Welcome to country, Prime Minister
It's a beautiful country and your party's primary vote is 35%
There is an interview a retired Paul Keating did with Kerry O’Brien some years back in which he talks about his and Bob Hawke’s strategy in implementing what we now think of as neoliberalism. I’ve been scouring YouTube for it but couldn’t find the clip I wanted, unfortunately. (There are other chats between the two of them, but not the one I was after).
I wanted to pull an exact quote from the interview, where Keating says something to the effect that the idea was to put Labor in a position of controlling the political centre, in effect, dominating the economic argument, thus allowing them to bump the Coalition as the natural party of government. I don’t think he used that exact phrase, but it captures what he was getting at.
The point is, after last Saturday’s election, Keating’s comments came back to me very strongly because I had been thinking: mission accomplished. It mightn’t have unfolded in quite the way Keating and Hawke hoped it would back in the early 1980s as they “open…
