Keating is enjoying an Indian summer as a public figure. His nemesis, John Howard, has been dispatched; the reforms that Keating drove – labour-market reform, universal superannuation, engagement with Asia, native title, competition reform, tariff cuts – are long enough ago for the pain to be forgotten and the benefits to be appreciated; and his style and substance compare favourably to the floundering of the Rudd–Gillard governments.

That’s not to say Keating did it alone. Other politicians – Howard, Bob Hawke, John Button, Peter Costello et al. – played leading roles in the remaking of the Australian economy, but, as Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Hartcher points out in his new book, The Sweet Spot, Keating was the wild card:

He was utterly fearless, utterly determined, utterly indefatigable and, quite possibly, utterly mad, at least by the conventional political definition. Why? Because no sane self-interested politician would have taken the political risks he did to transform the Australian economy.

In the 7.30 interview, Keating declined to comment on Julia Gillard’s style of leadership, but the implicit criticism was plain: Federal Labor has failed to adequately explain its agenda to the Australian people. There is, as the apparatchiks say, no narrative. Poor communication skills partly explain what’s gone wrong in Canberra over the past decade, but Hartcher goes further, blaming the voters and the current crop of leaders. First, he accuses the electorate of recklessness for having such low expectations of their politicians:

This low expectation creates a perverse incentive for a politician. It’s much easier to deal in cheap populism than good policy, to run fear campaigns than reform agendas, to demonise the rival party than to propose better alternatives. This, of course, is exactly the problem Australia has in 2011.

Next, he lays into the Opposition leader and prime minister for taking the populist politics of John Howard and Kevin Rudd to an extreme:

It was Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard whose combined efforts brought the era of responsible policy-based leadership and ambitious reform to a shuddering halt. Although they occupied opposite sides of the House of Representatives, their separate calculations brought them together as the political father and mother of Australia’s new populism, an ugly, squalling brat that soon drove the nation to distraction.

Territory such as this will be familiar to readers of George Megalogenis’s Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era (Quarterly Essay 40, 2010), which contended that the reform model that served Hawke, Keating, and Howard had been broken, causing ‘a system-wide crisis’. Likewise, Hartcher’s warning that, unchecked, the mining boom could cause long-term damage to the Australian economy is delivered with more depth and verve by Paul Cleary’s incisive Too Much Luck: The Mining Boom and Australia’s Future (2011).

The Sweet Spot may not break new ground, but – like Megalogenis and Cleary – Hartcher is on to something: Australia has lost its appetite for the kind of macro-economic reform needed to prepare for the shocks of climate change, the ageing of the population, and the end of the mining boom. Who is to blame for this capitulation? The answer to that question varies from tribe to tribe. Lindsay Tanner blames the media; Robert Manne The Australian; The Australian the Greens; and the Greens the so-called ‘political duopoly’ of Labor and the Liberals, as well as the Murdoch press. Gillard blames Abbott, but not as much as Abbott blames her. Who Malcolm Turnbull and Rudd point the bone at is anyone’s guess. This much is certain: Australia’s national affairs debate suffers from a lack of perspective.

Perspective is precisely what Hartcher sets out to deliver in The Sweet Spot. Australians, he argues, are ‘living in the world’s superpower of living standards’, but we don’t believe it.

Why? Because Australians are long accustomed to assuming that they are second-rate at anything but selected sporting events. Because the voices of disgruntlement are louder and more empathetic than the quiet contentment of the satisfied. And because humans become as deeply invested in their grudges and gripes as they do in their pleasures, and will not easily let go of a well-rehearsed complaint.

In a series of chapters that read like long opinion pieces, Hartcher argues that voters don’t have cause for complaint because Australia offers ‘the best conditions for human existence on planet earth’. He deploys international surveys and statistics, case studies and news clippings, to argue that Australia’s two-decade-long run of economic growth is not due to the mining boom, but to the reforms overseen by Hawke, Keating, and Howard. By combining the freedom of the American economic model with the fairness of Sweden’s social model, Australia has, Hartcher says, created a genuine alternative – a ‘low-taxing egalitarianism’ – that has succeeded where the American and Swedish models failed. As Hartcher points out, Australia was the only wealthy nation to emerge from the Global Financial Crisis with twenty years of uninterrupted economic growth behind it, and, according to surveys by the United Nations and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, offers the best conditions on planet Earth, ‘a sweet spot indeed’.

However, as Megalogenis argued, the reform model that created this ‘sweet spot’ is now broken. Does Canberra have the imagination and courage to fix it? After a shaky start, there are signs the Gillard government might have the ambition to follow Keating’s path. In November, Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten introduced legislation to increase compulsory superannuation savings from nine to twelve per cent. Two months earlier, the prime minister announced that Dr Ken Henry, a former head of  Treasury, would prepare a major White Paper that will determine the policies Australia needs to adopt in order to negotiate the ‘Asian Century’. Dr Henry’s White Paper will be released in the middle of 2012, around Budget time.

The Budget Papers will also test how serious Gillard is about a major reform that has already received the blessing of the Productivity Commission: the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Megalogenis, writing in The Australian on 11 November, said the government has to find the money in the Budget forward estimates if it wants to be remembered as a ‘policy innovator’ in the Hawke–Keating tradition. In other words, as Keating’s come-from-behind victory over John Hewson in 1993 demonstrates, it is too early to close the books on the Gillard government.

On balance, The Sweet Spot is an airport book – engaging enough, but not substantial. At least Hartcher is a journalist with the potential to become an author worth reading. No such claim can be made on the strength of former politician Frank Sartor’s first book, The Fog on the Hill: How NSW Labor Lost Its Way. Sartor’s memoir of his time as a Labor minister in New South Wales is at least 100 pages too long and reads more like typing than writing. If you want to find out about Labor politics in New South Wales, don’t read Fog on the Hill. Try Betrayal (2010), journalist Simon Benson’s fly-on-the-wall re-telling of the sacking of former Premier Morris Iemma, or Power Crisis (2010), Rodney Cavalier’s analysis of how Labor in New South Wales came to grief after Bob Carr retired as premier.