Dimensions
155 x 233 x 49mm
In January 1992, less than a month after Paul Keating became Prime Minister, Don Watson was employed as his speechwriter. Though trained in history rather than economics and generally regarded as a 'bleeding heart liberal', he became a close advisor and friend.
Based on notes Watson kept through the four turbulent and exhausting years he spent with Keating, this book is a frank, revealing and engrossing portrait of this brilliant and perplexing man, and a unique reflection on modern politics, government and Australia itself.
If he had never become Prime Minister, Paul Keating's place in Australian history would still have been assured. He was the treasurer who deregulated the economy; the weaver of Labor's modern story; its heavy weapon in the parliament. He was also the great enigma - a self-educated boy from Sydney's working-class west and a defining element of the head-kicking Labor right, who also happened to love Paris, Mahler and Second Empire clocks.
In December 1991, Keating wrested the prime ministership from Bob Hawke and the bruises from that struggle were part of the baggage he brought to the job: the other parts included the worst recession in sixty years and an electorate determined to make him pay for it.
Keating defied the odds and won the 1993 election, and in his four years as PM, set Australia on course towards engagement with Asia, a republic, reconciliation, and a social democracy that combined a modern export-based economy and sophisticated public systems of education and training, health and social security. Widely regarded as the supreme economic rationalist, the record shows that Keating's vision was infinitely broader and more complex.
This is a political memoir like no other. Written with humour, poetic grace and devastating candour, this book tells the inside story of what it was like to serve the modern era's most intriguing politician during some of the most important years in Australia's history.
