I referred in an earlier post to Paul Kelly’s style of commentary – a mix of oracular pronouncement and portentous ponderings about the primacy of narrative. I actually read his March of Patriots a while back, and planned to review it. But one hardly knows where to start. Almost everyone – bar the in house cheer squad – referred at the time of its release to the stretch involved in equating Paul Keating and John Howard’s visions as if they formed some unified patriotic project. Obliged, obviously, to deal with their animosity, Kelly sought to square the circle by implicitly positing some sort of distinction between surface events and historical forces, which of course then falls in a heap because his analysis can’t get much beyond the personal and quotidian. The claim that Howard and Keating were some sort of generational throwbacks – exemplars of ‘authenticity’ – contains something of insight, but a dash more of the forcing of categories of which Kelly is so fond.
I could go on, but instead, I’ll refer the interested reader to Guy Rundle’s comprehensive review, which is well worth a read.
Aside from his deft skewering of the position of the Insider Kelly loves to adopt, Rundle is spot on about the almost complete absence of any social and cultural context for the events and decisions Kelly narrates. It’s as if ‘the people’ – that abstraction par excellence – only shuffle onto the stage by proxy; as figures in the ubiquitous Newspoll.
Kelly is trying to write something a little more profound than the ‘first draft of history’ traditionally assigned to the journalist’s pen. There’s more than a tip of the hat to John Howard’s nationalistic view of history’s uses. But he ends up writing solely about politicians, and not all that much about Australia at all. That’s a symptom of a broader disease in the political class, which is also a sort of provincialism. In this, Kelly really is an exemplar.
I haven’t read March of Patriots (and don’t intend to) but I have read most of Kelly’s other books since The Dismissal. So, clearly, there’s not much I can say abourt the book itself. However, since I’ve actually written a political history (about the 1940s) there’s probably a little I can say about the difficulties of writing political history.
Firstly, there’s the point Guy Rundle made about the absolute necessity of setting the politics in some kind of social/economic context, as its usually this context that impels political action, and, later, when the historians/journalists get to it, the political narrative. Without such a context its pretty hard to get the narrative right, (whatever right means.)
Secondly, there has to be some elicidation of all concerned participants and their relationships with each other. And by concerned participants I don’t just mean contending members of the major and minor parliamentary parties, or the various factions within them, but those extra-parliamentary figures in the media, business, the military,charities and NGOs extr-parliamentary political movements of right and left who all shape the political agenda to which the elected politicians caught up in the practice of high politics, whose history you’re writing, respond.
Finally, there’s that large technical problem of the political historian, how to elucidate and define your themes so the history becomes something more than just one damn thing after another. And those themes can only come out of a thorough study of the primary evidence, not from something imposed ex cathedra on the evidence.
Phew!
Spot on Mark, and your comment about the same criticisms applying to the broader circles of political journalism are right on the money, too. The public is reduced to slavering, impulse-driven troglodytes in much of this commentary, where journalist becomes not only oracle, but also self-ordained Speaker.
Both good points, folks!
Just on your thoughts, Paul – the irony is that his failure to thematise effectively means the only worth in the book is the bare bones of the narrative (this happened, then that…) – which is funny when you think about the way he bangs on about the supreme importance of narrative!
Which brings me to another irony – Kelly ends up writing something akin to John Howard’s vision of a history of events. And it’s a boring fail.
You’re right Mark, and the absence of any sense of the circumstances and atmosphere of the times hurts the book. However there is also something to Kelly’s argument (in the book and on the publicity tour) that this is a book about policy over politics.
If anything we have a great over-abundance of writers who cover politics as a horse-race, and whilst Kelly may go too far, his focus on the policy as the core issue is a useful change. (At least there are many good academic books on Australian public policy, but few popularly consumed as Kelly’s will be)If more journalists focused so much on policy we’d be better off.
As for the Keating/Howard similarities thesis, I think his colleague George Megalogenis got their first and did a better job in ‘The Longest Decade’.
Anyway, I reviewed it here (http://andrewcarr.org/?p=1026) which some of your readers may find interesting.
Mark, I’m waiting for the day to cool so I can go up the street and buy some smokes, and I’m finding the itty-bittiness of taking notes from Lt. John Barker’s 1774-76 Diary mildly frustrating (I’ll get over it) – and I’ve had more time to reflect, so, here goes:-
It seems to me that one of the major tasks of the journalist and/or historian contemplating the Keating/early Howard years is this question of “reform”.
What I’d like to find the answers to is:
To what extent did Keating’s adoption of neo-liberalist policies diverge from Labor tradition (which to some extent they certainly did) and to what extent did they reflect that tradition, bearing in mind there has always been a strong thread of liberalism running through Labor ideology? ( The pre-depression and Depression policies ofNSW’s Jack Lang is the immediate example that comes to mind, but don’t ask me to give the detail – I don’t have the books here, but its interesting that NSW Labor has always been one the most conservative branches of the ALP, and surely the explanation of that goes beyond avoiding the Great Split of the 1950s.)
To what extent did Howard’s adoption of neo-liberal policies reflect Liberal ideology as framed in the period Menzies to Fraser, and how did they diverge, for diverge they did.
To what extent did the National Party modify Howard’s conservative urges if at all, given their admittedly arguable tendency towards rural socialism?
How did the ideologies/beliefs/ personalities of the two leaders and their supporters and detractors within each party(s) influence the implementation of reform, if at all?
How useful might be a comparison of the way Chifley and Menzies introduced Keynesian economic reform – and that was real reform – with the way Keating and Howard engaged in neo-liberal reform in the 1990s assist in the understanding of the neo-liberal reform programme? What was different in the way these two reform programmes were implemented?
Now, if Kelly had applied those kind of questions to his study of the Keating Howard years, do you think it might have improved his book?
[see, if I have to, I can go beyond Howard-hating.
]
Andrew, yes, but the distinction between policy and politics is also a somewhat artificial one. Kelly, in making it, presumes there’s some (neo-liberal) yardstick of *good* policy – which exists as some sort of Platonic essence – and the messy business of politics is about implementing it against resistance. It’s a completely ideological view of things.
Aside from refugees, I think the limits of Kellyism show up over global warming. It isn’t that he is a denier (I haven’t read ‘March’ so I don’t know if he mentions it), it is more that he just has a lot of difficulty making it fit with his narrative. Australia ‘opening’ up is about unleashing economic growth – and suddenly science brings up a limit! From what I’ve read he seems really impatient with the issue and wishes it would go away. I saw him on ‘Insiders’ getting really frustrated that we were spending so much time on climate change while in the US it was a ‘third order issue’ – where it belongs it seemed.
@7 – Paul, good questions, not really addressed by Kelly.
He has a bit of a theme about the mark of true leadership being to drag a party in your own direction (note that he’s recently criticised Rudd for not being able to do this), but the reasons why Howard and Keating might have (a) wanted to and (b) been able to do this are weak – going back to personal biography, essentially. It’s the reduction of ideological forces to impersonal actors such as ‘globalisation’ which is another big flaw. And, ironically, there – as a number of reviewers noted – he rather overstates the degree of maneouvre Oz pollies had (while pretty much ignoring what Keating and Howard actually did contrary to the neo-liberal push – except to lecture and chastise from his great height). It’s a weird book. Sort of almost a bit Hegelian/great man of history blend.
@9 – Tim, I can’t remember much discussion of global warming. That’s not to say it’s not there – while since I waded through the thing. But I think you’re spot on about how it disrupts his worldview, and the resistance he consequently puts up to it.
Also missing is an intelligent discussion of the sheer political genius of the Liberal machine in 1998.
Howard ran on the GST, scored a minority of the TPP, yet won a stunning victory that set Howard up for successive victories because suddenly the little comb-over loser looked like a winner.
Struggling through Hegel’s philosophy of history and bits of Carlyle (mainly dipping into his French Revolution) once is enough, Mark. Both leave the brain somewhat poached.
AC @ 6,
Enjoyed your review.
Haven’t read it but want to know one thing from those who have.
Doeas every chapter start with “Well Barry…”
Very good tssk @14, but you really have to stop watching The Insiders.
Without detracting from any of Rundle’s comments on Kelly let me point to the following from Manne’s (Monthly)review of same in which Kelly claims in relation to Australian neo-liberalism:
“The new economic model was conceived in practical self-improvement driven by Australia’s public policy tradition.”
To which Manne replies:
“This is a seriously weird claim. As Kelly himself has famously argued, for almost 90 years Australian public policy supported protection, government intervention and centralised industrial arbitration.”
Notwithstanding that LP appears to be Manne averse it is clear from this concise dismembering, one of many offered up by Manne, that Kelly is as politically and critically uninformed as any other Australian journalistic Alan Bigenuff. In short Kelly is bunkum and dangerously unaware of his inadequacies.
I’m not sure about “Manne adverse”, anthony. I’ve been critical of him at times, to be sure, and I have my doubts about his politics. But I’d agree that his review of Kelly’s tome was a good piece of work.
Aspects of Keating’s and Howard’s personal ideologies have set me wondering.
We know Keating imbibed politics at Jack Lang’s knee. (he brought up the Brisbane Line in the flag debate against Hewson, one of Lang’s great bete-noires).One wonders how much of Lang’s liberalism he soaked up. He seems to have rejected Lang’s populism. He wasn’t anti-Semitic like Lang, and Lang would never have privatised the Commonwealth Bank.
As to Howard’s formative years -he certainly adopted his father’s small business values, but, in power argued for budget surpluses, rather than carrying on the Great Depression obsession with balanced budgets which prolonged the Depression here til 1938/9.His xenophobic attitudes of race may have come from the family connection with the New Guard, but one has to be careful here. One of his brothers was an ALP stalwart, and, in the 1980s, presumably did not share JWH’s mindset. So it can’t have been all derived from family influences.
So far as the Menziean/Fraser Liberal Party was concerned, Howard was a bit of a fish out of water. One can track Costello’s political development from his antagonistic reaction to the late 1960s/early 1970s Social Revolution.(though he did do deals with the far left for political gain at uni, I gather.) But that Revolution passed Howard by, (apart from the fact that he was pro the Vietnam War.) He was a man who ignored his times, whereas the Keating programme – for example equal rights for women, anti-discrimination, Aboriginal land rights – Keating was very much a man of his time and remained so in the way he embraced 1980s neo-liberalism.
For Howard however, neo-liberalism, as epitomised by Thatcherism, was not so much a conversion on the road to Damascus, as the anti-socialist, anti-union, anti-Labor Light on the Hill he had been searching for all his life, but hadn’t previously found in Fraser’s Liberal Party. (not that they weren’t all free, but they were vaguelygentlemanly about it, if the memoirs of 1940s-60s pollies are any indication, until Labor won power in 1972.) Howard, who, like Captain William Bligh, was not a gentleman, but a grasping lower-middle-class upstart, set about casting Menzies’ Liberal Party in that mold, as a previous commenter noted. One wonders what role perceptions of class distinction within the Liberal Party played in Howard’s political formation, especially if he was looked down on, as I suspect he might have been?
I wonder if Kelly gives any consideration to these forces that may have moulded both political personae?
Note: All the above is a hypothesis. I haven’t reseached it in any detail at all.
Correction to 18.
Meant to write : “Not that the Liberals of the Menzies/fraser era were all free of anti-socialist, anti-union, anti-Labor attitudes.” Sorry. Half-blind.
“One wonders what role perceptions of class distinction within the Liberal Party played in Howard’s political formation, especially if he was looked down on, as I suspect he might have been?” – PB
Do you reckon that phone call from the 80s between Kennet and Peacock points in that direction?
My impression of Howards time as PM is that it wasn’t until well into the war on terra that he became comfortable in the position, perhaps secure is a better word.
One of the biggest vibes I always got off Howard was insecurity, but that seemed to be gone by 2002/3. Personal feeling don’t count for much I know, but it used to radiate off him (imo).
Its a good hypothesis anyway.
jules @ 20,
Interesting. About 2002/3 Howard is adopted by the American neo-conservatives. In terms of Australian PMs he is a world player in a way perrhaps that no other Aussie PM had been since Billy Hughes at the Treaty Of Versailles negotiations. Seriously.
He is finally engaged with a group of people who really think the way he does and see the world the way he does. He has every reason to feel comfortable in that milieu. In the USA, the party elder Malcolm Frsaser is not denigrating him, PJK is not taking acid pot-shots at him in the local media. If my hypothesis is correct, perhaps Howard felt like a prtophet without honour in his own country. In Bush’s America he is one of the elite that over here, he claims he so despises.
This gives him confidence. I think he always had courage and tenacity, but because nobody wanted him it got him nowhere. He knew he had become PM out of the party’s desperation, and the ALP’s unattractive leadership choices. American neo-conservatism builds on the ideology he has adopted from Thatcher. He makes it his own, I would suggest, but ultimately with disastrous electoral consequences – his tinkering with Medicare, his attempt to introduce what is arguably an American style unionism to Australia, and his imitative adoption, until it is too late of American climate change denialism as espoused by American ultra-conservatism all contribute to him losing his politican touch with his own electorate. The Americans “duchessed” him, the same way the Brits “duchessed” Billy Hughes, and this playing to a foreign power has exactly the same result – defeat at home. The electorate’s feeling is not explicit about this -nowhere near as explicit as it was with Hughes – they just feel there’s something wrong with Howard being too close to an American President the rest of the world appears to despise. My theory is Bush’s bad rubbed off. Of course it wasn’t the only reason for his defeat, far from t but it was a contributary factor. At the price of attaining a political security abroad he could never really believe he had at home, all is lost.
Again, all hypothesis.
I heard Christos Tsiolkas give an interview about his book “The Slap” in which he said Paul Keating and John Howard were joined in his mind. I usually go purple with rage when ignorant twits say there’s no difference between Labor and Liberal, and in retrospect the differences between Keating and Howard are even more obvious, but still there’s something to that.
What the likes of Kelly never want to confront is just how inseparable neo-liberalism is frin base and ugly prejudices. The likes of Kelly like to talk about “flexible labor market reform” – as if this wasn’t rooted in age-old Tory class bigotry. All around the world neo-liberalism and xenophobia (some version of Hansonism) seem entwined – either to be used by cynical neo-liberal politicians to distract from the unpopularity of their own policies or as a result of those policies creating unemployment, insecurity and damaging communities (note I’m being generous and not accusing neo-liberals of being Hansonites to begin with). It’s probably true that those countries that have embraced neo-liberalism most enthusiastically have had the highest economic growth rates, but they also have the highest growth in prison populations.
In other words, there’s some deeply ugly stuff that just can’t be disentangled from neo-liberalism – much as the likes of Kelly would like to see it as a bloodless affair.
..frin? Meant from, of course.
Though in Hughes’ case it was defeat in anti-conscription plebescites, not an election. And the “duchessing” had to do with getting him to consent to send more Aussies to the Western Front. (I should have made that clear.) However, his international recognition, of the kind Howard obtained, doesn’t come till the Versailles negotiations.
Lets face it, he’s a stupid boring old murdoch grovelling turd who should just have his writing career euthanized.
When an editor, he mainly just snivelled to Suharto (Murdoch’s favorite at the time).
He’s just an irrelevant, pompous old bastard.
I’m really really looking forward to the Australian being shut down and the creeps who write there having to get real jobs.
Kelly put himself forward as a serious historian with ‘The End of Certainty’, with his thesis of the Australian Settlement (which is really a thesis began by others, such as John Manning Ward, though AFAIK Kelly is the one who thought to call it the `settlement’.)
Yet in the few historical passages of that book, Kelly (a.) placed an inordinate emphasis on his conception of state economic interventionism, and (b.) was woefully unconcerned with everything else in Australian history. The British Empire? The White Australia policy? The Americans? Communism? Catholics, Aborigines, women? None of these subjects existed in Kellyworld, at least not before he made a documentary for the ABC (with the help of a production team, of course.)
Paul, you’ve written here that Lang was ‘Australia’s FDR’, correct?
I know that’s the argument put forth by Frank Cain in his recent work Jack Lang and the Great Depression.
I disagree with Cain’s view. In fact, I was concerned to read the odd `speaker’s corner’ polemical touches in that book; for instance, the Premiers Plan being only referred to as ‘The Niemeyer Plan’; or the vote to bring down the Scullin government being described as a poor decision… made by Scullin. Perhaps this is the reason for Cain’s book being published by a very minor publishing house—the Louise Adlers and the UQPs like there history a little bit less eccentric.
Anyway, Bede Nairn’s critique in the ‘Big Fella’ suits me fine.
Couldn’t agree more Trengo. Paul Kelly is a vacuous rightwing whoopee cushion. It’s insulting that people allow his gasbagging to contaminate the public space.
Nickws @ 26,
I haven’t read Cain’s book and its years since I’ve read Nairn’s.
No. I don’t think Lang was Australia’s FDR. As I recall, the Lang Plan never got up. More than anything else it was a piece of anti-banking populism if my memory of my reading is right, and that always went down well in hard times. The criticisms of Niemeyer were a reflection of Lang’s well-documented anti-semitism, another populist strain, and his criticisms of British bond-holders had implications of a (non-existent) international financial conspiracy, yet another populist strain. (Eddie Ward was still rabbitting on about the latter with his condemnation of the IMF and Bretton Woods in the late 1940s.)
I was rather more thinking of how Lang fitted into the early liberal tradition within the ALP, which along with socialism,single-taxers, workers’ utopias etc, all went into the mix of early Labor ideology (so much so, if I remember rightly that they had no problems going into coalition with the Deakinite Liberals in the earliest years of the 20th century).
PB, the British governing classes may have “duchessed” Hughes and the America’s evanescent neolib ascendency may have “duchessed” Howard, but neither required “duchessing” to arrive at the foreign policy positions that both espoused with single-minded vigour.
In foreign policy terms, both Hughes and Howard were driven by conviction.
Hughes was prepared to tear his party and the country apart over his failed pursuit of conscription.
Howard, more cleverly, pushed the Iraq/Afghan commitment to the limit, but not beyond, of public toleration.
Hughes used Imperial loyalism as a stalking horse for a prickly and combative, but stunted, nationalism. He was prepared to exploit Australian racism to achieve this vision.
Howard used Australian nationalism as a stalking horse for his surrender of Australian interests and their subsumption under the rubric of Bush’s inchoate and ramshackle “Coalition of the Willing”. He was prepared to exploit Australian racism to achieve this vision.
Rudd still hasn’t worked out what to do with Howard’s legacy.
On John Winston Howard’s clever lies in pursuit of his neoliberal convictions, do yourself a favour and watch this doco on the crucifixion of Andrew Willkie.
But be quick. It won’t be up for long.
Katz @ 29,
Agree with you about Billy Hughes.
I think implicit in my remarks about Howard’s self-identification with neocon ideology (which included identification with Bush foreign policy) was a sense of how Howard was driven by conviction.
I should have made it clearer that both Hughes and Howard were driven by personal conviction. My bad.
Lang was a strange one, but ‘Langism’ was a form of class politics that reflected the radicalization of the working class by imperialist war and capitalist crisis, see my book on Lang; http://www.geoffrobinson.info/?page_id=399
Katz @ 30,
Thanks for putting me onto that doco. One wonders how Howard managed all these things and yet managed to appear he was not involved. Hopefully when they open the Archives in 30 years all this will be revealed. Was quite disturbed by the doco, but not surprised.
Geoff Robinson @ 32,
Good to “meet” another historian who has a fascination with J. T. Lang.
My research work on him has been mostly concerned with his post 1930s career – during WW2, especially in relation to the Brisbane Line and his attitudes/non-relationship toward Curtin at that time.
And with his career as an Independent in Federal Parliament 1946-149, on which I based my honours thesis.
Though I have studied and lectured on the Lang Government during the Great Depression.
Will read your book.
Cheers,
PB.
In many ways Andrew Wilkie didn’t have his wits about him.
When Senator Sandy MacDonald started using the classified report authored by Wilkie himself (30 minutes into the video) Wilkie should have made a huge protest about the illegal use of classified information and utterly refused to confirm or deny material protected by the dread provisions of the Crimes Act.
Ratty and the leakers would have been severely embarrassed for endangering Australian national security in pursuit of a personal vendetta.
Katz,
Yeah. I wondered why he didn’t scream blue murder too.
I wrote a short article after I heard Paul Kelly interviewed by Richard Fidler on his day time Conversations program:
‘Interview’ with Paul Kelly yet more free ABC advertising for Rupert Murdoch
The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly’s misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard’s, has been supplemented, at taxpayers’ expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program. …
Not sure what happened to the link in my above post. Here it is again:
‘Interview’ with Paul Kelly yet more free ABC advertising for Rupert Murdoch
I haven’t read any of Paul Kelly’s books. But, having read his work in The Oz and his pronouncements on the Insiders, I have no inclination to read them. Even Alan Jones has more integrity than PK. He does not try put up a pretence of being intellectual or superior.
then
He tries to build a huge head of steam with 10 dollar words and says the bleeding obvious. His limited talent appears to be critical of ALP or Rudd without trying to be obvious about it. Usually that is done by giving poor Malcolm a serve as well (even-handedness???).
I think Insiders would do a lot better in trying to rope someone like Michelle Gratten on the show. PK needs to be exposed like the emperor who has no clothes. And that incessant lip sucking…brrrrr…
There is much truth in this, though personally I wouldn’t go as far as to say that everbody who spoke of the Premiers Plan being the Niemeyer Plan was influenced by anti-Semitism. The most recent Lang author, Dr Frank Cain, uses the ‘Niemeyer Plan’ formulation. And I don’t think that a tenured UNSW academic is that irresponsible.
Isn’t it easier just to use ‘Radical’ in its original 19th century meaning? ‘Liberalism’ is just too awkward, too diverse, particularly for a modern audience.
Nickws @ 39,
]
I agree re terminology on Premier’s Plan. I was, I hope, alluding here to Lang’s personal anti-semitism. However we do need to consider to what extent reactions in Australia fitted into the world wide anti-semitism of the time in Britain, France, Russia, Germany etc. I’m specifically refraining from mentioning Nazism here (Italian Fascism seems to be a peculiar beast in this regard) because anti-Semitism existed outside that anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi ideology. (The New Guard here was anti-Semetic and aped Hitler, but they were also a bunch of laughable middle-class suburban incompetents).
As for using the term radical for liberal. I absolutely take your point, but radical does mean more than liberal – 19C/early 20C socialist tendencies for example, so it presents the same sort of confusion over terminology and definition – [the historian's bane, sort of.
Its important when looking at ALP stuff to understand it as a process in movement. It starts as a shift to political action by workers who carry with them a strong committment to lib-labism (the practice of worker activists support middle class liberals, which is generally widespread where there isn’t a workers party). As some of these middle class reformers were slurped into the labor machine from day one, it has always reflected a kind of bizarre class schizophrenia on the one hand aspiring to a better kind of society (eg. socialisation, light on the hill), on the other keeping its action limited to acceptable and relatively mainstream positions.
As the party develops, and new injections of ideas occur, you get, laboratory style, almost as many mixtures as it is possible to imagine.
As others have commented, Lang was a product of that movement. Both his populism, his anti-bank rhetoric, and his anti-semitism all have their roots in the melange of ideas in the early ALP.
As for Keating – I think this is best explained by the collapse of progressive politics. The lesson drawn by most Laborites regarding the reform government of Whitlam, was that serious reform is implausible – which knocked the intellectual stuffing out of the idea of Labor Governments as a means to achieve any kind of substantially different world. Once the Accord process renders redundant labour movement activism, since this becomes irrelevant in an era of centralised wage fixation, this severely curtails the renewing influence of working class activists. 1991 and the self-destruction of the CP deal a major blow to non-Labor transformative politics.
So Keating sits against this backdrop – he is able to lead the ALP, primarily because the party has nowhere else to go. He provided *a* program for them (neo-liberal ‘reform’ plus social liberalism) which succeeded in winning support from the party primarily because of the vacuum of all else.
On the Howard-Keating thing – stylistically, sure some similarities. Both can arguably qualify as ’statesmen’ (something we could also say of Menzies and Whitlam, though not K.Rudd). There is a strong continuity between Enterprise Bargaining, WorkChoices and Fair Work – all of which profoundly restrict solidarity. But there the similarity ends – Keating sold a message of ‘accept the pain, in exchange for a modern, broadly progressive political agenda’ – something many of the political inheritors of the new left, who by the 1990s had increasingly jettisoned any concern about class, were only too happy to accept. Howard said to the so-called ‘battlers’: this progressive political agenda by the ex-hippies is *why* you are suffering pain, so let me run the same basic economic framework, with a 50’s derived social agenda instead.
In short what they have in common was an attempt to manage capital in an environment where eroding workers gains of the past was the order of the day.
The exhaustion with the economic package of neo-liberalism is a big reason for K.Rudd’s success, despite his near total failure, either before or since his election, to articulate, let alone act on, *any* kind of distinct program. Its Howard+new pragmatism, that’s it.
– As an aside, I’ve always questioned to what extent Keating learned much at all from Lang, except perhaps how to ‘work the numbers’ in bureaucratic organisations. Lang, for all his failings, was *connected* to the workers movement, addressed himself significantly to the labour movement, and felt compelled to justify himself to the labour movement. There is also little doubt that the Lang Plan was progressive viz a viz the Premiers Plan, and a partial articulation of working class rejection of the capitalist strategy of making workers pay for the depression. Perhaps not ‘the Australian Lenin’ as my namesake once claimed, but unlike Lang, Keating felt no such compunction to justify or address himself to workers, except for the brief moment of raw populism that salvaged the ‘93 election for Labor.