Catch and Kill: The Politics of Power
By Joel Deane | UQP | $32.95
Political biography is far too often a form of celebrity navel-gazing. The public is assumed to have a closer interest in personalities and plots, scheming and naked ambition, than in what those ambitious personalities, plotters and schemers achieve, or seek to achieve, for ordinary citizens.
Publishers know what sells books – or so they would have us believe. So if they serve up a narrative of power that delves just as deeply into the ends for which it is used, that narrative must either rise above the ruck of politico-lit or perish for want of an audience. There is little risk of the latter fate befalling Joel Deane’s new book, which covers the career arcs of Labor leaders John Brumby and Steve Bracks in Victorian public life during the last decade of the old century and the first of the new.
Catch and Kill – a title quoting Bracks on his personal philosophy of leadership – makes a bold pitch to that class of Victorians engaged with politics. It as good as says, “Read me and I’ll give you those fly-on-the-wall anecdotes I know you love to gorge on, but I’m not going to skate over the serious policy debates of our times. For some chapters, you’ll need to channel your inner wonk.” And, having said that, it delivers. In spades.
Essentially, Deane tells the story of how four operators – Bracks, Brumby, John Thwaites and Rob Hulls, christened the “golden four” by a party insider – rescued Victorian Labor from a historic low point, when the electorate had it pinned as the Guilty Party of economic incompetence on whose watch the State Bank had come crashing to earth. They engineered its transformation into a stable, largely successful government that ended with a narrow loss of office in 2010.
In telling this story, Deane makes use of his considerable skills as a raconteur with a sharp eye for the telling quip, as well as of his rapport with the key players of the era (he became a speechwriter for Bracks in the early noughties). Happily, the author’s gifts don’t stop there: they also include the odd scoop, even more welcome in a book than in a daily newspaper or an on-air bulletin because we know it took time and patience to unearth and so is more likely to be of durable import.
Political junkies will remember how the details of the Kirribilli agreement left people thunderstruck when Laurie Oakes revealed them in a 1991 news bulletin. Reading Deane, their eyes will doubtless widen on learning of critical wargaming sessions held at perhaps the party’s lowest point – December 1996, just after Jeff Kennett had trounced Labor at the polls again.
These sessions were held in the unlikeliest venue: a hotel in the true-blue Liberal suburb of Kew. Each major step in the resurrection of their demoralised party, and the glory days of a decade later, were spawned at these secret trysts in the heartland of their conservative foes. Deane does political historians of the future a great service in illuminating these meetings, though his account of Kew’s place in our political life contains a rare error of fact (Menzies retired to Malvern, not Kew) and omits mention of its being the birthplace of Gough Whitlam.
Another fascinating detail (I think it’s a revelation but can only say for certain that I hadn’t read it elsewhere) is that when Julia Gillard was on the knife edge of forming government after the 2010 election she turned to Bracks for advice on how to woo independents, which he had been forced to do from a similar position back in 1999.
If parts of this book are a touch dry, requiring more sustained concentration than others, it isn’t the author’s fault so much as the nature of economic minutiae, committee work and what Deane terms “big-picture policy development.” What he does manage to do is avoid boring the more discursive reader while providing enough context and flavour – as any good political reporter worth his or her salt would do – to acquit him on any charge of dumbing down his subject matter.
The fact that he pulls off this feat is no accident. He faithfully attends to the strategic shifts on such big issues of the day as water policy and federalism while providing regular proof that politics is ultimately practised for real people by real people (however contrived they may appear through the prism of the TV screen).
Though not his primary focus, federal politics is naturally interwoven with the story of state Labor’s advances and setbacks across the period, so it shouldn’t surprise the reader to find here one or two of the better zingers about the flawed genius of Kevin Rudd. Deane quotes an understandably unnamed Victorian Labor politician as saying of the most intense personality to occupy the Lodge in recent decades: “Thankfully he was born in Australia, because if he’d been born anywhere else millions might have died.”
By intermittently bringing himself and his family life into the narrative, Deane offers salutary reminders that politics is also written about by real people, though he is always careful not to let his own biography overshadow those of the politicians and their party in opposition and government.
In one sense Deane is several writers rather than one: he is as comfortable with analytical prose (that’s the speechwriter at work) as he is fly with the luminous image of the poet (one of his other vocations), writing that at one point inner-suburban Labor luminaries had to cross a “latte-coloured Rubicon.”
His editors at UQP have let the author’s voice – or, rather, voices – ring true throughout, giving this book a distinctive personality that becomes more apparent the deeper into the text you go. Personally, I wish they’d prevented the extremely occasional stumble (Deane’s claim that Chicago was founded in 1835, the same year as Melbourne, is only two years out, but still wrong), but then what book is perfect?
This one’s not too far off. Although it is a must-read for the politically engaged, those who wouldn’t ordinarily go near a political biography will relish its insights into human nature. Deane has created an incisive, well-rounded portrait of powerbrokers, their arts and their craft, which shows us precisely how those who would govern us govern themselves. •
