Australia

3. Fitzgerald et al., Made in Queensland (11 Feb 2023)

by kurto

Narrates politics and government from formation in 1859 to the early 2000s, lamenting the persistent, centrifugal influence of such industries as ranching, sugar, and mining while emphasizing education and the arts in a state not known for such disciplines. The book often reads as a historicist critique, for example failure to sooner adopt 20th-century voting standards – notwithstanding the Sunshine State and Australia being in the world’s vanguard. Left unexplored are such matters as how the Australian Labor Party’s assumption of party supremacy over parliamentarians became Peter Beattie-era ‘consultative government’ or why ‘primary industries’ and country regions have retained influence despite two-thirds of the citizens coming to live in the southeast portion of the state (‘imagined ruralism’ lacking explanatory rigor).
Of note:
• In the late 1800s, the bias toward inland rails, rather than coastal connections, evinced opposition to Brisbane interests
• Queensland uniquely favored importing islanders, running contrary to white Australian policy – notably favored by the ALP as a means of raising wages
• The period 1903-15 marked a political sea change, including such innovations as industrial wages arbitration, as the state reacted to 1893’s depression with ‘New Liberalism’ – the state fostering equality of opportunity – as well as Federation
• During the Depression, the Labor government funded infrastructure without upending the primary industries, in part because the ALP was strongest in the country districts. The party believed regionalization had helped sidestep some urban hardships of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia
• Queensland modernized in the postwar era: railway mileage exploded; suburbs were retrofitted for utilities and sewage; motels were popular as women’s holidays. Politically, the state was isolated from Australia by the reactionary, sleazy Bjelke-Petersen government (to 1988). More specifically, Brisbane’s 1987 Fitzgerald policy-corruption industry offset the 1982 Commonwealth Games and 1988’s World Expo
From the 1990s, globalization (as if international competition was a new economic phenomenon) changed public policy from regionalization to neoliberal rationalization, as evidenced in the closing of state schools in small towns. Fly-in, fly-out employment took root. At last a falsifiable thesis, if minimally unexplored. The book lacks an analytical structure to underpin the state’s character. (On the policy side, schools and the arts are perpetually underfunded, and reconciliation is always exacerbated, unfinished; there is no discussion of sport, especially rugby league.)
It seems the continuing role of primary industries as well as tourism reflect the scale of revenue and employment, which along with expansive landmass countervails Brisbane; the state has continuously attracted intranational migration; and citizens are consciously proud of their work and lifestyle.

See also: http://www.oeler.us/2021/07/07/19-gorman-heartland-30-oct-2020/

25. Menzies, Afternoon Light (10 Dec 2022)

by kurto

Essays in postwar government by Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, showing a pragmatic, legalistic bent. The politician ought neither trust in emotion nor be a cynic, but demonstrate pragmatism. Menzies sketches leading contemporaries, notably Churchill and Queen Elizabeth as well as his predecessors. In portraying diplomatic efforts to persuade Nasser to negotiate over the Suez Canal, the author asserts Eisenhower undermined efforts. The Australian and American constitutions are compared, the latter charter being more subject to political considerations, and the relationship of Australian government to the British metropole considered. Menzies criticizes the Commonwealth’s automatic admission of newly formed republics as well as treatment of South Africa and Rhodesia. The object of Commonwealth meetings is not to issue resolutions but to exchange ideas.

5. Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia (10 Feb 2015)

by kurto

Geography and economics have been more important to Australian history than politics. The ‘tyranny of distance’ shows itself in Aboriginal culture, Western settlement and economic development, foreign relations, and so on. They have often been interrelated, as in the development of export products (notably wool and mining) or the influence of drought. Owing to scarcity of labor, working conditions and labor law have been advanced, leading to egalitarianism (equality of outcomes) and also devotion to sport (as outside leisure). Black-white relations, obviously one-sided and sometimes fraught, are not more significant than the latter 20th-century influx of Asian peoples, which supplemented steadily decreasing European migration. Crisply written.

15. [Mcintyre], Work of History (7 August 2022)

by kurto

A festschrift narrating the career of Australian Marxisant Stuart Macintyre, evincing the effects of ‘commitment’ on professional study – however learned, surely limited and tendentious. An early historian of the British and Australian Communist parties, which pursuit was seen as groundbreaking because (modestly) critical, Macintyre moved on to Australian labor and government, and in as much as Marxist theories failed in history and they did in sociopolitics, then a Weberian sociology of the contemporary. He lamented the Hawke-Keating era didn’t go far enough in addressing utopian goals, criticizing ‘normative neoliberalism’, rejecting the search for ‘timelessness’. Effectively he and his student lodged the usual complaints of ‘winners and losers’, that unequal outcomes fall short of the general will. Macintyre was a ‘black armbander’ who controversially sought to put himself above the fray, a position which might have been more credible had he acknowledged the errors and outcomes of 20th-century communism.

6. Knightley, Australia (20 Apr 2016)

by kurto

A long cultural essay of 20th-century Australian society, helpful for understanding changing attitudes but lacking the dispassion of the historian. The author recurs to descriptions of the government and the working class, changing views of Aboriginals, and the cultural relationship with England. Knightley seems a reliable weather vale for left-liberal politics: he doesn’t acknowledge predecessors thought they were doing the right thing.

7. Kelly and Bramston, The Dismissal (24 Apr 2016)

by kurto

Governor-General Sir John Kerr’s dismissal of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam violated multiple standards of propriety, including Kerr’s obligation to inform Whitlam of the seriousness of the budget crisis (i.e., blockage of supply), Kerr’s keeping counsel with High Court judges, his discussions with the opposition, and the use of ‘reserve powers’. The authors generally located the shortcomings in the personalities of the vainglorious yet timid Kerr and to a lesser degree the ambitious Malcom Fraser and the bombastic Whitlam. Constructed as a journalist’s tick-tock account with the newest information presented first, the book seems unlikely to be the last word because of its focus on personalities to the near-exclusion of contemporary society, economy, and politics; it reads like a polemic, defending contemporaneous conclusions, although this could be a byproduct of Aussie vernacular.

11. Macintyre, Concise History of Australia (26 Jun 2019)

by kurto

Exemplifies the black armband school of Australia history, lamenting race, sex, and class in a Whiggish, frequently polemical narrative of illegitimacy and ignorance. Major topics such as Australian geography and continental exploration or the particulars of sport are dismissed as ‘colonial history’ or ignored. Though tainted by willful ideology, as well as tendentious glosses of world history, these points emerge:

Founding to circa 1850

  • There are two ways to interpret Australia’s founding, as a convict colony succeeding North America, or a as supply of naval stores
  • Aboriginals were found to be in a ‘state of nature’ and therefore lacking title to land
  • Australia attained self-sufficiency in food more quickly than North America, and began to supplant North America in attracting British migrants with the revision of land grants in the 1830s
  • Sealing and whaling led the economy to 1830. Pastoralists (‘squatters’) employed many on the fast-growing sheep stations. Following the introduction of merino, Australia captured half of the British market for fleece by 1850
  • As the early social divisions between convicts, freeborn, and natives faded, social order grew egalitarian

Circa 1850-90

  • Following the discovery of gold in Victoria, surplus wealth lifted Australia’s intake to 15 percent of all British exports, and the country began attracting private British capital. The first railways, telegraphs, and steamships from Europe reduced the tyranny of distance. However, all of the major cities were 800 kilometers from one another: inter-colonial travel was by ship
  • The debate over the low-cost availability of land for settlers was intertwined with the first colonial (i.e., state) constitutions. Macintyre laments the nature of upper houses in some states, overlooking democracy’s contemporaneous rarity
  • The character of Australian democracy is attributable to the Chartists: universal suffrage, the secret (‘Australian’) ballot, rough equality of electorates, no property qualification
  • Government powers were highly centralized, emanating from capital cities via courthouses and schools (the colony having replaced the church in 1850). The economic effect of towns was to create specialists in the professions and trades
  • The recession of 1891, kicked off by a miner’s strike, ended the midcentury ‘bargain’ between employers and labor, growth in exchange for job security. The economy contracted by 30 percent, demonstrating (according to the author) Australia had outstripped the land’s capacity, goaded by London capital

Circa 1890-1945

  • The economy remained geared to the Britain: 3/5 of exports to the UK, 1/2 of imports from there. The government promoted migration when labor was scarce and vice versa. Jobs were safeguarded by tariffs on goods competing with Australian manufactures – but protection only extended to employers meeting wage standards. The tactic effectively coopted the labor movement
  • Australian identity appropriated the socioeconomic mythos of the swagman: independent, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian. (Why was this a poor, unjust outcome?) The ANZAC represented unobtainable sacrifice and redemption of the convict stain.
  • Australian nationalism was a response to protest-minded socialist and feminists, both of which are ‘universal’ and international. The author expresses surprise that political leaders persuaded the electorate to unify, as he glosses the details of state formation
  • Despite fin-de-siècle setbacks, unions sidelined doctrinaire socialism. By 1914, electoral success made Australia’s Labor Party a world leader. This prompted the consolidation of protectionists and free traders into the rival Liberal Party. However, the push for conscription, which failed, split Labor and sideline the party for most years until 1941
  • The racially homogenous ‘south’ was urban, polarized by class, and an export-led economy. The harsher climate of the north required cheap labor, meaning jobs for Aborigines, Chinese and islander immigrants, and so society downplayed racism. Race, in the authors view, is not genetic but cultural; prevailing sociocultural norms are inherently hegemonic and oppressive. In the interwar years, rural development failed to halt migration to the cities.

Postwar

  • That social insurance wasn’t extended in the 1930s is attributable to inter-state rivalries. John Curtin traded wartime sacrifice for government power to pursue full employment, social welfare and pensions, and labor representation in management. His colleague Herbert Evatt was Australia’s first great statesman, a liberal international prominent in founding the United Nations
  • Robert Menzies stood for ‘forgotten Australia’, neither management nor tribal labor; he was dedicated to the British Commonwealth. But Aussie foreign policy moved into the orbit of the USA’s ‘informal imperialism’, which was not to be relied on any more than the UK… which country’s integration into the nascent European Union hurt the Australian economy.
  • Most of the final chapters are polemics. Gough Whitlam is treated favorably, Malcolm Fraser praised to the extent he was tolerant of social democracy. Paul Keating’s ‘bargain’ limiting wages in exchange for job creation evinces the author’s belief that the role of Australian business is to provide employment
  • Deregulation, exemplified by the floating currency, betrays the suspect role foreign capital and ‘neoliberalism’, i.e., participating in the world economy. As above, Macintyre complains of Australia’s dependency on exporting natural resources, but does not suggest an alternate approach for a country of 25 million; and is favorable to engagement with Asian economies, but fails to notice they are most interested in minerals and often totalitarian

Macintyre seeks both equality of opportunity and outcomes. His hindsight is splendid but historiographical method more wanting. Evidence is poorly presented in unnumbered endnotes, making it the more difficult to assess whether more contemporary evidence has been cherrypicked.

12. Blainey, Shorter History of Australia (4 Jul 2019)

by kurto

Technology, the conquering of distance, and British capital have been more important to Australian history than political decisions, while sport not labor is an unusually accurate mirror of society’s elite. As at 1789, Australia was the world’s largest surviving zone of hunter-gatherer society; Aboriginal tribes continued fighting one another more than the invading British. When later denied civil rights, it was because Aboriginals had shunned European ways. Aussie winters are sufficiently warm for hay to grow all year, so sheep farming prospered and wool became the leading export most years from 1835-1975, until commodities took over; Australia had long since become an export-led economy. In developing society, urbanization was strong than in North American because land was more expensive; half of land revenues were spent to bring out settlers who tended to stay in cities; more than half of first-time new farms failed. Steam engines changed men’s working conditions after 1860, 50 years before domestic products (e.g., stoves, refrigerators, washing machines) revolutionized women’s conditions. Railways, which expanded by a factor of 9 over 1871-91, began to link cities to the outback towns; most inter-city travel was by ship. Universal suffrage (including the secret or ‘Australian’ ballot) came very early in world society. Unions, which got started during the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, preferred shorter working hours to higher wages, because most men were single. Owing to leisure time and mild winters supporting the grass fields, sport prospered. The football clubs of Melbourne and Geelong are older than any in the in English (soccer) Premiership, and playing grounds grew large so people could watch. Australia, from 1850, was the first country to value spectator sports because they demonstrated determination, stamina, courage, and the will to succeed. In some ways, the author notes, Australia has first-rate sports and second-rate work culture because the latter been protected from competition. By 1891, most Aussies were literate.

In 1889, English General J.B. Edwards published an influential report noting each state had its own railways, post offices, immigration laws, import duties, and (most of all) military units. The report captured Henry Parkes’ imagination, who called a convention in Sydney in 1891 to promote federation; John Quick championed a constituent delegated to write a constitution. The Australian Natives Association (ANA) was the leading force in the push for independence, which progressed in an environment conscious of defending the continent from invasion, the recession of 1893, and comparisons with America. Sydney, confident of regaining supremacy from Melbourne, saw federation as a Victorian conspiracy. Changes were to require a majority of population; but this does not make Australia inherently conservative; rather, during the 20th century would-be reformers marshalled their forces too narrowly. The movement was slowed by the economic slump of 1893, which was deeper than in Europe: 13 of 22 banks which issued notes closed. Amid the campaigning, Aussie politics were reshaping: Labor, a unionist but not socialist party, ascended in New South Wales and Queensland, Radical-Liberals held power in preeminent Victoria and South Australia.

In the first half of the 20th century, Labor’s success exemplified the country’s egalitarian spirit: government should regulate work and ‘tall poppies’ were to be cut down. Post Federation, Labor tended to be (British) immigrants, and Liberals natives. The ‘White Australia’ policy, much like those pertaining in the USA, Canada, or New Zealand, is most notable because it persisted longer. At the turn of the century most immigrants were actually Italians, Greeks, or Russian Jews. The policy hurt Queensland economy, dependent on Polynesians as well as a law requiring shipping to be owned by natives. 1907 saw the introduction of a basic wage standard. Simultaneously, the emergence of oil transformed Australian coal self-sufficiency to import dependency. World War I, particularly the travails of Gallipoli and the Somme, sealed Australia’s nationhood in ways statutes could not (but Western Australia voted to secede in 1933!). In 1921 Labor reversed course by adopting a socialist platform, while Irish Catholics became moderates and city manufacturers more dependent on protection than farmers. World War II brought the country closer to America. Moderate John Curtin reformed the economy and brought Canberra (i.e., national government) into national life. In the postwar years, English immigrants were outnumbered 3:1 by Europeans, the start of a significant cultural change. Everyone had a job due to autarchic manufacturing policy (as well as Europe’s need for its own goods); in sum, manufacturing was now more important than agriculture. Over 1945-70, though the era is strongly associated with Menzies, the economy reshaped Australia more than politics; the autarchic policy sought to avoid the perils of World War 2. Australia was self-sufficient during the 1973 energy crisis, for in the 1970s mining replaced agriculture and capital was attracted to a stable country, which found a new client in Japan. Menzies distanced the Liberals, based in Victoria, from corporate business while enticing suburban women and returned servicemen. Anti-communist feeling hurt Labor, spawning a breakaway Catholic party which tended to side with the Liberals. Hawke began ending protectionism, Keating financial regulation, but labor itself was not exposed to competition. At century’s end, the Mabo decision inventing Aborigine claims to land was judge-made law, badly done and so drawing the courts into a legislative role. Post 1990, social and cultural matters separated the parties more than politics proper. While it was fashionable to declare Australia an Asian county, in fact it was sui generis, Paris being closer to Asia than Canberra and the closest reaches of Australia being a desert. In this way, distance remains a pivotal force; but the country, now one of the world’s four oldest democracies, feeds itself plus 80 million overseas, justifying white settlement.

Clark (Cathcart, ed.), History of Australia (3 Aug 2019)

by kurto

A colorful polemic ranging from 1787 to approximately 1935, increasingly lamenting the Australian citizenry’s failure to adopt an egalitarian social democracy. The country’s first political issue was whether the rights of convicts revived with manumission or were forever forfeit. By 1835, there were two methods of seeding European civilization: 1) a leveling, seen in early New South Wales and lastingly in Western Australia, due to high price of labor which produced social regression, and 2) slave labor in New South Wales, Tasmania, and Queensland. Through the end of the transport to NSW in 1840, civic officials and pastoralists were supported by forced labor; the 1818 arrival of surplus convicts enabled Macquarie to initiate Sydney’s public works. Emancipists looked past judicial rulings to affirm civic restoration, and notwithstanding Lord Bathurst’s 1823 pronouncements (e.g., no land grants to ex cons but only those with capital for improvement), eventually settlers concluded reform could occur without forced labor. By 1828, ¼ of the population over 12 was native: taller, hardier, irascible but not vindictive. However, bushranging carried elements of Irish vengeance on Anglo society, and settler-Aboriginal relations were conquest. Governors such as Macquarie and Bourke, aware of the skills shortage, tolerated emancipists whereas Tories favored ‘exclusive’ legislatures, the contest playing out in the writing of provincial constitutions. Only South Australia was different because of its balance of sexes, no penal labor, and orderly German population.

By the mid-19th century, the population had doubled, convicts become numerically insignificant, wool exports grew by a factor of seven, and Catholics rose to one-quarter the population. The problem of transitioning from a penal to a working-class society was evident in the lack of an enforceable penal code, native social institutions, and persistent labor shortages. The economy’s dependence of commodities (including wool) promoted reliance on British capital, draining the settlers’ creative energies and entrenching metropolitan social institutions (e.g., education and law). The exclusives-emancipists rivalry changed into a contest between oligopolistic pastoralists and urban egalitarians (who notably eschewed American-style democracy). The first NSW constitution combined requirement for land ownership to vote with government appointments and concessions to bourgeois merchants, but raised the price of land, thus discouraging immigration to the ‘workman’s paradise’. 1852’s gold rush prompted Britain to hasten the provincial charters (and also the independence of Victoria). NSW aimed at a landed, hereditary Whig society to stave off socialized masses, Victoria following suit. In SA, worker aspirations for land were acceptable and manhood suffrage granted. But the proto-governments of the goldfields showed indigenous Aussie political views and even practical outcomes such as the eight-hour workday. The Selection Acts of 1860, intended to promote agriculture and closer settlement while responding to diggers’ dream of landownership, created conflict with pastoralists as well as squatters. Only SA had achieved a stable class of wheat farmers; in WA dependence on convicts made the state most fragile; failed farmers turned to crime. Aussies learned to sympathize with failure without becoming cynical. Clark considers that the aspirations of petty bourgeois for respectability and the working class for land ownership held back the country.

Between 1870-90 both Melbourne, which was protectionist, and Sydney, favoring free trade, reached population of 300,000; manufacturing grew notably in clothing, printing, iron works, furniture, and foodstuffs so as to reach 10 percent of GDP; women worked in the putting-out system. Simultaneously, wool sent to English mills increased another five times. Unionism sprang up in shearing and spread to shipping. In VIC and SA, the working class was immigrant, seen as deserving of the vote; in NSW and QLD, it was convict on the way to socialist; TAS and WA remained ‘feudal’, Europeans aligned against Aboriginals. The 1891 retirement of NSW premier Henry Parkes was the end of the chance to build a middle class from bushrangers and city labor. It was also contemporaneous with the start of the economic downturn, in which era legislatures blocked social reform. Liberals saw Federation as a way to circumvent revolution but the white Australia policy ended the country’s working-class reputation(!). Further, independent Australia remained dependent on Britain for defense. Clark laments conscription’s dividing labor and contends Gallipoli and World War I failed to liberate the country from is colonial history.

Postwar electrification promoted bourgeois values, while government plans such as national insurance undermined labor’s polemics. The national mythology touted liberty and freedom from poverty. Jack Lang exemplified Labor’s role as its social conscience. During the Depression, the NSW premier sought to suspend payments of British credit, but a centrist faction led by Joe Lyons accepted the recommendations of the Bank of England’s Otto Niemeyer that Australia was living beyond its means. Lyons would subsequently help found a party of the non-communist left; the 1932 controversy over England’s ‘bodyline’ cricket was fueled by the debt argument. Wrapping up in the middle of the Depression, Clark’s postwar coda accuses Menzies of cultural cringe and hails Whitlam as a liberator.

Even as abridged, Clark’s telling is full of poignant anecdotes, effectively showing the author’s sociopolitical views but also revealing his lack of dispassionate inquiry. Ever watchful for egalitarian ideals and social revolution, Clark never articulates those foundational concepts which make these inevitable: tellingly, Herzen comes closest in theorizing the petty bourgeois’ transformation is the final work in any society based on property. Why should vast Australia not permit its citizens to own land?

21. Kelly, March of Patriots (22 Nov 2019)

by kurto

            Prime ministers Paul Keating and John Howard extended Alan Hawke’s reform program, albeit for different reasons and in contrasting ways, positioning Australia for a tranquil prosperity in the 21st century. The pair shared a working-class heritage though the Labor man was egalitarian by ideology, the Liberal by creed. Kelly describes the outcome as ‘Aussie exceptionalism’, the transition from a protected to a global economy while preserving pragmatic, socially egalitarian features and avoiding ‘US style’ laissez-faire (or neoliberal) features.

a            Then-Liberal party leader Alan Hewson should have won the 1993 election, but his Fightback platform provided Keating a target to distract from a deep Labor recession; this year, not 2007 ended ‘neoliberalism’ in Australia. Despite winning Keating blamed Hawke for not relinquishing power in 1988. His income tax cuts (combined with raising gas and tobacco surcharges) were cynically designed to make the Hewson’s GST proposal unworkable, and would force his finance minister to resign soon after delivering his first budget. Nonetheless, despite 10 percent unemployment he stood by the 1980s reforms, breaking tradition of responding to downturns with higher tariffs. The introduction a central bank and abandoning the wage award system would set the stage for low inflation. As a cultural warrior, Keating was anti-British (a la Manning Clark) and a radical nationalist (i.e., anti Federation), exemplified by his attack on the flag. Prone to overreaching, he required faith in his ideological, ‘redemptive’ positions on the market economy, republicanism, Aboriginal reconciliation, and Asian détente. Keating held the Mabo decision allowed for ‘coexistence’ of native claims and pastoral title, allowing the former a seat at the negotiating table; but the outcome was judicial administration and so tanglement. Ultimately he failed to graft Mabo, Asian détente, republicanism, and multiculturalism onto modernization.

            Labor’s contesting the 1996 election on terms of concealed budget deficit cost the party a decade. Workchoices, Howard’s effort at labor (industrial) deregulation, not only raided the opposition’s turf but also sought to demonstrate growth did not result in inequality (but shared gains). Howard could not have succeeded Hewson, but followed Alexander Donner because Kevin Costello was prepared to wait his turn. He had changed since his first term as Liberal leader, moving beyond the party divisions of the 80s to fuse a Burkean conservatism with Smithian economics. Labor’s reform model comprised financial deregulation, tariff cuts, moves to counter inflation (i.e., the central bank), privatization, and enterprise bargaining; Howard added tax (GST) reform as well as fiscal and labor measures – unusually conceding credit to Labor for the effects of financial and tariff changes. Unemployment was not conquered until the 2000s, but the Liberal PM renewed the country’s sense of personal responsibility, moving it further away from (social) protection. He was disinterested in religion as a political objective, and dropped opposition to ‘multiculturalism’, but held his ground on citizenship and immigration and contested Mabo and the 1996 Wik case, which implicated some 40 percent of the land. Kelly writes Howard missed his opening vis-à-vis Aboriginal reconciliation. He loved talkback radio and laid claim to a generation of ‘battlers’, the Aussie Reagan Democrats.

            The passage of GST was opened by a court ruling stopping New South Wales from taxing tobacco; monies were to go the states. The newly floating currency enabled the country to weather the Asian crisis, while underlining Howard’s confidence in its Western ties. Under Howard, Australia’s plan was not détente but world deputy (e.g., Afghanistan) and regional leader (Timor independence). By the end of his term, relations with Tokyo, Dew Delhi, Jakarta, and Beijing were at a high point; Howard skillfully drew closer to China while immediately supporting America in its war on terrorism (having been present in Washington on September 11, 2001). Hanson was a noisy, worrisome, and ultimately flawed challenger. As to an Aussie republic, Howard agreed with Keating a popular presidential mandate would overturn the Westminster system, and exploited uncertainty whether it meant the country would no longer have a British head of state or should become a direct democracy.

            After the debacle of Seattle 1999, Howard had sought a bilateral trade deal with America, sealing the arrangement with instinctive show of support after 9/11: Howard immediately understood the attack as a threat to the West. (Ironically, the economic downturn of the Howard’s second term, punctuated by the 2000 introduction of the GST, a landmark to his tenacity, broke the common assumption that Australia was tied to the US economy, the Antipodean slump being unrelated to tech.) The Tampa incident demonstrated both determination to control Australia’s borders and response to judicial activism. Australians agreed with Howard the executive branch should be responsible immigration, regardless one’s party affiliation. Post-reform Australia was not prepared to accept judicial activism as an alternate policy mechanism.

            Full of contemporaneous and post facto interviews, Kelly is Australia’s answer to Bob Woodward, himself an establishment figure if not quite so biased. Though sometimes repetitive, and the introduction is something of a flying start, the book is clearly the starting line for academics.