Although the Keating vivacity is apparent – the memorable phrase, the brutal putdown, the over-the-top metaphors – the speeches lack the vividness and immediacy of political speech in the contest for power. They are more the commentary of an intelligent and experienced observer distant from political action, rather than speeches designed to shift the levers of power. This contrast is well illustrated by the one item in the book contemporaneous with Keating’s prime ministership: his encounter with Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral Castle in September 1993. Here we have the prime minister in the full flush of his recent electoral victory, ‘a heretic ... whose message would call into question all she stood for’, telling his monarch ‘as politely and gently as I could that ... the majority of Australians felt the monarchy was now an anachronism; that it had gently drifted into obsolescence’. Unlike anything else in the book, this stops the reader in his tracks. A certain piquancy is added by the aesthete’s appreciation of the royal furniture, whose ‘parched complexion gave the sense [that] the room’s earthly moistures had long since vapourised’.

Inevitably with such a compilation there is repetition. If we read once that ‘[our] security [is] in Asia rather [than] from Asia’, we encounter it a dozen times. If we learn once that ‘Japan is the mother of all emerging economies’ and thus an exemplar to the developing world, we meet the idea in many versions. And the failure of the United States to use its unipolar moment in the 1990s to refashion the world in accord with the realities of the coming century is a running lament through the chapters on international relations. This kind of repetition is not without its advantages. For a reader trying to understand Keating, they act as drumbeats guiding us to critical elements in his aesthetic and political visions.

Aesthetically, Keating is old-fashioned in the best sense of that word. This is reflected in many ways: his fondness for antiques, captured in a joyous eulogy for a Sydney antiques dealer; his lack of interest in film, the characteristic new art form of the twentieth century (‘I am not,’ he declares, ‘a film goer’); his immersion in the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century, with an admitted predilection for the earlier Baroque. He is defiantly anti-modernist in architecture: damns ‘a form of exhibitionism which slaked from façades all remnants of the architectural forms and motifs that existed down through the ages’; dismisses Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe; and claims the Opera House as ‘the greatest building of the twentieth century’ primarily because it denies the canons of modernism. The one architectural style of the twentieth century for which he admits a certain affection is Art Deco, which may help to explain the eclectic mix atop Capital Hill in Canberra.

There is an immediacy in Keating’s comments on the sources and evolution of a roughly contemporary event, the global financial crisis of 2008. These speeches remind us that he was the most eloquent of public teachers of economics. As early as 2003, he predicted the timing of the crisis, though it was based on a general theory of the longevity of business cycles, rather than on the specifics of the coming disaster. Even as late as September 2007, Keating, like most commentators, had scarcely grasped the magnitude of the impending collapse. Interestingly, he explains the crisis as the result of long-term political failures in both the United States and Europe. In the former, the breakdown in the ‘prosperity compact’, with wages held flat or falling in a period of economic growth, led, in an era of cheap money, to borrowings on an enormous scale as people sought to avoid a decline in living standards. Thus facilitated by ‘the loan sharks of Wall Street ... the wind-down to the [private] debt wreck was underway’. At roughly the same time, George W. Bush’s wars on terror and his tax cuts for the wealthy wrecked the public finances. Keating argues that, across the Atlantic, the Europeans ‘have pumped up their own black cloud in the form of an ultra-stressed monetary union’, which lacked the disciplines to respond to economic storms. The monetary union permitted profligate governments, firms, and individuals – particularly in the Mediterranean countries – to borrow at low rates of interest not justified by national economic circumstances. And now the birds have come home to roost in the form of sovereign debt crises.

Keating is pessimistic about recovery. Further private borrowing is massively constrained, while the sovereign debt crises in a range of countries suggest that rises in government debt are no longer sustainable. For Keating, the only way out is for the debtor countries to earn their way back to balanced growth by increasing exports and replacing imports. But that requires the surplus countries, above all China and Germany, to facilitate a global shift in external balances by upping their own domestic demands. However, this runs contrary to modern Germany’s economic model, while any embrace of consumerism of a more individualist kind in China poses challenges to both its social and political order. If not dealt with, Keating argues, these forces threaten another international financial crisis – ‘this time without the fiscal room or ability, world-wide, to put countercyclical policies into place’.

The political speeches, of which the most important was delivered at the University of New South Wales in March 1999 – the nearest approach to a political autobiography in the book – have two objectives. Keating’s first aim is to establish ownership, even personal ownership, of the structural reforms which laid the foundations for ‘the longest economic expansion in our history’. In so doing, he plays down the role of Bob Hawke and castigates Howard and Costello as squanderers of the inheritance ‘bequeathed them by my government’. The second aim is to deny the accusation that his changes were little more than Thatcherism with a human face.

Hawke is notable only by omission. There are remarkably few references to him in this long book, and these simply apprise us of the fact that along the way there was a prime minister called Hawke, who was part of a government usually referred to as the ‘Hawke–Keating government’. Of the half-dozen or so references to Hawke of any substance, most are negative: Hawke opposes superannuation reform in 1991; the Hawke government (no Hawke–Keating here) fails to implement Aboriginal Land Rights; Hawke neglects Indonesia and President Suharto. The one exception to this approach is the ambitious claim made in 2006 that ‘the huge reforms that occurred in the life of the Keating government, as distinct from the Hawke–Keating government, are the ones that have underpinned the fifteen-year expansion’, and he goes on to instance the ending of centralised wage fixing, the endgame tariff cuts, the superannuation reforms, and the locking-in of superannuation with the equities market. The trouble with this claim is that it ignores much that elsewhere he argues was vital for the transformation: the floating of the dollar, financial deregulation, the opening of the banks to foreign competition, the reduction in overall government expenditure, the initial tariff cuts.

If Hawke is mostly sidelined, Howard and Costello are denied any creative role. They can have no claim to ownership of Australia’s remarkable economic success, for they ‘wouldn’t have had the wit to put it in place themselves but smiled like Cheshire cats’ as the benefits flowed in. They had simply ‘run dead in the continuing obligation of structural economic change’. On their ‘sole example of reform’, the Goods and Services Tax, Keating is scathing: a second-order economic issue, a regressive tax on all spending without regard to income, and with no important structural influences. Given that Keating was once the leading proponent of a GST, this requires a certain chutzpah.

Paul Keating with Queen Elizabeth, Canberra, 1992

He gets particularly hot under the collar at any suggestion that ‘Labor was in some sort of ideological, Thatcherite thrall to markets’. Labor embraced rational economic solutions and market-oriented policies, he argues, as the only way in a rapidly globalising world to ensure economic growth and thus the future of ordinary Australians. Moreover, unlike the United States under Ronald Reagan or the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher, the government carried through these policies in cooperation with the trade unions and coupled them with imaginative, if tight-fisted, social policies. This led to ‘the construction in Australia ... of a socio-economic model which was unique in the world’. To turn his economic rationalism into a ‘fashionable bogey man’, he claims, just doesn’t work; ‘as ogres go, it really doesn’t cut the mustard’.

But the use of the terminology ‘economic rationalism’ begs the question. Who on earth would want to be an economic irrationalist? Specific steps taken by the Hawke–Keating government can be seen as rational responses to the structural flaws in the Australian economy, particularly in a globalising world, and as a junior minister in the government I was complicit in those decisions. But they were part of a wider ideology – neo-liberalism – that swept the developed world, particularly the anglophone countries, in the 1970s and 1980s. Characterised by a commitment to the market, to individualism, to small government and financial deregulation, the neo-liberals pursued the privatisation of state enterprises because such enterprises were inefficient, lower income taxes because high taxes stifled individual enterprise, and the dismantling of an overly bureaucratic welfare state because it bred a culture of dependency.

No social democratic party in the world, apart possibly from New Zealand Labour, made so complete an accommodation with neo-liberalism as did the Hawke–Keating government, though, as we have noted, the accommodation was carried through with the cooperation of the trade unions and was accompanied by ameliorative social policies. But what were the costs to Australian Labor of this accommodation? In exalting the market, often without caveats, did Keating undermine the very ethos of the Labor Party? Did he forget the social democratic view that the market was simply the least worst method yet devised by man to call forth the goods and services the community demands? Did he abandon the moral critique of capitalism at the heart of social democracy: that it was a system propelled by greed, that it inevitably guaranteed inequality, and that its rewards bore little relationship to an individual’s intrinsic merits? As the social democrat Don Dunstan warned in one of his last public speeches, if we forgo that critique ‘we will find ourselves not competing for the centre ground but for the right!’

Such critical introspection is not for Keating. Yet about his public life there is a strange disconnect. As federal treasurer, he was the undeviating economic rationalist, the hammer of the ‘Balmain basket weavers’. By contrast, as prime minister he pursued untiringly Native Title and Aboriginal reconciliation, was generous in his multiculturalism, and pursued with vigour the cause of the republic. Indeed, so great is this contrast that the economic rationalist hero of the 1980s has been accused as prime minister of the sin of ‘Whitlamism’, the most damning pejorative in the lexicon of the Australian neo-liberals.

In pondering the shortcomings of contemporary leaders – such as that ‘archetypal worry-wart’ Angela Merkel and an Obama who refuses ‘to snatch the naked flame and hang on’ – Keating draws this mordant conclusion: ‘in the end, everyone in political life gets carried out – the only relevant question is whether the pallbearers will be crying.’ Agree or disagree with him, this challenging collection of speeches underlines how much was lost to this country in the disappearance from high politics of this leader at the early age of fifty-two. I am just one of the many pallbearers crying at the wake.