Australian Politics
Daniel Andrews: The revealing biography of Australia’s most powerful premier by Sumeyya Ilanbey
Writing a biography of any practising politician is a difficult task: you are more or less beholden to your subject, and the book can end up an exercise in diplomacy instead of perception. Writing a book about Bill Hayden, who has been called an enigma, a Hamlet, and a Cassandra, is double difficult. Writing about Hayden without Hayden’s help (he ‘was able to squeeze in only limited interviews’) is almost impossible.
... (read more)Diplomatic Witness: Australian foreign affairs 1941-1947 by Paul Hasluck
A Nation At Last?: The changing character of Australian nationalism 1880–1988 by Stephen Alomes
Anatomy of an Election edited by P.R. Hay, I. Ward, and John Warhurst
Australia at the Crossroads: Reflections of an outsider by B. A. Santamaria
Power and Protest: Movements for change in Australian society by Verity Burgmann
For a reform politician, these three books should be compulsory reading. They are not, for such a reader, heartening. But they do ‘serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.
Brian Dale’s Ascent to Power, very much less than fair to Neville Wran, is an unintended expose of the nature of political journalism in this country and its practitioners.
... (read more)It was in the wake of the landslide re-election of Daniel Andrews’s Labor government in November 2018 that the former Coalition prime minister, John Howard, christened Victoria ‘the Massachusetts of Australia’. Coming from Howard, this characterisation of Victoria was not meant as a compliment. Rather, it seemed designed as a consolation message for the local Liberal Party. He was providing them with an alibi for their lengthening record of under-performance in the state. Victoria, Howard seemed to be saying, was simply impervious to the party’s conservative values.
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