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Winner, 2013 John Button Prize Tony Abbott is the most successful Opposition leader of the last forty years, but he has never been popular. Now Australians want to know: what kind of man is he, and how would he perform as prime minister? In this dramatic portrait, David Marr shows that as a young Catholic warrior at university, Abbott was already a brutally effective politician. He later led the way in defeating the republic and, as the self-proclaimed “political love child” of John Howard, rose rapidly in the Liberal Party. His reputation as a head-kicker and hard-liner made him an unlikely leader, but when the time came, his opposition to the emissions trading scheme proved decisive. Marr shows that Abbott thrives on chaos and conflict. Part fighter and part charmer, he is deeply religious and deeply political. What happens, then, when his values clash with his need to win? This is the great puzzle of his career, but the closer he is to taking power, the more guarded he has become. ‘Since witnessing the Hewson catastrophe at first hand, Abbott has worn a mask. He has grown and changed. Life and politics have taught him a great deal. But how this has shaped the fundamental Abbott is carefully obscured. What has been abandoned? What is merely hidden on the road to power? What makes people so uneasy about Abbott is the sense that he is biding his time, that there is a very hard operator somewhere behind that mask, waiting for power.’ —David Marr, Political Animal ‘This is no character assassination. Marr is not afraid to praise Abbott in places and respects his political skills and intelligence.’ —Michael McGuire, the Advertiser ‘David Marr is as brilliant a biographer and journalist as this country has produced.’ —Peter Craven, Australian Spectator ‘If you want to hit a man where it hurts, hit him in the groin. David Marr doesn’t miss in his Quarterly Essay profile.’ —Chris Wallace, Canberra Times David Marr is the multi-award-winning author of Patrick White: A Life, Panic and The High Price of Heaven, and co-author with Marian Wilkinson of Dark Victory. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Monthly, been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch. He is also the author of five bestselling biographical Quarterly Essays.
Though geographically far apart, Turkey and Australia are much closer than many would think. This collection provides a relevant, comparative and comprehensive study of two countries seeking to reconcile their history with their geography.
The inside story of a wicked problem … What should Australia do about climate change? A succession of leaders has tried to answer this question – and come unstuck. Politicians and public servants call it a “wicked” problem – one highly resistant to solution – and many approaches have been developed and discarded by the major parties. Some believe Australia’s dependence on coal makes effective action impossible. In this book, award-winning journalist Philip Chubb examines the tenacity of fossil-fuel interests and their allies in business, politics and the media when their power is challenged. He reveals and analyses the political strategies of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard as they tried to overcome the obstacles created by Australia’s carbon-intensive economy. This is a dramatic study of leadership replete with new revelations. Using more than 75 interviews with key figures (including Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, Greg Combet and Penny Wong), freedom-of-information requests and good old-fashioned leaks, Chubb gives a persuasive account of success and failure in climate policy, and of the strategies that leaders must use in future.
In the second revised edition of this monograph, Jennifer Menzies and Anne Tiernan capably chart the often hazardous terrain of the ‘caretaker period’ that ensues from the time an election is called until a new government is formed. This is a landscape fraught with political and administrative dangers – particularly for public servants who are required to ‘mind the shop’ and keep the basically machinery of government going. The conventions represent an historical accretion of custom, practice and rules, often leavened with uncertainty. In tackling their subject, Menzies and Tiernan draw upon their shared past experiences as public servants and ministerial ‘staffers’ as well as the highest standards of academic scholarship – this is a ‘must read’ for politicians, public servants and students of government. The second edition expands on the first edition by documenting recent controversies and trends which have had an impact on caretaker conventions. The analysis of the contemporary application of caretaker conventions has been updated and new case studies included – particularly from the last federal election. Also included is additional material about lengthy government formation after election day and the management of caretaker conventions during that time. The New Zealand material has been revised and updated.
Trust is the most powerful weapon in the political arsenal. It can pierce an opponent’s armour or deflect the most ferocious attack. It can explain difficult policies, and become a well of goodwill that politicians can draw from in their darkest hours. Yet despite its great value we are resigned to the idea that trust in politics will continue to decline. Drawing on contemporary political stories and examples, The Trust Deficit shows us how faith in our politicians has been eroded but how it can be rebuilt. Julia Gillard’s pledge that there wouldn’t be a carbon tax and Tony Abbott’s promise of no cuts to health or education saw a collapse in their governments’ levels of support. By breaking trust down to its elements—reliability and competence, openness and honesty—we see how recent leaders established trust and used it to their political advantage.
The years 2010 to 2013 saw a remarkable period in Australian political history: Julia Gillard became Australia's first female prime minister after she successfully staged a leadership challenge to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. A few months later she led her party to the 2010 federal election, and subsequently steered through seventeen days of negotiation with three independent members to successfully form her second, but minority, government. Yet, three years and three days later, she was overthrown by the very man she had originally dethroned. In this book, expert contributors consider the turbulence of that period and reflect on the Gillard governments' policy-setting, institutional and political legacies. In particular, they consider the issue of Gillard's leadership of a minority government and the arrangements needed to work with the Greens and independents to achieve Labor policies in the parliament. A recurring theme raised by many of the authors relates to the many distractions that prevented Gillard and Labor from gaining popular traction during the period. The book gives particular attention to Gillard as a female leader and the relentless campaign of denigration that pursued her, drawing conclusions about the fate of many women who assume positions of significant power in the Australian community. The Gillard Governments has been produced by the ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra. It is the eleventh in a series of books on successive Commonwealth administrations. Each volume has provided a chronicle and commentary of major events, policies and issues that have dominated successive administrations since 1983.
Earle Christmas Grafton Page (1880–1961) – surgeon, Country Party leader, treasurer and prime minister – was perhaps the most extraordinary visionary to hold high public office in twentieth-century Australia. Over decades, he made determined efforts to seize ‘the psychological moment’, and thereby realise his vision of a decentralised, regionalised and rationally ordered nation. Page’s unique dreaming of a very different Australia encompassed new states, hydroelectricity, economic planning, cooperative federalism and rural universities. His story casts light on the wider place in history of visions of national development. He was Australia’s most important advocate of developmentalism, the important yet little-studied stream of thought that assumes that governments can lead the nation to realise its economic potential. His audacious synthesis of ideas delineated and stretched the Australian political imagination. Page’s rich career confirms that Australia has long inspired popular ideals of national development, but also suggests that their practical implementation was increasingly challenged during the twentieth century. Effervescent, intelligent and somewhat eccentric, Page was one of Australia’s great optimists. Few Australian leaders who stood for so much have since been so neglected.
This book examines the history, theory and journalistic practice of profile writing. Profiles, and the practice of writing them, are of increasing interest to scholars of journalism because conflicts between the interviewer and the subject exemplify the changing nature of journalism itself. While the subject, often through the medium of their press representative, struggles to retain control of the interview space, the journalist seeks to subvert it. This interesting and multi-layered interaction, however, has rarely been subject to critical scrutiny, partly because profiles have traditionally been regarded as public relations exercises or as ‘soft’ journalism. However, chapters in this volume reveal not only that profiling has, historically, taken many different forms, but that the idea of the interview as a contested space has applications beyond the subject of celebrated individuals. The volume looks at the profile’s historical beginnings, at the contemporary manufacture of celebrity versus the ‘ordinary’, at profiling communities, countries and movements, at profiling the destitute, at sporting personalities and finally at profiling and trauma.
Americans call themselves a democracy, but they are not. America has redefined democracy to make it conform to the capitalist economy and rule by wealth elites. When American leaders say they wish to make the world safe for democracy, they really mean that they want the world, including Australia, to subsume itself into this US project. Any process resulting in Australia absorbing more of the United States' corporatist political culture will result in the serious erosion of our own democratic ideals. Australia should resist this, especially at a time when such corporatist politics is losing its legitimation. We are better served by our own robust system of democracy.