Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era

Quarterly Essay Media Release

Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era considers Australia’s political dead zone.

The Hawke, Keating and early Howard years were ones of bold reform; recently we have seen an era of power without purpose. But why? Is it down to powerful lobbies, or the media, or a failure of leadership, or all of the above? And whatever the case, how will hard decisions be taken for the future?

In Trivial Pursuit, George Megalogenis dissects the cycle of polls, focus groups and presidential politics and what it has done to the prospect of serious, difficult reform.

Megalogenis argues that politics-as-usual has become a self-defeating game and mounts a persuasive case for a different style of leadership. From now on, he argues, it is the key divisions between young and old, and north and south, that will shape the nation’s future. But can a hung parliament and a pragmatic Labor leader rise to the challenge?

“Labor assumed the Howard method should be its method. Because Howard had given up on reform, Labor did too. Because Howard aimed at the wallet every time he suffered a wobble in the polls, Labor did too. This is why the party that held the nation together in World War II and remade it in peacetime wasn’t in any shape to be an agent of change when power finally came its way again in 2007. Labor governed by the conservative populist manual when the nation wanted something else. It was cowed by Howard, and captured by the polls.” − George Megalogenis, Trivial Pursuit

George Megalogenis is a senior writer with the Australian and the author of Faultlines: Race, Work and the Politics of Changing Australia and The Longest Decade. He is a regular guest on ABC TV’s Insiders program and runs the popular blog, ‘Meganomics’.

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