The Longest Decade

· Scribe Publications
4.8
4 reviews
eBook
416
Pages
Eligible
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About this eBook

Paul Keating and John Howard altered the nation’s body-clock. Between them, they dominated 30 years of power, as both treasurers and prime ministers. Typically, they have been seen only as antagonists with competing visions of Australia and its place in the world. In The Longest Decade, however, George Megalogenis argues that they also deserve to be seen as the twin architects of the political, economic, and social revolution that took Australia through a period of trauma and recovery, and then on to an era of unprecedented affluence. Strangely, both men also had the opportunity to retire on top — Keating in 1994 and Howard in 2006 — yet both stayed too long.

Based on exclusive interviews with both Keating and Howard, and on Megalogenis’s many years experience as a member of the Canberra press gallery, The Longest Decade is a brilliant, non-partisan analysis of the forces that shape Australia today — from the rise of working women to the triumph of the McMansion.

This is the story of how an era came to be defined by Keating and Howard, but it is also the bigger story of how Australia became a more complex society, and forced each leader to adapt before dismissing them both. This substantially revised and updated edition includes several additional chapters dealing with the termination of the Keating–Howard era.

Ratings and reviews

4.8
4 reviews
A Google user
25 January 2016
Great read for our times
1 person found this review helpful
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A Google user
9 January 2018
Good book.
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About the author

George Megalogenis is the author of Faultlines (Scribe 2003) and The Longest Decade (Scribe 2006, updated 2008) and a senior journalist with The Australian newspaper. He spent 11 years in the Canberra press gallery between 1988 and 1999 before returning to The Australian’s Melbourne bureau. He has a small footprint in each area of the media: newspapers, the Internet, television and radio. Apart from his day job, he runs his own blog, ‘Meganomics’, on The Australian’s website, is a regular panellist with the ABC’s Insiders program and appears on Melbourne community radio RRR’s Breakfasters program. The Longest Decade created a record of sorts in 2006 when it was launched by John Howard in Canberra and then Paul Keating in Sydney. The book has been updated and expanded with new chapters covering the end of the Keating–Howard era and the rise of Kevin Rudd.

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