boxing ban was defeated easily on the voices but Hayden called for a division when conference chairman, Jack Egerton, also ruled in the negative on the other question.

He described the moment later in his eponymous 1996 memoir: "Egerton was furious, 'Gawd, I can't follow delegate Hayden, he's opposed to a bloke getting a punch on the nose, but doesn't mind if he gets a punch in the bum. Those supporting the chairman to the right, poofters to the left!'. Egerton's humorous, if rough and ready response, defused a fair bit of tension, for support for homosexuals' rights was in its infancy back then. Representatives of the clean-cut working class were not too sure about homosexuals in those days," he wrote.

By then Hayden was a 10-year veteran in Canberra having entered parliament in 1961, at the age of just 28. Eight years after his arrival, in 1969, another Labor wunderkind would land, Paul John Keating. The two would establish a quiet but productive bond, built around economic policy rigour, a certain otherness, and a shared desire to modernise both party and nation.

Keating, who is not known for handing out cheap praise, delivered in his address nothing less than a major corrective delivered by one of the only remaining people who was there throughout, shoulder-to-shoulder with Whitlam, Hayden, and Hawke.

"Bill understood that the frame of protectionism and old Labor-think could never rescue the country or the party from its descending fortunes," Keating said.

"He knew that I thought the same and that I broadly stood apart from the Labor orthodoxy in terms of the remedies."

Keating, who subsequently reached the summit denied to Hayden, nonetheless credits the Queenslander for much of his own success, beginning with Hayden's "wild call" to promote the precocious young New South Welshman to the shadow treasury post in January of 1983.

Without that elevation, Keating freely admits, he would not have been treasurer in Hawke's stellar 1983 cabinet - constructed by Hayden - and thus, presumably, might never have risen to the prime ministership himself.

"It was a big call. Some said at the time, a wild call. But had he not, I would not have become treasurer when Bob Hawke's government was sworn into office. I might have later - but then I would have been denied the all-important opening field of play."

It would be easy to dismiss Keating's oration as a genre piece, mere paean to its namesake. But the former prime minister's repositioning of Hayden within the Labor pantheon and within modern Australia's story, is more authoritative than that.

From his unique first person vantage point, Keating characterises Hayden's arrival in the leadership in late 1977 as the turning point, the pivot to post-war Labor Mark II. This phase, he says, set up the now universally revered Hawke-Keating golden era, defining its parameters and intellectual culture, if not the actual details in economic and foreign policy spheres.

"Even our opponents, these days, talk about the great reform period of the Hawke and Keating governments and well they might. The slew of changes set up the country for the modern age," he said.

"But, the antecedents of those changes, those great reforms, began with the frameworks Bill Hayden brought to the frontbench ... what [his work] did do was develop and have regard to a process and matrix of discursive reason, the likes of which pre-Hayden Labor had never had. And it was that process that ultimately, the Hawke government was built upon."

While Keating notes Hayden's ministerial achievements such as "the country's first single mother's pension" and "constructing Australia's first universal health insurance system, Medibank," he accords a special reverence for Hayden's intellectual and moral authority.

This was especially evident in the area of foreign affairs through the creation of "respectable independence" in our dealings with the US, the pursuit of nuclear disarmament, and the push for a Cambodian peace settlement.

Uniquely, according to Keating, Hayden played a role within Labor in turning its anti-American elements, convincing its left wing that the ANZUS treaty was vital and that the presence of US surveillance facilities had sound moral grounds.

He quotes Hayden on deterring nuclear war: "We were obliged to support America. That commitment was morally driven. That it would be immoral to claim neutrality and non-alignment on such an issue when most life on the globe could have been extinguished by a major nuclear conflict".

Said Keating, "Bill Hayden's stewardship of the ANZUS review and his carriage of the issue within the party and following that, Bob Hawke's ability to affirm Australia's support for the joint facilities, completely re-based the ANZUS treaty, not only providing a reaffirmation of its centrality, but doing so from a position of respectable independence.

"This is the difference between the intelligent management of the alliance during the Labor years 1983-1996, and the obsequious quality that characterises it these days."

"That kind of healthy independence, in the end, gave the Americans themselves more confidence about us, as a thinking and useful ally, rather than the relatively useless and fawning one they had formerly gotten used to."

"Instead, in a return to obsequiousness, [John] Howard encouraged the Americans into Iraq, their greatest strategic post-war mistake."

Hayden's career was unfairly marked by things that didn't happen. Losing the leadership in 1983 led to his role as one of Australia's most important foreign ministers. But it denied him the chance of being prime minister. Before that even, he was wheeled in as treasurer, too late as Whitlam subsequently conceded, to save that government. Or as he noted himself, to to late to avoid economic calamity.

"If we had served out the remainder of our term, another two years, I have no doubt that as treasurer, I would have turned the economy around," he wrote.