Tag Kevin Rudd
Australia is in the grip of an election campaign, with an increasingly disengaged and disillusioned population calling down a curse on both their houses. Drawing on more than sixty on-the-record interviews with all the major players, Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation Paul Kelly writes with a keen eye and fearless determination. His central theme is that Australian politics has entered a crisis of the system that, unless corrected, will diminish the lives of all Australians, that in many senses politics and the machinery of government no longer serve the people. “The business of politics is too decoupled from the interests of Australia and its citizens,” Kelly writes. “This decoupling constitutes the Australian crisis.” Triumph and Demise is the inside account of the hopes, achievements and bitter failures of the Labor Government from 2007 to 2013. Nobody knows all the major players in Australian politics in the same way author Paul Kelly does.
Mark Latham is one of the greatest Prime Ministers Australia never had; unpredictable, brilliant, personable, closer to the electorate and the common aspirations of the Australian people than almost any prominent politician before or since. He was roundly defeated by conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2004, and left politics the following year, crushed both by the internal complexities, hypocrisies and multiple incompetencies of the Labor Party; and by his own sometimes difficult personality. Latham at Large is an entertaining, thought-provoking, sometimes scathing, often humorous collection from a man who is not afraid to speak his mind. There is no one else like Mark Latham in Australian public life.