The Longest Decade (2006), by George Megalogenis

Adorned with an uncommonly nondescript photograph of Paul Keating and John Howard together, George Megalogenis’s second book (after 2003’s Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia) is an attempt to interpret the last fifteen years of Australian politics, with reference mainly to the (almost) unbroken period of economic growth that has informed them.

Megalogenis is a trained economist and was, between 1988 and 1999, a member of the Canberra press gallery, that gaggle of soundalike journalists competing to repeat the most politician spin-bytes for endless news bulletins. While those eleven years gave the author closer access than most to the ‘corridors of power’ during a period of great political, economic and social change, one has the feeling the book benefits more from his seven years outside the gallery since.

His project is to examine the claims made by Keating, Howard and their respective apologists to the sole responsibility for the last decade-and-a-half of prosperity. His main thesis is that both Prime Ministers, despite arriving from the opposite sides of the materialist spectrum, had almost identical views on economic reform, and thus should be remembered as equally responsible.

Such insight is true, though hardly new. Howard (as treasurer, Opposition leader and Prime Minister) and Keating (as treasurer and PM) both wanted deregulation, privatisation, labour market reform, free trade, surplus budgets, low inflation and lower taxes: essentially, the neoliberal project. Where they differed was on social policy, yet while he spends time on Hansonism and asylum seekers, Megalogenis’ bias is toward the politics of inflation and the rates of interest and unemployment (as opposed to their social costs).

Whatever such an emphasis was intended to achieve, its (perhaps unintended) effect is to reflect the biases of the Keating and Howard governments by relegating human rights to a level of secondary concern (with a few notable exceptions for the former). In defence of Megalogenis, one might argue that his project was to merely describe and analyse the politics of reform and the egos of its instigators, but another might ask how well such a thing could ever be done without questioning the very delineation of ‘economic’ from ‘social’ that informs much of that ‘reform’.

Where Megalogenis’ book is useful is in its restatement of the many memorable lines that have been strangely forgotten by the press gallery over the years, notably the distinction of ‘core’ from ‘non-core’ promises and the ‘never ever’ GST promise, and in both Keating and Howard’s thoughts on past events, gained through hours of one-on-one interviews conducted by the author. Despite the quality research, though, this is hardly the End of Certainty for the Nineties.