kewpid.net

(or my second if you include this ver­it­able rant)

Being the on-the-pulse polit­ical junkie that I am, I bought The Longest Dec­ade by George Mega­lo­genis. The book is split into 15 pas­tiches that Mega­lo­genis (I’m gonna call him GM from now on) calls “snap­shots”. You’d think that would be one snap­shot for each year of the “dec­ade”, but that would limit half of the Keating/Howard double-act to a third of the volume.

The writ­ing itself is fairly easy to read — “ped­es­trian”, if you’re feel­ing bitchy — but that’s good because I have a curi­ously short atten­tion span. It is more like 15 loosely con­nec­ted fea­ture art­icles than a uni­fied tome. The oil that GM’s try­ing to sell is that des­pite the pop­u­lar notion that Keat­ing and Howard are a study in con­trasts, they are fun­da­ment­ally sim­ilar in their eco­nomic and for­eign policy out­look. For example, while Keat­ing is remembered for his fond­ness for greater rela­tions with the Asian region, and Howard less so, the truth is they both saw the eco­nomic poten­tial in Asia, and any push for cul­tural integ­ra­tion was nom­inal at best. Keat­ing said in 1996, “I have never believed that Aus­trali­ans should describe them­selves as Asi­ans or that Aus­tralia is or can become part of Asia”. Howard has oth­er­wise made that point abund­antly clear.

Keat­ing is lauded and lam­basted for his eco­nomic reforms and high interest rates. Howard is strangely cel­eb­rated for keep­ing Australia’s rate of interest in the eco­nomy low. While eco­nomic con­cepts are some­times obscure and dif­fi­cult to explain, GM is doing read­ers a great dis­ser­vice by adopt­ing the Howard approach. Import­ant issues that marked Australia’s trans­ition to a rel­at­ively open eco­nomy such as the dis­tri­bu­tion of incomes and work­force par­ti­cip­a­tion are con­flated to the vague descriptor “dereg­u­la­tion”. Keat­ing, for all his flaws, increased the eco­nomic lit­er­acy of the nation, and explained his policy. Howard has been happy to let the people slowly slide into ignor­ance. GM as an eco­nom­ics gradu­ate should know better.

Apart from the lit­any of typos and gram­mat­ical errors which were a little grat­ing (and should have been picked up by the edit­ors), The Longest Dec­ade

• The Three Lives of Thomas­ina hd

is a decent sum­mary of the Keating/Howard era. Though there is per­suas­ive evid­ence to their sim­il­ar­it­ies, its doubt­ful Keat­ing and Howard will ever really get along.