The emphasis is on Keating as a faithful adherent to free market precepts, principally as a deregulator of Australian financial markets and a cutter of government spending. While not making the point explicitly, the book gives enough of Keating’s background to reveal that he is someone without any consistent philosophical core. (His fumbling attempts to put his passion for ornate clocks into some lofty context within the sweep of Western political thought is simply embarrassing.) For the first twenty-five years of his political life, he was a loyal adherent to crusty Labor policies based on government intervention in the economy. He sat at the feet of Rex Connor – the greatest disaster of the Whitlam era – and took notes during private lessons from that irascible scourge of foreign bankers, Jack Lang.

It was only when he fell under the sway of the bright young dogmatists in Treasury following the March 1983 election (and after he got some inkling of the acclaim that could be his from the sleek operators in the financial markets) that he became a convert to the free market. Soon he was the champion of what most journalists so glibly label ‘rational economics’ regardless of the way in which this process brands all critics as ‘irrational’. The widespread acceptance of Keating as a success on both the political and economic fronts is a remarkable phenomenon. After all, he has managed to preside over a fall in most people’s living standards – not, understandably enough, during a recession – but during a period of economic growth. He has encouraged a massive redistribution of wealth which has created a new class of super rich in this country and a whole swag of companies which have contrived to pay tax at a rate well below that extracted from a factory hand or hotel maid. Restraint has been imposed on ordinary wage and salary earners while executives, especially in such ephemeral areas as merchant banking, have seen their salaries rip ahead.

Their underlying justification for the belt tightening for the bulk of the population was that this would help boost profits and eventually lift the sort of investment that would eat into unemployment and our balance of payments deficit. Profits have certainly boomed but the promised level of investment has failed to materialise, particularly in our ailing manufacturing industries. Unemployment remains stuck at a depressing seven to eight percent while the balance of payments is in a mess. Astonishingly, Keating can worry about the economy ‘overheating’ despite the vast pool of unemployed lying idle. The fact that interest rates have to rise to combat this ‘overheating’ is a damning comment on his failure to make a significant assault upon the bottlenecks that beset the Australian economy. Yet all we hear from the pundits is that Keating has made such a brilliant treasurer that Bob Hawke should step aside and let him become prime minister immediately.

Carew does not veer outside this orthodoxy let alone challenge it. The book is very much written from the perspective of someone comfortable with the ideology of the financial markets. Little attention is given the skewing of income distribution towards the well-off under a Labor treasurer. Keating’s push for a consumption tax is treated sympathetically as a ‘reform’ thwarted by ‘emotional’ arguments. Scant attention is paid to the horrendous effects it would have had on inflation and on what's left of the progressive nature of the tax system. Some examination of the way in which the abolition of exchange controls that accompanied the ‘dirty’ float of the Australian dollar greatly facilitated the movement of money for tax avoidance purposes would have been welcome. Perhaps it was too late for the author’s deadline, but mention of Citibank's involvement in tax schemes would also have made the analysis of Keating’s decision to allow in foreign banks more complete. According to evidence given in court by a Tax Office auditor, Citibank has promoted tax schemes which could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue – an amount unlikely to be balanced on the other side of the ledger by its contributions to Australia as a good corporate citizen.

Even within the context of the capital markets, which is the book’s strong point, Carew gives Keating too much credit for economic literacy. For example, she quotes approvingly his statement defending the way in which part of the profits generated by wage restraint have gone offshore. ‘Let’s say they (Bond and Elliott) end up with twenty billion dollars in gross assets abroad, our net debt abroad is reduced by twenty billion dollars.’ This is simply not true. Investment abroad does not have any direct relationship to the level of our overseas debt. Indeed, depending on how the acquisition of the twenty billion dollars in gross assets is financed, it may well add initially to our foreign debt rather than reduce it.

The central theme to come out of the book is Keating’s immense fascination with power and equally strong enjoyment in wielding it. His love of power provides a constant temptation to revert to the interventionist approach that dominated his political upbringing. The relaxation of controls over the money markets mark the main achievement of his deregulatory zeal. These incidentally have been sufficiently grateful to form a defacto power base for the Treasurer as he becomes alienated from his longer term supporters – the markets, we are warned repeatedly, will retaliate if the Labor Party so much as disturbs a hair on his expensively coiffured head.

There has been no attempt to abandon Australia’s highly regulated wage fixing system. Instead, its complex mechanisms provide a source of enduring enjoyment for a man who likes mechanical things – Carew records that as a boy Keating took a car apart just to see how it worked.

But even in the case of the banks, Keating has retained some of his old interventionist zeal. As well as reserving the right to choose which banks will come in he has been busy trying to arrange a merger of the Commonwealth with another local bank. The upshot is likely to be two giant organisations dominating retail banking in Australia, with the foreign banks trying to pick up some of the cream from foreign exchange dealing and funding takeovers.

Carew notes that in his zeal to attack the Fairfax group because he didn’t like one article on him out of the tens of thousands that have appeared, Keating has introduced new regulations prohibiting cross ownership between electronic and print media. But she did not go on to record the highly regulatory system he introduced for TV ownership which, while encouraging national networks, retained bans on additional channels being opened. One result from Keating’s term in office is that there is now a greater concentration of media ownership, especially in print, with all the usual adverse consequences for pluralism of expression in this country. The process is already apparent in the way in which the convention wisdom about the superiority of ‘rational economics’ is so dominant in the mainstream media where increasingly supposedly independent analysis is provided by ‘business economists’. (Next ‘business physicists’ will be telling us about the delights of reprocessing plutonium).

The virtue of Carew’s book is that it is a clearly written account of Keating’s progress to power, unburdened by any forced attempts at psychoanalysis and unsullied by the sort of hero worship that permeates the work of some younger journalists.