‘Lessons in statecraft’?: Political memoirs, tax reform, and the National Taxation Summit 1985

ABSTRACT

Former politicians produce political memoirs for a variety of reasons, many of which are self-serving. However, given that active politicians who aspire to emulate or at least learn from the example of their predecessors often read political memoirs, we need to understand how these books conceptualise the policy process. In this article, I argue that political memoirs are a manifestation of their author’s (mis)conceptions of the policy process itself. Adopting the Hawke Government’s Taxation Summit of 1985 as a case study, I comparatively analysed the way that six political memoirs and autobiographies account for that policy process, examining the varying significance that each author ascribes to policymaking agents, chiefly the leadership, the executive, the bureaucracy, the intra-party factions, and external community interest groups. I conclude that memoirs are conditioned by genre conventions, and by their author’s specific vantage point within the policy network.

前政治家出版政治自传出于各种原因，许多出于自私的目的。但既然还活跃着的政治家希望效法前贤、踵武先辈，并经常阅读政治自传，我们就有必要了解这些自传是如何将政策过程观念化的。笔者认为，政治自传反映了传主对政策过程本身的理解或误解。本文以霍克政府的1985年税务峰会为个案，比较分析了六部自传对那一政策过程的说法，具体包括每位传主对于政策制定方、领导人、执行者、官僚机构、党内派别纷争、外部利益群体等不同重要性的理解。笔者最后指出，自传是由文体以及作者在政策网络中的具体优胜之处决定的。

KEYWORDS:

• Memoir
• autobiography
• policy actors
• taxation
• policy networks
• discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an account of the National Economic Summit of April 1983, see Bongiorno, The Eighties, pp. 16–20.

2 For Hawke’s discussion of the Matthews Inquiry, see p. 294. For his account of the Costigan Report, see 296.

3 For instance, he explained that Stewart West, a key opponent of the package, was a member of the Left faction. See Hawke, Memoirs, p. 303.

4 Keating also stressed that Hawke ‘did the deal […] overnight without telling me’ (O’Brien 2015, 215).

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Joshua Black

Joshua Black is a PhD candidate in the School of History and National Centre of Biography, ANU. He has published and presented historical research on the history of Australia's political culture in a number of fora and has contributed to public discussion in forums such as the Conversation, Inside Story, the Australian Book Review and ABC Radio. In 2021, he co-edited a special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History with Dr Stephen Wilks. He has worked in the field of Higher Education equity and support, with experience in advocating for the diversification of student populations, and the progressive nature of technology use in pedagogical practice. He is currently treasurer of the Canberra branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, and the Australian Historical Association's Postgraduate Representative (2020–22).