Howard used power differently to Keating, but to the same end. Howard's Australia is confident, perhaps even a little too smug. But it also became what Keating had wanted -a pin-up for globalization-because Howard happened to agree with him on that score.
Keating and Howard have split the past 30 years of power between them, almost evenly, as treasurers and prime ministers. Each stint was informed by the one before it: treasurer Keating cleaned up the mess that treasurer Howard had made of the economy at the start of a 1980’s; Howard as prime minister was given a mandate to repair a society that had been divided by his predecessor, Keating, in the 1990’s.
I want to tell two intertwined stories, the political and cultural, and pose the question that taunts our age: how did the Keating/Howard economy take us from growth to greed?
