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David Love's Unfinished Business
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Paul Keating on the changes to the Australian economy, 1980-2008
Speaking at the launch of his biography, Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's Interrupted Revolution (David Love, Scribe), Keating demonstrates the undeniable force of his intellect and personality in this overview of the sweeping changes that have occurred in the Australian economy over the past 3 decades. With an acute eye for detail, a feel for the big picture (and his own part in it), and a perfect turn-of-phrase, this is classic Keating.
State Library of NSW, August 2008
 
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Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope
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Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois and the Democratic Party’s new rock star, is that rare politician who can actually write — and write movingly and genuinely about himself.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
375 pages. Crown Publishers. $25.
His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.
And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.” Most memorably, the book gave the reader a heartfelt sense of what it was like to grow up in the 1960’s and 70’s, straddling America’s color lines: the sense of knowing two worlds and belonging to neither, the sense of having to forge an identity of his own.
Mr. Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope” — the phrase comes from his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address, which made him the party’s rising young hope — is much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech, and the bulk of it is devoted to laying out Mr. Obama’s policy positions on a host of issues, from education to health care to the war in Iraq.
But while Mr. Obama occasionally slips into the flabby platitudes favored by politicians, enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in “Dreams From My Father,” an elastic, personable voice that is capable of accommodating everything from dense discussions of foreign policy to streetwise reminiscences, incisive comments on constitutional law to New-Agey personal asides. The reader comes away with a feeling that Mr. Obama has not reinvented himself as he has moved from job to job (community organizer in Chicago, editor of The Harvard Law Review, professor of constitutional law, civil rights lawyer, state senator) but has instead internalized all those roles, embracing rather than shrugging off whatever contradictions they might have produced.
Reporters and politicians continually use the word authenticity to describe Mr. Obama, pointing to his ability to come across to voters as a regular person, not a prepackaged pol. And in these pages he often speaks to the reader as if he were an old friend from back in the day, salting policy recommendations with colorful asides about the absurdities of political life.
He recalls a meet-and-greet encounter at the White House with George W. Bush, who warmly shook his hand, then “turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president’s hand.” (“Good stuff,” he quotes the president as saying, as he offered his guest some. “Keeps you from getting colds.”) And he recounts a trip he took through Illinois with an aide, who scolded him for asking for Dijon mustard at a T.G.I. Friday’s, worried the senator would come across as an elitist; the confused waitress, he adds, simply said: “We got Dijon if you want it.”
In his 2004 keynote address Mr. Obama spoke of the common ground Americans share: “There is not a Black America and White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” And the same message — rooted in his own youthful efforts to grapple with racial stereotypes, racial loyalty and class resentments — threads its way through the pages of this book. Despite the red state-blue state divide, despite racial, religious and economic divisions, Mr. Obama writes, “we are becoming more, not less, alike” beneath the surface: “Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.”
Mr. Obama eschews the Manichean language that has come to inform political discourse, and he rejects what he sees as the either-or formulations of his elders who came of age in the 60’s: “In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage. The victories that the 60’s generation brought about — the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority — have made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions — that quality of trust and fellow feeling — that bring us together as Americans.”
His thoughts on domestic and foreign policy try to hew to this consensus-building line. Some of his recommendations devolve into little more than fuzzy statements of the obvious: i.e., that America’s “addiction to oil” is affecting the economy and undermining national security, or that the education system needs to be revamped and improved. Others echo Bill Clinton’s “third way,” methodically triangulating between traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas.
Mr. Obama writes that “conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”
He uses the Bush administration’s tough language to talk about national security in the age of terrorism (“if we have to go it alone, the American people stand ready to pay any price and bear any burden to protect our country”) but adds, crucially, that “once we get beyond matters of self-defense,” he is “convinced that it will almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally when we use force around the world.”
He assails President Bush for waging an unnecessary and misguided war in Iraq and for promoting an “Ownership Society” that “magnifies the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy.” Yet he also takes the Democrats to task for becoming “the party of reaction”: “In reaction to a war that is ill-conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.”
This volume does not possess the searching candor of the author’s first book. But Mr. Obama strives in these pages to ground his policy thinking in simple common sense — be it “growing the size of our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules” or reining in spending and rethinking tax policy to bring down the nation’s huge deficit — while articulating these ideas in level-headed, nonpartisan prose. That, in itself, is something unusual, not only in these venomous pre-election days, but also in these increasingly polarized and polarising times.
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Al Gore's The Assault on Reason
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Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger
In “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is “out of touch with reality,” that his administration is so incompetent that it “can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,” that it ignored “clear warnings” about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by “stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,” while using “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.
Review byFernando Ariza
The New York Times
THE ASSAULT ON REASON
By Al Gore
308 pages. Penguin Press. $25.95.
The administration’s pursuit of unilateralism abroad, Mr. Gore says, has isolated the United States in an ever more dangerous world, even as its efforts to expand executive power at home and “relegate the Congress and the courts to the sidelines” have undermined the constitutional system of checks and balances.
The former vice president contends that the fiasco in Iraq stems from President Bush’s use of “a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration.”
He argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized and instituted” by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donal Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — including its secret authorisation of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for “enemy combatants” — demonstrate “a disrespect for America’s Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy.”
Similar charges have been made by a growing number of historians, political analysts and even former administration insiders, and President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings have further emboldened his critics.
And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, “The Assault on Reason” turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports — a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.
This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy — low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape — and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of “An Inconvenient Truth” so bluntly effective.
Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.
Doubts about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Mr. Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him “there was zero possibility” that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from “making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush.”
And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. “Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question,” Mr. Gore writes, administration members “undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion — even though he was an expert, and they were not.”
Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration’s penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception” on matters like Iraq has made “true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible.”
Mr. Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration “withheld facts” from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be “far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president.”
And he contends that “it has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests” — like those represented by the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi before the war, and ExxonMobil on the climate crisis — for “basic information about the policies important to these interests.”
As for his conviction that the Internet can help re-establish “an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish,” it plays down the more troubling aspects of the Web, like its promotion of rumor and misinformation alongside real information, and its tendency to fuel polarizing, partisan warfare.
Part civics lesson, part political jeremiad, part philosophical tract, “The Assault on Reason” reveals an angry, impassioned Al Gore — a far cry from the carefully scripted, earth-tone-wearing Al Gore of the 2000 presidential campaign and the programmed “creature of Washington” described in the reporter Bill Turque’s 2000 biography of him, “Inventing Al Gore.”
Much the way that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a more accessible Al Gore — at ease with himself and passionate about the dangers of global warming — this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this “fateful juncture” in history.
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Lee Iacocca's Where Have All The Leaders Gone?
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Review by Gabby Hyman
MBA-Business-Schools Book Reviewer
Where Have All the Leaders Gone? by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney; hardcover, 192 pp; Scribner
That confident charmer you see on Chrysler television ads is done smiling. In fact, he’s sputtering with rage. He’s had it up to here with the Bush administration and has filled nearly 200 pages with his disgust with the media, Congress, and the voters who have given a carte blanche to erosion of personal freedoms, economic mismanagement, and a foreign policy akin to global insanity. “I’ve never been a Commander of Chief,” writes Lee Iacocca in Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, “but I’ve been a CEO.”
Iacocca renders a top-down analysis of this MBA-led Administration that he claims lacks the fundamental “C” qualities that make for successful leadership: courage, conviction, charisma, competency, and common sense. The book is a popular springtime read at MBA degree programs and leadership seminars, and it has ridden atop The New York Times Hardcover Business Book List this May.
It’s “A Hell of a Mess”
Iacocca pulls few punches. His literary style mirrors the management panache wielded to rescue Chrysler in the 1980s. Iacocca claims that Bush’s management of the country over the last six years has resulted in:
- “a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving
- the biggest deficit in the history of the country
- skyrocketing gas prices
- borders like sieves.
- the loss of the manufacturing edge to Asia
- schools in trouble
- and once-great companies getting slaughtered by health care costs.”
As for Congress, Iacocca wants it to know, “we didn’t elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity.”
People change. The man who had once reaped great profits from the creation of Chrysler’s minivans now wants us to adopt stringent fuel-economy standards. The 82-year-old Iacocca scoffs at Bush’s business training: “Thanks to our first MBA President, Social Security is on life support and we’ve run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq.”
He discusses all the presidential candidates including John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. (Un)fortuantely, Sarah Palin did not make the list!
About Lee Iacocca
Lido Anthony “Lee” Iacocca is primarily known for his monumental car designs for the Ford Motor Company and his revival of the Chrysler automobile brand in the 1980s. A graduate of Lehigh and Princeton, Iacocca was appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan as head of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation that raised money for the renovation of that historical landmark.
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Gittinomics reviewed
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Drawing: By Rocco Fazzari
Review by John Edwards
smh.com.au February 17, 2007
Author Ross Gittins
Genre Society/Politics
Publisher Allen Unwin
RRP $26.95
Ross Gittins has always been a liberal and compassionate voice.
FOR 30 YEARS economics columnist Ross Gittins has delighted and instructed readers of this newspaper, bringing a clear and simple style to a notoriously complicated subject.
Usually serene and gentle, he is ferocious when provoked and he is most often provoked by important people telling silly lies, so his denunciations are entertaining.
Gittins's opinions have changed a lot over the years, as he himself acknowledges. But among the babble of mercenaries, doomsayers and blinkered business spokespeople in the finance pages his has always been a liberal and compassionate voice, more likely to have a go at the strong than the weak.
For someone with a deep professional interest in how we work, how much we get paid, what we buy and what we sell, Gittins himself is unusually austere.
He is generally the only guest at the Reserve Bank Governor's lunch table wearing scuffed runners. He does seem to make an effort to colour co-ordinate his runners with his pants and jackets, though this may be quite accidental. He likes taking taxis but regards them, I think, as a wicked luxury.
I know Gittins well enough to have an argument about something when I run into him, but not well enough to know much about him outside his work.
Reading Gittinomics, I know a little more. He drives a very old but apparently reliable car with which he is well satisfied. He goes bushwalking with a "neurologist mate". His dad, as he often tells us, was a Salvation Army preacher.
It's the Salvation Army streak that runs through Gittinomics, a book built on his columns for the Herald and cast as a self-help manual on the business of life. Gittins likes us, but he is also cranky with us and he no doubt rightly feels we could do with some improvement. He scolds us for our materialism, our limitless and invented wants. We work too hard, we save too little, we neglect our families and deny ourselves the leisure to contemplate the true meaning of our lives.
Mainstream economics doesn't much help because its working assumption is that the more we have, the happier we will be. As Gittins writes, some interesting recent work in economics demonstrates this is manifestly untrue.
This book promises instead to tell us how to live "the good life without money stress, overwork and joyless consumption". Not altogether surprisingly, the answer is the one the Buddha discovered under the banyan tree two and a half thousand years ago.
It's also the same one Gittins senior probably offered to Ross while he was growing up. The answer lies with us. "I'm the son of a preacher," he declares, "and if you think I am going to absolve you from personal responsibility you're much mistaken." We need to remember "there's more to life than work or consumption". We should not be in such a "tearing hurry". We should take all our holidays. Let the neighbours get ahead. Give our partners and our kids a higher priority. We should want less.
There's a lot of wisdom in this advice and a lot of evidence and argument in Gittinomics to back it up. But I do think his portrayal of our contemporary life a bit unfair. It is certainly true that Mum today is more likely to have a job than Mum half a century ago. But it is also true that Dad's hours of work today are not as long as they were then.
Gittins thinks we consume too much and perhaps we do, but at roughly 60 per cent, the share of Australian production appropriated as household consumption hasn't changed in half a century. It has increased exactly in line with our national output. Household saving has certainly gone down, as Gittins complains, but that reflects a higher level of taxes and of interest payments on debt than a higher share of consumption than our parents enjoyed.
It reflects, too, the fact that we are very much wealthier than we used to be and don't need to save as much. And while our spending on big TVs and big cars is probably quite as wicked and silly as Gittins thinks, much of the increase in our household spending in recent decades has been on health, education, culture and recreation. In any case, perplexing as they are, the problems of having too much are surely preferable to the problems of having too little.
In just opening up another argument with Gittins, I find I have already taken up one-quarter of the space allotted for this review. It reminds me of how hard it is to deal with economic issues in a simple and brief way, and what miracles of style and thought Gittins has wrought over the decades to say so much in such small spaces.
John Edwards is chief economist for HSBC Bank, Australia and New Zealand
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George Megalogenis's The Longest Decade reviewed
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A fascinating insight into the minds of Paul Keating and John Howard.
By Michelle Gratton May 20, 2006
Two for the price of one: George Megalogenis compares and contrasts the Keating and Howard years.
Photo: Andrew Taylor
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Author George Megalogenis
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Genre Society/Politics, History
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Publisher Scribe
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RRP $32.95
POLITICAL LEADERS love to talk up their own book. And, despite their disclaimers, they're natural-born commentators. George Megalogenis, a journalist with The Australian, has mined these vanities, persuading Paul Keating and John Howard to give him long interviews for his comparative study of the pair. This focuses on their prime ministerships and Australia in the 1990s, the decade that continued Australia's economic transformation but saw a redirection on issues of national identity.
The interviews yield gold. The author describes Howard and Keating as "unplugged", and indeed they are, revealing much about themselves when they talk about each other.
Listen to Keating, on character, or lack of it: "I don't think they (John Howard and Peter Costello) are perfectionists; they're not quality snobs. Whether constructing a moulding for my house, or working out a colour, I try and do it with the same kind of intense calibration I brought to the public task."
And Howard, musing on who Keating did, or did not identify with: "He is not really part of the sporting thing about Australians . . . he was quite a good swimmer, wasn't he? He didn't seem to understand much about rugby league, for example, for a Labor leader coming from western Sydney." The cattiness and much else from the mouths of these protagonists give richness to a complex, closely woven book that is packed with information. Comparing and contrasting players is difficult, but when it works, as here or Michael Duffy's rather different exercise, his 2004 Latham and Abbott dual biography, the result is a sort of two-for-the-price-of-one book.
Megalogenis' field is economics but he focuses heavily on the politics (including the One Nation phenomenon), as well as foreign policy and other preoccupations of these years. Throughout, the author makes the most of his number-crunching skills, whether it's slicing and dicing the demographics, party support or housing statistics.
The numbers suggest we should think of the '90s not so much as belonging to Generation X as Generation W, "for women and 'wogs' ".
The workforce was becoming "more feminine and cosmopolitan, because the shape of the workforce was being altered by the daughters of old Australia and the Australian-born sons and daughters of non-English-speaking immigrants". Meanwhile the men of "old Australia" were undergoing more difficult changes, with many trade unionists being shaken out of their jobs, and a lot becoming small business people, especially handymen - and Tory voters.
While Megalogenis concentrates on one decade, inevitably his account spans a much longer period, because Keating and Howard "have split the past 30 years of power between them, almost evenly, as treasurers and prime ministers . . . treasurer Keating cleaned up the mess that treasurer Howard had made of the economy . . . Howard as prime minister was given a mandate to repair the society that had been divided by his predecessor".
Stripped to the basics, and of self-serving political positioning and posturing, Howard and Keating as politicians agreed on economics (we're talking very broadly here) but were poles apart on Australia's identity. Treasurer Keating did better than treasurer Howard as economic reformer, but Howard had a chance to get the economic runs on the board as PM, including bringing in the broad-based indirect tax that Keating fought for and then, when he lost to Bob Hawke's pragmatism, turned his back on.
PM Howard's retro attitudes on identity apparently resonate, after Keating's elevation of a more ambitious version guaranteed his end. "Keating's support for Aborigines, women, and artists grated with traditional Labor voters because they assumed he thought they weren't good enough for new Australia."
Keating's own ultimate failure with voters (after his 1993 triumph over John Hewson) hasn't stopped him believing he knows what his successors' strategy should be.
"Keating blames the Labor Party of Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, and Mark Latham for turning its back on upward mobility," Megalogenis reports, recounting how before the 2004 election Keating advised Latham to promise to cut the top income tax rate from 47 cents to 39 cents. Keating told him this would drive Howard mad. Latham rejected the advice. We'll never know how the Howard political psyche would have coped, though clearly it was in better shape than Latham's.
Megalogenis' account does not pretend to be a behind-the-scenes story of how decisions were made within the Keating and Howard governments. We already have much of that on record for Keating's days; the Howard historians are yet to get into swing.
This is the view from the helicopter, with the pilot carrying binoculars, allowing him to share with his passengers an enormous range of detail. While occasionally this overwhelms, the book is a good read for those wanting to understand two politicians who have made a real difference to modern Australia.
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