Readings.com.au: New Politics

The Obamas: A Mission, A Marriage

When Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, he also won a long-running debate with his wife Michelle. Contrary to her fears, politics now seemed like a worthwhile, even noble pursuit. Together they planned a White House life that would be as normal and sane as possible. Then they moved in.

In the Obamas, Jodi Kantor takes us deep inside the White House as they try to grapple with their new roles, change the country, raise children, maintain friendships, and figure out what it means to be the first black President and First Lady. Filled with riveting detail and insight into their partnership, emotions and personalities, and written with a keen eye for the ironies of public life, THE OBAMAS is an intimate portrait that will surprise even readers who thought they knew the President and First Lady.

Reframe: How To Solve The World's Trickiest Problems

“An original and vital contribution to understanding politics.” – Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist

How to solve the world’s trickiest problems – terrorism, climate change, financial insanity and more.

In the tradition of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, Reframe brings a fresh perspective to our toughest political problems. This is a book by a young Australian thinker that turns conventional thinking on its head.

Why can’t we eliminate terrorism by killing terrorists? Why can’t we resolve immigration tensions by building higher fences? Why can’t we learn anything about climate change by talking about the weather? And what do fishermen in Turkey have to teach us about international relations?

Economics consultant and Rhodes scholar Eric Knight explains how a change of focus can reveal a solution that was lying just outside your frame of vision.

This is an optimistic, lucid, original book by a literary star in the making.

Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis And What To Do About It

‘A wonderfully readable, lucid account of the treatment of refugees in modern western democracies. Lamey writes superbly. Taking Hannah Arendt’s philosophy as its gravitational centre, it draws the reader to the inescapable conclusion that the way refugees are treated is often disfigured by a “phony and corrupt humanitarianism”. This is a marvellous book. It should be compulsory reading for our politicians ’ – Julian Burnside

Frontier Justice is a gripping exploration of the worldwide refugee crisis. Combining reporting, history, and political philosophy, Andy Lamey sets out to explain the story behind the radical increase in the global number of asylum-seekers and the effects of our reluctance to accept them.

Importantly, Lamey approaches the issue as a global one, presenting case studies from Australia, North America, and Europe. He follows the extraordinary efforts of Yale law students who sued the U.S. government on behalf of a group of refugees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay; recounts one refugee family's journey from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to contemporary Australia via the world's most dangerous ocean crossing; explores the fascinating case of the so-called Millennium bomber who filed a refugee claim in Canada before attempting to blow up the Los Angeles airport; and examines the ongoing debate over the Australian government’s controversial plans for offshore processing of refugees.

Throughout Lamey's account, he focuses on the rights of people in search of asylum, and how those rights are routinely violated. But Frontier Justice does not merely point out problems. At the heart of the book is a new blueprint for how the rights of refugees might be enforced, and a vision of human rights that is ultimately optimistic.

Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy

When Lindsay Tanner resigned in 2010 as the ALP’s federal minister for finance and member for Melbourne, having had an 18-year career as an MP, he notably managed to retire with his reputation for integrity intact. In Sideshow, he lays bare the relentless decline of political reporting and political behaviour that occurred during his career. Part memoir, part analysis, and part critique, Sideshow is a unique book that tackles the rot which has set in at the heart of Australian public life.

Lindsay Tanner was the minister for finance and deregulation in the Rudd–Gillard governments, and held the seat of Melbourne for the ALP from 1993 to 2010. Having retired from politics at the 2010 federal election, he is now a special adviser to Lazard Australia, and a vice-chancellor’s fellow and adjunct professor at Victoria University. Mr Tanner is the author of several previous books, including Crowded Lives (2003) and Open Australia (1999).

After Words: Post-Prime Ministerial Speeches

A unique volume of speeches and occasional pieces written entirely by former Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Books of speeches are rarely published as a compendium of work by one person. After Words is unique in Australian publishing by virtue of its scale and range of subjects, and that all the speeches are the work of one eye and one mind: former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Each speech has been conceptualised, contextualised and crafted by Paul Keating. Subject to subject, idea to idea, the speeches are related in a wider construct, which is the way Paul Keating has viewed and thought about the world.

The speeches reveal the breadth and depth of his interests - be they cultural, historical, or policy-focused - dealing with subjects as broad as international relations, economic policy and politics. Individual chapters range from a discussion of J?rn Utzon's Opera House through to the redesign of Berlin, the history of native title, the challenge of Asia, the role of the monarchy, to the shape of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, and more.

After Words contains an analytic commentary on Australia's recent social and economic repositioning, in the minds of many, by its principal architect. The speeches, more often than not, go beyond observations, as Paul Keating sketches out new vistas and points to new directions.

For those interested in matters that go to the future of Australia and the world, After Words presents, unmediated, a panoply of issues which the policy mind and writing style of Paul Keating has sculpted into a recognisable landscape.

Paul Keating was elected to the Australian Federal Parliament in 1969. He was appointed Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia upon the election of the Hawke Labor Government in 1983. During the eight-and-a-half years of his Treasurership, he presided over the dismantling of the protectionist economic framework that had existed for a century. Opting for an open, competitive economic model, his reforms have since underpinned twenty consecutive years of low inflationary economic growth in Australia.

He became Prime Minister in December 1991, and led the Australian Labor Party to an historic fifth term of government in March 1993. As Prime Minister until 1996, he championed a clutch of seminal changes. These included the reorientation of Australia's strategic and trade relationships with Asia, laying down a framework for Australia's shift to a republic and the development of a major legal structure to return lands - for the first time - to Australia's indigenous people.

Quarterly Essay 44: Man-Made World: Choosing Between Progress and Planet

Witnessing at first-hand the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference and wondering what went wrong, Andrew Charlton realised the truth of a colleague’s words: “The world is split between those who want to save the planet and those who want to save themselves.”

In this groundbreaking essay, Charlton discusses the rift that will shape our future: progress versus planet; rich versus poor. In recent times environmentalists have argued with mounting force that the growth of human activity on our planet is unsustainable. We are, they claim, on a collision course with destiny. But, the developing world counters, environmental threats, dire as they may be, are not the only challenges we face. Indeed, these can seem a distant danger compared to the daily tragedies of life in slums and villages.

Across the globe, economists and environmentalists vie over who has the right response to climate change, population growth and food scarcity. In Australia, this battle has plunged our politics into one of its most tumultuous periods. In Man-Made World Charlton evaluates some of the proposed solutions –renewable and nuclear energy, organic and genetically modified food – and argues that our descendants will only thank us if we find a way to preserve both the natural world and human progress.

“Progress has its price. Each step of human advancement has left a footprint on the planet. Today our two defining challenges are managing climate change and eliminating global poverty. In Copenhagen we learned that these challenges are inseparable.” —Andrew Charlton, Man-Made World

This edition of Quarterly Essay also includes a piece by one of Australia’s leading writers, Richard Flanagan, entitled The Australian Disease: On the decline of love and the rise of non-freedom.

Correspondence

This issue also contains correspondence relating to the previous issue QE43 Bad News by Robert Manne. Correspondence relating to QE44 Man-Made World will appear in the next issue.

About the Author

Andrew Charlton was senior economic adviser to the prime minister from 2008 to 2010. During that time he served as Australia’s senior official to the G20 summits and the prime minister’s representative to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. He previously worked for the London School of Economics, the United Nations and the Boston Consulting Group and received his doctorate in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of Ozonomics (2007) and Fair Trade for All (2005), co-written with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Looking For The Light On The Hill: Modern Labor's Challenges

Today, the Australian Labor Party is in crisis. Reduced to minority government after just one term, and at rock bottom in the opinion polls, the party seems to be at a defining moment in its history. The perception of the federal government is that it can’t deliver, can’t be trusted, can’t communicate what it stands for, and that it is beholden to independents and the Greens. How did it come to this so soon after Labor’s thumping election win in 2007?

Looking for the Light on the Hill argues that Labor is bedevilled by twin problems: the loss of its intrinsic culture of strong, bold, and innovative leadership; and an identity crisis that has emerged because Labor has failed to refresh its values, philosophy, and purpose for the modern era. Written by a party insider and former Rudd government adviser, the book draws on Labor’s history with fresh perspectives, and includes the secret components of the party’s recent internal review. It also includes new interviews with former party leaders, current and former ministers, and union leaders and party figures — and reveals astonishing opinion-poll results, commissioned exclusively for this book, that demonstrate the depth of the crisis.

Challenged by the Greens on the left and the Coalition on the right, Australia’s oldest political party is in real trouble. Looking for the Light on the Hill shows how Labor can get its mojo back with new policy ideas, a new political strategy, organisational reform, and a refreshing of the party’s values. This book couldn’t be more relevant, more timely — or more necessary.

Waltzing At The Doomsday Ball: The Best of Joe Bageant

'Essentially, it comes down to the fact that a very large portion of Americans are crazier than shithouse rats and are being led by a gang of pathological misfits, most of whom are preachers and politicians.'

In 2004, at the age of 58, writer Joe Bageant sensed that the internet could give him editorial freedom. Without having to deal with gatekeepers, he began writing about what he was really thinking, and started submitting his essays to left-of-centre websites.

Joe's essays soon gained a wide following for his forceful style, his sense of humour, and his willingness to discuss the American white underclass, a taboo topic for the mainstream media. Joe called himself a 'redneck socialist', and he initially thought most of his readers would be very much like himself — working class from the southern section of the USA. So he was pleasantly surprised when the emails started filling his in-box. There were indeed many letters from men about Joe's age who had also escaped rural poverty. But there were also emails from younger men and women readers, from affluent people who agreed that the political and economic system needed an overhaul, from readers in dozens of countries expressing thanks for an alternative view of American life, from working-class Americans in all parts of the country, and more than a few from elderly women who wrote to Joe to say that they respected and appreciated his writing, but 'please don't use so much profanity'.

Joe Bageant died in March 2011 at the age of 64, having published 89 essays online. The 25 essays presented in Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball have been selected by Ken Smith, who managed Joe's website and disseminated his work to the wider media and to Joe's dedicated fans and followers.

'One of the great American writers of his generation.' – Charles Firth

'Bageant must be one of only a handful of people who can provide and understanding of what America's redneck underclass is thinking. The mix of storytelling and political commentary is superb.' – The Daily Telegraph

'Bageant may write like a dream but he hasn't forgotten where he came from . . . Cutting through the corporatist film-flam, he describes just what trouble America is in.' – The Australian Financial Review Magazine