I’m doing a book chapter on The Politics of Australian Economic Policy which needs “suggestions for further reading”, and one thing I need to suggest is a couple of good sources (preferably books, but reports or survey articles would do) giving a summary of the general case in favour of microeconomic reform in Australia and a positive evaluation of the reform experience.
I’d normally cite Productivity Commission reports, but I’d like something a bit less technical [the main audience is undergraduate political science students]. On the critical/sceptical side, I plan to suggest my own book Great Expectations and books by Michael Pusey and Fred Argy. Any other suggestions would be gratefully received.
Another question Thanks for comments and suggestions so far, which basically confirm my view that there isn’t a book of the kind I am looking for. I would also be interested in a book covering the period 1945-75 in Australia with a focus on economic policy from a political viewpoint. Perhaps I should follow the suggestion of one of my commentators and write it myself
John Quiggin 
pro-reform: maybe that Exarsperating Calculators book by Will Coleman? Also, Wolfgang Kaspers 2001 CIS book: Buldig Prosperity (though it is a bit forward looking).
anti-reform: you could also add Steve Keen and/or Clive Hamilton. Though the anti-reform case is strengthened by leaving out Hamilton and Pusey I think.
Sounds like an interesting class. Makes me wish I was still at UQ so I could give you some grief. 🙂
I don’t think Coleman or Kaspers really really qualify for university texts, unless you’re teaching polemic. I would look to fair-minded pro-reformers, such as Michael Keating, Ross Garnaut or John Patterson (the sadly late John Patterson, I believe).
Teaching undergraduate courses I am always on the lookout for this sort of thing, and I’m fairly sure there exists no right-wing Rational Expectations. It would surely have landed on your desk for review.
One has to fall back on chapters of Dave Clarke’s collections of briefings for high school students in the AFR. Proper books like Coleman’s (and a couple of anthologies on economic rationalism) tend to be too general and waste space shooting down easy targets like Pusey.
Des Moore’s IPE website (http://www.ipe.net.au/ipeframeset.htm) lists a number of ‘publications’ with promising titles, but I doubt that any of them are books; some may be just opinion pieces and speeches. The Centre for Independent Studies has a number of recent books on its website (http://www.cis.org.au/) but none is a general survey of microeconmic reform.
You may have to follow Francois Quesnay’s example and write the required book yourself under a pseudonym.
I’ve been enjoyng your web log for a couple of months.
James
I meant Great Expectations, obviously.
Perhaps Bob Catley’s Globalising Australian Capitalism might just qualify, although I guess it’s now a bit old (1996).
The best political book on the subject is Paul Kelly’s *The End of Certainty*, though it’s not as good a read as Paul Kelly’s *My Mate Plugger*
“Dry” by John Hyde (www.ipa.org.au)?
John: among the possible references on “economic policy from a political viewpoint” in the period 1945-75, I’d suggest you include Wanna, Kelly and Forster “Managing Public Expenditure in Australia” Allen and Unwin, 2000 – a political science perspective on budgeting and expenditure management: it’s a subset only of economic policy more generally, but a good overview of main themes without pushing a particular ideological line and identifies the political factors particularly well.
Perhaps Stephen indirectly alludes to the problem here, which is that there are countless subsets but no satisfactory story of the period as a whole.
This is not to say that there are no accounts. On the contrary, there are many. It is straight forward enough to collect a more or less standard series of indices, and weave an analytic narrative around them.
One might do this briefly, or at length, collecting and critically reviewing the more or less standard sets of stories gathered around trends and disjunctures in the underlying series. So many of the stories are well known, they form an implicit if scarcely agreed orthodoxy, which is reproduced schematically in countless introductions or background sections of the countless subsets.
Alternatively, one can pick a couple of themes (as Paul Kelly has done, although too simplistically to my mind), and drive them through the related material over these years, picking a narrative and polemical density of your choice.
Such studies can be very interesting and useful, of course, but they really don’t make much of a splash on the great canvas described by the discipline of history.
In large part, I would argue that the problem here is that so much of this recent past still remains either unknown or unresolved. On either count, the task of producing an exhaustive account will quickly become exhausting.
It is no bad thing that schematic memories will continue to be reproduced, but I suspect the Full Monty will only begin to come onto the radar when some of the major hidden and contentious parts of the story are much more fully known or settled, either through the generation of subsets or by the course of events themselves.
The work of yourself and others in Out of the Rut in 1999 made good reading, even if the Labor Party ignored it.
The essays, though critical, are supportive and informative of reforms in several areas, eg. welfare and banking, as well as getting stuck into the dubious merits of the great asset sell off.
And not to forget Barry Hughes classic on the Fraser era – Exit Full Employment: Economics in the Stone Age.
That Barry seemed to shift ground as one of Keating’s advisers is a different story. Perhaps Paul Kelly or Laura Tingle’s political analyses of the period get into it.