If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.

The blurb claims:

In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.

Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.

If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.

But it gets worse. The much vaunted analysis is trite or obvious, and the insider sources seem to have all been on the Liberal side of the aisle, but even then we learn nothing much of any great interest over and above what informed observers perceived at the time. There’s a heavy leaning to the uncritical acceptance of whatever sources say, just as with Jackman, although obviously Van Onselen and Senior had fewer sources. There’s also an uncritical leaning to the right, with Rudd’s policies often being described as thin or symbolic but with enconiums about “the [Howard] government’s sound economic management” being regularly repeated.

Bernard Keane observed in Crikey that while the authors claim that “the press gallery” wanted a change of government, the day in day out nutsoid denialism and cheerleading of the News Limited hacks in the then Government Gazette passes entirely unmentioned. Actually, about the only interesting bit of the book is a bit of ex post facto insight into where the Shanahans, Milnes and Pearsons were getting their psephological theories from – there’s an odd parallelism between the delusions in Howard’s own office (noted as having contacted Shanahan to ensure that a story made the front page of The Australian on one occasion) and Crosby Textor and all the batty lines the punditariat served up – principally the theory that Labor could lose with 52% of the vote and that marginal members might have up to a 4% personal vote. Tony Abbott and others also get portrayed in passing, with no reflection on the significance of all this, as suggesting angles for the punditariat. Anyone for fearless journalism, Dennis? Hold the front page, Chris!

[There are also a few bizarre mentions of Piers Akerman columns that add nothing to the story. Though his prediction that some National Party era scandal in Queensland whose name I can't even recall now would be a sleeper issue in the election goes unmentioned. Rather, he's portrayed writing searing critiques of the Rudd opposition. I really hope someone wasn't touting for a favourable mention in the Daily Terror to increase their book sales?]

So – ironically – we have an underplayed and unconscious indictment of Australian political journalism in a book that – despite being written by two academics – manages to convey even less insight and analysis, let alone matching of social trends and political developments – than Jackman’s book – written by a political journalist. It’s another completely “insider” account where the electorate appears to be a cipher, appearing only through polls and John Howard’s apparent intuition, and with politics reduced to the most mechanical of campaign methodologies and strategies.

Again, the question that should be raised is one for Melbourne University Press. These books are just underdone. This one, frankly, feels like Van Onselen left much of the writing to his junior author Senior – a PhD student – and then never quite got around to adding the analytical gloss or shaping much of a narrative. It cries out for an editor. It may well be that there’s a commercial calculation at work here – that a book with John Howard on the front cover is going to have a very limited shelf life in Borders or wherever – but when are we going to see some serious and considered writing on the 2007 election? The Christmas quickies were mostly better than the books that apparently had a longer gestation period.

Van Onselen and Senior – in their academic papers – demonstrate that they actually are a lot better than this. I don’t know if it’s deliberate dumbing down for a supposedly mass market, but if this sort of tome produces only yawns in the rather small market of political bloggers, well – why not wait longer and put more effort into something that lives up to its hyped promise?