Economic cycles are broad and global in nature. Partisan politics is blindly concerned with the current electoral cycle, which is narrow and domestic. The basic strength of Megalogenis’s work is that he contextualises – and, in doing so, reinterprets – these minor electoral cycles against the major global economic shifts that influence them.

He argues that the best point along the broader economic cycle to form government is just prior to a V-shaped recovery. This is the point when those workers who were retrenched in the previous downturn are about to be re-employed. However, Australians have had an uncanny knack of changing governments just before an external economic shock. For Whitlam, it was the oil shock, for Fraser, stagflation. Howard had the Asian financial crisis, and Rudd, the Global Financial Crisis.

But Hawke was the only prime minister in Australia’s history who had the blind good fortune to form government at the ideal moment of a V-shaped recovery. ‘One of the easiest to forget elements of the Hawke–Keating reform partnership,’ Megalogenis points out, ‘is the benign international environment in the first phase of their project. Australia itself was in crisis, but the global economy was in rare good health.’

Contrary to this, Whitlam tried to deliver on electoral promises after the economy had turned. Whitlam’s initial electoral successes reflected the commodities cycle. The Labor Party’s national vote – in 1969, 1972, and 1974 – increased proportionately with Australia’s growing terms of trade, but crashed during Whitlam’s final eighteen months in office.

Such a perspective is instructive, because it helps us to see beyond the script that commentators and party politicians took from the fallout of the Whitlam years, and which has since been used to reinforce a way of thinking about politics that has become increasingly distorted by focusing on the electoral cycle.

Whitlam, and through him the nation, was a victim of lousy timing. His government confronted an external shock less than a year into its life which neither the system nor the public had the maturity to handle. Rather than comprehend the abrupt change in Australia’s economic circumstances, Labor and its conservative opponents turned to one another and said, ‘It’s your fault.’

For Megalogenis, there is an irony lurking between the lines of this tired script, because both the system and the public have matured enough in subsequent decades to respond exceedingly well to these external economic shocks.

The simplistic story overlooks how Whitlam fired ‘the starting gun for deregulation’ when he reduced all tariffs by twenty-five per cent in 1973, and how Bill Hayden, Whitlam’s last treasurer, first moved to tackle inflation, thus laying the basic framework that Hawke and Keating operated within in the 1980s. And yet, the oppositional rhetoric between parties has basically stayed at the same, immature level it was forty years ago. Now it is clearly blocking further reform.

In reading between the lines of this script, Megalogenis reappraises our understanding of both economics and political leadership. He is keenly aware of the limitations of economic models, of the myopia that comes from looking too closely at the data: ‘Economics struggles with human beings. Just when they think they have accumulated all the relationships in a society within the boundaries of a mathematical model, emotion will overwhelm all logic and create a bust no one sees coming.’

Perhaps the reason Megalogenis is so good at interpreting our economic history is because he does seem not to struggle with human beings. He knows that we are the anchors to reality that guide his analyses of the data. It is human behaviour, emotion, and thought that directs economies as much, if not more, than it is economics that has directed human beings. For Megalogenis, ‘economies turn on emotion. Booms and busts are the two extremes of the human condition, and the job of government is to moderate the mood swings.’

Here, Megalogenis offers an insightful study on political leadership. It is in the context of these economic mood swings that good leadership has an opportunity to thrive, where the real impetus for our reform agenda has emerged. This is not about applying a fixed economic model over our society; rather, it is in these moments that our leaders (often not by choice) deviate from the false certainties of such models and confront the ebb and flow of reality.

The reality is that over the past four decades, Treasury and government have missed all the major turns in the broader economy. In hindsight, the protagonists can talk about these moments with a degree of certainty, but in reality it was how a course was steered in these moments of uncertainty that Megalogenis considers the measure of their leadership. It is not about predictive knowledge or divine reason but the ability to function amidst uncertainty; to display self-restraint at a time when giving in to the flux of the situation would result in being swept away.

Megalogenis shows us how such moments must have seemed from the perspective of the assumptions of the day – how decisions were made at the time, why they were made, what obstacles they faced, but also what they couldn’t know at the time, but which we now do. He argues that all the great reformers were improvising rather than imposing some grand plan. Keating was perhaps more a Miles Davis than a Plácido Domingo.

The flipside of this assessment is how poor leadership works, usually by exploiting negative aspects of emotional mood swings of the economy. John Howard played on the xenophobic aspects of our culture to maintain power. But, as Megalogenis points out, such exploitation was only possible against an economy that was struggling to emerge from recession. Howard perfected a form of poll-driven politics that Rudd adopted, to his – but more importantly, to our – detriment, by letting the media dictate his agenda. ‘Kevin Rudd was the first leader I’ve experienced that ceded the respect for his office by his willingness to serve the media,’ Megalogenis states. ‘Julia Gillard and Tony Abbot compounded his errors by refusing to complete a sentence between them during the 2010 election campaign.’

The seeds for this, however, were sown at the same time as those of our maturity. Whitlam won the first major television election. The 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign created the ground for the negative backlash of Fraser’s 1975 ‘Turn on the Lights, Australia’ campaign. It is this reflex negativity, coupled with the changes in our media environment over the past four decades – from analogue to digital – that has come to distort the modern political landscape. For the media cycle is smaller than the electoral cycle, with our partisan politicians and commentators stuck between the two. The lynchpin of this is the opinion poll, which, Megalogenis argues, promotes ‘lazy journalism’ and ‘short-term thinking’ within political parties.

For Megalogenis, one sign of strong political leadership is the capacity to know when to ignore opinion polls; not to pander to the reactions of the electorate, but to reflect back to us our own potential for maturity. Howard did this with gun control. Keating managed it, for a time, with his economic reforms.

One of Megalogenis’s favourite polls is from 1951. It measured which countries Australians wanted their immigrants to come from. Greece, Yugoslavia, and Italy were very unpopular. Megalogenis’s father had come to Australia from Greece the year before. His mother migrated in 1962. Had the government of the day heeded this poll, Megalogenis muses, his parents may well have never met, and he would not have been born.

I can’t help feeling, reading The Australian Moment, that had that government paid attention to this poll, our loss would have been the greater.