Paul Kelly

“The story of the 1980s is the attempt to remake the Australian political tradition. This decade saw the collapse of the ideas which Australia had embraced nearly a century before and which had shaped the condition of its people. The 1980s was a time of both exhilaration and pessimism but the central message shining through its convulsions was the obsolescence of the old order and the promotion of new political ideas as the basis for a new Australia.”

– The End of Certainty, 1992

“The deepest lesson of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era is that Australia's political system is failing to deliver the results needed for the nation, its growth in living standards and its self-esteem. The process of debate, competition and elections leading to national progress has broken down. The business of politics is too decoupled from the interests of Australia and its citizens"

– Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of the Labor Generation, 2014

“The Australian mind was shaped by the physical world - the world of water, distance and desert. Geography dictated that Australia was the last continent to be occupied by Europeans who interrupted 50,000 or more years of unbroken Aboriginal society. For many of the Europeans who came in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the journey to Australia was their last. Their departure from the old world was the irrevocable event. Many came in servitude and were later freed. Accordingly, there are two ways to interpret the Australian experience: as an island of permanent exile, or as a beach that offers a new life”

– Shipwrecked in Arcadia: The Australian Experiment, Harvard Lectures, 2002 

“John Howard arrived as an outsider, naked but for his credentials. There was no 'best and brightest' team for Howard; he shunned any such notion. The people became the justification of his prime ministership. As a consequence Howard changed the method of governing. He became prime minister, chairman of cabinet, de facto head of state, a talkback radio personality, economic manager, war leader, cultural commentator and sporting ambassador. He climbed over everything, every waking hour "

– The March of Patriots, 2009 

“Hawke and Keating became one of the most successful teams since Federation. They had a policy affinity, an efficient rapport and complementary political skills. Hawke, unlike Fraser, gave his ministers political room. Keating was dominant within the cabinet, Hawke within the country. Where Hawke was popular, Keating was dangerous. Hawke preached consensus and Keating wielded the economic knife. The alliance was a success in containing its rivalry. The turning point came only in 1988 when the leadership contest was joined”

– The End of Certainty, 1992

“Gough Whitlam is testimony to the great man theory of history. Without Whitlam there would have been no ALP Government in 1972; equally, there would have been no dismissal in 1975. Whitlam's character is the essential ingredient in both events and in the fantastic odyssey that connected them. It was the chemistry within Whitlam of a wilful personality and a profound intellectual conviction that made him such an explosive figure. Whitlam's prime ministership was shaped and then overwhelmed by his sense of mission. The flaw, finally, was that Whitlam's vision of his program and himself was too large and egocentric for the country to handle. Many voters concluded that 'this bastard is too big for his boots.'”

–  November 1975 (1995)