Punch & Judy: The Double Disillusion Election of 2010
Mungo MacCallum
Who better than Mungo MacCallum to guide us through the sweat and semantics of the campaign trail and the closest election in Australian history?
Punch & Judy: The Double Disillusion Election of 2010 is the essential account of the federal election.
In early 2010, there were few signs that the coming election would be so hotly contested. Tony Abbott had just become the third Opposition leader in as many years, and a politically buoyant Kevin Rudd seemed a shoo-in for a second term.
Then came the dramatic eleventh-hour leadership change that installed Julia Gillard as prime minister – the first woman ever to lead the nation and Abbott’s old sparring partner.
The ensuing campaign saw both leaders racing from the malls to the mines in a desperate attempt to win over the swingers and woo an increasingly sceptical electorate. The result was a hung parliament, the first minority government since World War II, and a new phase in Australian democracy.
Punch & Judy is a pacy and perceptive account of the 2010 election campaign and its remarkable outcome, by one of Australia’s most entertaining and original writers.
“The timing could hardly have been better: 7 September was an auspicious day for red-headed sheilas. The most celebrated of them all, Elizabeth I, England’s Gloriana, had been born on that date just 477 years earlier. She too had had the odd run-in with a Mad Monk or two, but was generally thought to have done pretty well. Of course, the omens were not all favourable: exactly seventy-four years ago the last thylacine died, making extinct a unique Australian. There had been times in 2010 when it looked as if Australian democracy might suffer the same fate. Somehow it had been given a second chance…Let the games begin.”
– Mungo MacCallum, Punch & Judy
Mungo MacCallum is one of Australia’s most influential political journalists. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has worked for Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines and been a journalist and broadcaster for the ABC and SBS. His books include Mungo: The Man Who Laughs, How To Be a Megalomaniac and Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election, as well as Quarterly Essay 36, Australian Story.
