Paul John 1

ALREVIEW 43 Paul John I Paul Keating Prime Minister, by Edna Carew (Allen and Unwin, 1992). Reviewed by Craig Mc Gregor. There he is: Prime Minister of A u stralia (at la st), w ritten ab ou t, in terv iew ed and watched every day—and still an enigma. He is even an enigma to Edna Carew, despite a profes sionally researched and written biography by someone who has established herself as a leading finance writer and has the back ground to tackle Keating in precisely the arena where he ex cels: economic policy. I had read Carew's earlier version of this book, then titled Keating: A Biog raphy, and enjoyed it—though I was a bit put off by the heavy concentration on Keating's financial views; it was as though it were a book about Keating the Treasurer, rather than Keating the Man. This new edition is essentially an updating of the earlier one to take advantage of Keating's accession to the prime ministership, and it has all the virtues and flaws of the original. In other words, it brings the Keating saga through to 1992 without really offering any new insights into the man or revising the style and tone of what was already a successful biography. First, the virtues. This is an accessible and easily read book which follows Keating's career in classic chronologi cal order (first sentence: "Paul John Keating was born on 18 January 1944 in the suburb of Bankstown...") and is mercifully free of economic jargon. It has the succinct clarity of mainstream feature journalism of the sort one has come to expect in the quality financial press in Australia, with lots of direct quotes, comments from other jour nalists, clips from contemporary newspaper reports and some useful scene-setting about what was happen ing in the politics of the nation at large as well as Keating's role in it. Carew gives a good deal of emphasis, rightly, to K eating's working class/Irish/Catholic background, though without investigating very far just how much of this Keating has kept and how much he has discarded—a fascinating question, and one which, if she had been able to answer it, might have given her a more conclusive or at least central theme to wrestle with in the course of her narrative. She deals, briefly, with Keating's wealth, his pur suit of style and good taste, his friendships with people like property developer Warren Anderson ("I like stars"). But it is all very circumspect, as though she felt she had to cover the ground without expecting to reveal anything insightful about Keating's character. It's left to Keating's own statements about his allegiances, especially in the later part of the book, to get across the commitment to his background which he still seems to feel so strongly—so much so that John Hewson accused him in parliament recently of "sound ing like Jack Lang" (not realising that it might have been the greatest com pliment he could pay his opponent). Carew's quick description of Jack Lang reads uncannily like a descrip tion of Keating himself: Bom the son of a watchmaker, and forced to supplement the family in come as a child by selling newspapers, Lang was determined to shake free of working class pover ty. He became a successful account ant and a wealthy real-estate agent, and later a newspaper publisher. His entrepreneurial streak and profitable business interests... Since becoming PM Keating has let some of that personal ideology come through; his old-fashioned Bankstown nationalism , his republicanism, his Irish suspicion of the Brits. The book brings out, too, the personal elan and vivacity which charms even hardbitten Canberra press gallery commentators like Alan Ramsey. Carew is good at charting Keating's ambition, his rise from Young Labor A L R : SEPTEMBER 1992 star to a three-week minister in the dying days of the Whitlam govern ment, to Hawke's Treasurer to, even tually, Prime Minister ("He's a fixer, he's always been a fixer"—CRA chief economist John McLeod). The chap ters on his years as Treasurer are detailed and illuminating, with the successive policy crises and changes documented with extracts from speeches, press conferences and newspaper columnists. There is also a chapter on "Old clocks and four-letter words" which lumps together a lot of human interest material about Keat ing, from his interest in French Empire antiques to his explosive verbal abuse to his one-eyed belief that you must be utterly for him or utterly against him. For Keating, the world is a jungle peopled by friends and enemies— nothing in between. And yet, at the end, Keating the man seems as much a mystery as ever. It's as though Edna Carew has recounted the outline of Keating's character without ever trying to understand what the man is really like, what makes him run, what is bravura and what is real passion, what the hell he is doing it all for. This is no psychological portrait. There is vir tually no attempt at interpretation. Even Keating's economic policies are simply reported, without any attempt to link them with Keating's persona or the political/personal/ideological changes which may have prompted them. I was disappointed that Carew didn't even draw on her own exper tise to 'place' her subject in the context of the economic debates which have dominated the political agenda in Australia for the last decade. Keating is clearly not just a pragmatist, but this biography reads as though that's all he is. So what is he? A technocrat? A moder niser? What's his agenda—apart from the most difficult one of all, winning the next election and keeping John Hewson out of office? He's certainly an activist, having pushed through the deregulation of the financial sys tem and a series of tax reforms which typically combine progressive (capital 44 M R E V IE W gains and fringe benefits) and regres sive (lower taxes for high income earners) features. He's won the ad miration of good, solid Left ministers such as Brian Howe. Biography is a difficult art, and Edna Carew's is the best one of Keating we have. Her task has been made doubly difficult by having someone as com plex and elusive as Paul John to deal with. She doesn't seem to have had much direct access to the man himself. What we are left with is a cautious, impersonal report—at a distance, as it were—of one of the most dazzling figures in contemporary Australian politics. Whether he is as capable of dazzling the Australian electorate as he has the media we will know next year. CRAIG McGREGOR's Headliners is published by University of Queensland Press. Ole Man History The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama (Lon don, 1992, H am ish Hamilton). Reviewed by Brett Evans. Are we witnessing a "world wide liberal revolution"? Are we living in the "old age of mankind"? Indeed, has History with a capital 'H' really ended? Francis Fukuyama thinks so— but, in the words of Mandy Rice-Davies, "H e would say that, wouldn't he". Educated at the University of Chicago where one of his professors was Allan Bloom, author of The Closing (...truncated)