Australian Politics
In October 1993 I picked up a copy of Window, the ‘Weekly Hong Kong Newsmagazine with Exclusive Coverage of China’ and found in the Business and Finance section a Profile, ‘Bob Hawke’s Eagle Eye in Asia’. There was a photograph of the Eagle, who described himself as a ‘business commentator and facilitator of increased enmeshment in Asia’. This was certainly a confident label. Reading on I discovered that Hawke saw himself as ‘overwhelmingly responsible for the vision of Australia as part of Asia’. He told the reporter than in his first days as Prime Minister he had used the phrase, ‘our future lies in enmeshment with Asia’, a sentiment that was at first greeted sceptically, but now, Hawke claimed, ‘no one questions the wisdom and correctness of Hawke’s vision. No one.’ Emphatic stuff, claiming sole credit for long term shifts in opinion and cultural practice, while dismissing the doubters. If that was all there was to my theme, this would be a very brief history indeed.
... (read more)Prime Ministers’ Wives by Diane Langmore & Suffrage to Sufferance by Janine Haines
Ross Fitzgerald reviews 'Billy Snedden: An unlikely Liberal' by Billy Mackie Snedden and M. Bernie Schedvin
Neither a conventional biography nor an autobiography, Billy Snedden is a story told in two quite distinct and authentic voices. There is that of the late Sir Billy Snedden, Liberal Party leader from 1972 to 1975, and Dr Bernie Schedvin, lecturer in politics at La Trobe University.
... (read more)From Fraser to Hawke by Brian Head and Allan Patience & The Hawke–Keating Hijack by Dean Jaensch
Malcolm Fraser On Australia edited by D.M. White and D.A. Kemp
The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government by James Walter
George Munster reviews 'The Things We Did Last Summer' by Bob Ellis, '31 Days to Power' by Robert Haupt with Michelle Grattan, 'Time of Testing' by Craig McGregor, and 'Gamble for Power' by Anne Summers
‘In fifty years’ time,’ Robert Haupt and Michelle Grattan write in 31 Days to Power. ‘historians will look at the 1983 elections, see that inflation, unemployment and interest rates were at high levels compared to the past, and conclude that Fraser could never have won’.
... (read more)