Unfinished Business:
Paul Keating's interrupted revolution

$29.99 AUD

Unfinished Business:
Paul Keating's interrupted revolution

Overview

In the early 1980s, Paul Keating set out to reinvent the Australian economy. He floated the Australian dollar, liberated banking and finance from its regulatory shackles, and — most significantly — introduced a universal superannuation scheme. The results were astounding growth in the value of the national economy and in the personal wealth of ordinary Australians.

Keating’s revolution was based on his insight that, by encouraging every citizen to save for retirement, a huge pool of investment capital would be created that would help enrich the nation. But the fulfillment of his vision was denied by his political opponents after the Australian people voted Keating out in 1996.

In Unfinished Business, David Love, a veteran economic and financial observer, becomes Keating’s modern-day Boswell, reporting fascinating and frank conversations with the former prime minister both before and after his political demise.

Writing with great verve and insight, David Love explores the story of Paul Keating’s interrupted revolution — a story that has never been fully told — and sounds a timely warning that the failure to finish the job Keating started has left our new-found prosperity vulnerable, particularly in the current climate of international economic uncertainty. The Keating revolution, it turns out, is at least as relevant to the future as it has been to the past.

Details

Format
Paperback
Size
210mm x 135mm
Extent
272 pages
ISBN
9781921640148
RRP
AUD$29.99
Pub date
23 November 2009

Awards

  • Winner of the 2009 Gleebooks Prize, NSW Premier's Literary Awards

Praise

'Love is a fluent writer and presents the Keating arguments eloquently. But he has fallen too much under the Keating spell.'

Mike SteketeeThe Australian

'Love understands the big picture and also the importance of personalities in economic history, something lesser economics journalists (such as myself) don't pay enough attention to … he does come close to getting inside Keating's head, something earlier biographers have failed to do and the wider population has lost interest in doing.'

Peter MartinCanberra Times
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About the Author

David Love was born in 1933, gained a degree in economics from the Australian National University, and went on to head the Australian Financial Review’s Canberra office in the early 1960s. After working for the World Bank in Washington, and taking on the simultaneous jobs of economics editor with the AFR and economics leader writer with the Sydney Morning Herald, he established Syntec, a highly regarded, privately circulated monthly newsletter that analysed business and financial developments for its high-level subscribers. John Fairfax & Sons took a half-share in the business in the mid-1980s, but Mr Love eventually bought out their share, finally selling the business to Access Economics in 1998. Mr Love is also the author of Straw Polls, Paper Money (2001).

more about the author