Unfinished Business: Paul Keating’s Interrupted Revolution – Book Review

While the book, particularly, concentrates on the part played by Keating in the introduction of a universal superannuation scheme in Australia, it also looks at Keating’s role in floating the Australian dollar and liberating the banking and finance sectors from the strict regulation that had governed those areas of the Australia economy until the 1980s. It argues that the pension funds created by Keating joined the armoury of government instruments by allowing government, through the budget, to make co-payments into individual pensions in lieu of naked tax payments, according to whether total communal expenditure needed to be slowed or hastened.

This book argues that these actions by Keating resulted in huge growth in the national economy and in the personal wealth of ordinary Australians, and resulted in Australia becoming conclusively the largest investment-funds manager in Asia. Love argues that Keating, as Treasurer, oversaw a revolution of the Australian economy which was based on his insight that, by encouraging every citizen to save for retirement, a huge pool of investment capital would be created, thereby, enriching Australia.

Love argues that the fulfilment of Keating’s vision was denied by the election of the Howard Government in 1996 and that the failure by the Howard Government to complete the “revolution” commenced by Keating has left the prosperity created by Keating in a vulnerable position, particularly, in the current economic climate of international economic uncertainty. He argues that the Keating revolution is at least as relevant to the future as it has been to the past.

The author is a veteran economist who headed the Australian Financial Review Canberra office in the 1960s; worked for the World Bank in Washington; and was the Economics Editor for the Australian Financial Review and lead economics writer with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Importantly, David Love he created the business that later became the very famous Access Economics. In this book, Love predicts the recently disclosed problems of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.²

Love is clearly an unashamed admirer of Keating and his work in the area of economics, both as Treasurer and Prime Minister, and this admiration is also seen in the interviews the author conducted with Prime Minister Keating both before and after Keating’s political demise. However, Love provides a fascinating insight into the general workings of the Australian economy, in general, and Keating’s role in removing many of the regulations that hamstrung the economy prior to “the Keating Revolution”, in particular.

Dan O’Gorman SC

Footnotes

1. According to its website, Scribe is an independent Australian book-publishing company, founded by Henry Rosenbloom in 1976. They publish 65—70 titles a year, and specialise in serious non-fiction and quality fiction. Their web address is http://www.scribepublications.com.au/index.
2. For details of the collapse of these two curiously named federal home mortgage financiers, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090503351.html