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Articles on Paul Keating

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In a new book, former prime minister Paul Keating makes it clear that, from a young age, he was interested in power and the gaining of it. AAP/Daniel Munoz

Book review: Keating, by Kerry O'Brien

Kerry O'Brien has provided the platform for Paul Keating to define his political career, explain what drove his reform agenda and cement his position as one of Australia’s greatest leaders.
Ros Kelly was the first in a long line of federal ministers to address themselves to the question of Australia’s emissions target. AAP Image/Lee Besford

25 years ago the Australian government promised deep emissions cuts, and yet here we still are

When Australia’s government first pledged to set an emission-reduction target, Jon Bon Jovi was riding high in the charts. The progress made in the 25 years since has hardly been a blaze of glory.
The revolution of the past three decades has not been kind to the people who have experienced the destruction of their industries, jobs and communities. AAP/Jessica Evans

The unmaking of the Australian working class – and their right to resist

Something similar to E.P. Thompson’s story of England in the first three decades of the 1800s has happened in Australia between the mid-1980s and today.
Labor has long had leaders, such as former prime minister Paul Keating, capable of speaking the language of Anzac. AAP/Alan Porritt

A legend with class: labour and Anzac

There is a complicated story involving the Anzac legend and the left between the 1920s and the 1960s which historians have barely begun to untangle.
Journalist George Megalogenis takes an affectionate journey through the milieu of Australia’s economic reform in a new ABC documentary, Making Australia Great. ABC TV

Making Australia Great despite themselves: PMs stake rival claims

A line-up of former prime ministers stake their rival claims to making Australia great, in a new series by journalist George Megalogenis.
The cross-bench senators may call to mind Paul Keating’s charge of ‘unrepresentative swill’, but they also reflect and respond to the 21st-century world in ways that the major parties can’t. AAP/Alan Porritt

Don’t blame micro-parties or the Senate – update an archaic system

The Senate is not a root cause, but part of a long list of symptoms that indicate Australia’s political system is increasingly unfit for purpose in the 21st century.
John Howard sealed his fate by going too far with WorkChoices, but he got the balance right and succeeded with the GST reform. AAP/Andrew Brownbill

Why not listen to the people for a solution to the reform stalemate?

The distinction between the global and the local is collapsing under the pressure of climate change, economic restructuring, global migration and jihadism on the one hand and the populist and information…
Mercurial, visionary: Paul Keating was by far the most industrious treasurer Australia has ever had. National Archives of Australia: A6180, 15/2/93/25

Cabinet papers 1989: Keating’s Bringing Home the Bacon budget

A recent public poll showed that of Australia’s recent federal treasurers, Peter Costello and even John Howard were rated higher than Paul Keating. Joe Hockey was rated the worst. Today’s release of the…
The public response to the eulogies to Gough Whitlam testifies to the power of oratory that draws on and gives fresh life to memory. AAP/Alan Porritt

Memoria in Memoriam: Whitlam’s farewell invokes power of oratory

In a playful rhetorical flourish at the Sydney Town Hall on Wednesday, Indigenous leader Noel Pearson monumentalised Gough Whitlam’s prime ministerial legacy, Monty Python-style: What did the Romans ever…
Twenty years on, Paul Keating’s Creative Nation remains a vital reference point in the history of Australian cultural policy. AAP Image/Julian Smith

Paul Keating’s Creative Nation: a policy document that changed us

Today marks 20 years since the publication of Creative Nation. An ambitious and expansive project by Paul Keating’s Labor Government, it was the first Commonwealth cultural policy document in Australia’s…
Former PM Paul Keating says the Liberal party has always opposed universal superannuation. Lukas Coch/AAP

Keating accuses government of attacking super ‘out of prejudice’

Paul Keating has launched a swingeing attack on the government’s deferral of 12% compulsory superannuation, accusing it of wilfully sabotaging Australia’s savings scheme out of prejudice. The former prime…
Former prime minister Paul Keating argued governments need to use their political capital to drive reform. But this is becoming increasingly difficult in a poll-driven political climate. AAP/Paul Miller

Keating, reform and the difficult notion of ‘political capital’

Throughout Keating, a series of interviews that finished airing on the ABC earlier this month, the former prime minister makes reference to the notion of political capital in relation to the Labor government…
The existence of a dispute tells us more than its adjudication is ever likely to. AAP Image/Lukas Coch

Keating’s Redfern speech is still worth fighting over

The Redfern Park Speech, given by former Australian prime minister Paul Keating on December 10 1992, was a speech worth fighting for. It captured harsh truths about Australian history; it used those as…
The full story of the Keating years – and their aftermath – is both far more complex and contentious than the man himself would have us believe in his ABC interviews. AAP/David Crosling

Keating: interviews for the true believers

The ABC’s four-part series of interviews with Paul Keating, which has just finished airing, displayed the former prime minister and treasurer in all his complexity, both at his best and at his worst. This…
Kevin Rudd leaves parliament with his future as uncertain as his legacy. AAP/Daniel Munoz

The Rudd legacy: we need to talk about Kevin … or do we?

Should we care about Kevin Rudd’s legacy? Will anyone care? Australian political historians gaze with envy at the United States, where past presidents are revered and books about the “founding fathers…
Former prime minister Paul Keating delivers a Remembrance Day address in Canberra. AAP Image/Alan Porritt

Today’s youth protected against 20th century’s Armageddon

Delivering the Remembrance Day address at the Australian War Memorial, Paul Keating has highlighted the protection that unifying Europe gave from the sort of dangers that led to “Armageddon” last century…

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