It raises the question: why bother with a new biography? In truth, Day has little to add to what has already been written or said about Keating’s years in government. Keating refused to co-operate with his aspiring bio-grapher. The story of his life has been well-trodden; most of the footnotes covering forty-seven pages of Day’s biography refer back to earlier biographies. Two of them were particularly memorable. John Edwards’s Keating: the Inside Story (1996) drew on his access to Keating’s files to uncover the true history of the poor decisions that led to the 1990–91 recession. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating (2002) was a literary and political tour de force, even though it ended Watson’s friendship with his easily offended subject.

Day wanted to write the book, he says, because Keating was a leader out of the ordinary: ‘determined to transform Australia for the better, to carry the nation forward rather than simply mark time or pander to the interest groups that got [him] into power.’ Day had already written biographies of Andrew Fisher (2008), John Curtin (1999), and Ben Chifley (2001), and saw a Keating biography as a natural successor. The last real biography was by Edwards, and, Day argues, each generation should revisit its history to discover it anew.

‘Day has little to add to what has already been written or said about Keating’s years in government’

This would be a strong argument for a new analytical work focused on the key issues of Keating’s twelve to thirteen years as treasurer or prime minister. But the pretentiously titled Paul Keating: The Biography is not that book. It is a chronological narrative of Keating’s life, presenting the issues as Day believes they appeared to Keating at the time, with occasional interpolation of others’ views. It is chock full of facts and interpretations of Keating’s moods and opinions. They pile up on each other at a breathless pace, the more so because Day tells virtually the entire narrative in the present tense. Presumably he hoped this would add a sense of immediacy to events long past. But, sustained over 480 pages of text, it makes his narrative exhausting to read. It also made it more difficult for Day to take an analytical approach to his subject.

The author’s most significant new material is his account of Keating’s ancestry. While Keating identified strongly with the Irish Catholicism of his paternal line, Day shows that on his mother Min’s side he came from a line of English Protestants, two of whom arrived here as young convicts. It is an interesting revelation, given Keating’s identification with his Irish roots, and a widespread view that this influenced his campaign for a republic, one of the issues that dominated his final term.

Day also highlights the improbable friendship the young, ambitious right-wing treasurer developed with the old, visionary left-wing historian Manning Clark. He speculates that Clark helped inspire Keating’s determination as prime minister to tackle big social issues, such as restoring indigenous land rights in line with the High Court’s Mabo judgment, ‘enmeshing’ Australia with Asia, campaigning for a republic, and creating a comprehensive arts policy. These were not issues that many people expected Keating to focus on as prime minister.

Day is renowned for spicing up his histories with controversies. His fresh ‘angle’ here is the claim that Keating is dyslexic and that this is one of the reasons why he became such a uniquely creative speaker. ‘Rather than relying on written speeches, replete with facts and logical debating points, he learns to create vivid word pictures which allow him to cut through to audiences,’ Day asserts. Keating has angrily rejected the claim of dyslexia in a letter to The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Excruciatingly, Keating also pointed out that he is not divorced, as Day claims.

Day overstates and labours his point, but it is certainly true that, as a rule, Keating was far more fluent speaking on his feet than reading a speech. Yet there were remarkable exceptions. I was driving with the car radio on when Keating delivered his tribute to the Unknown Soldier on 11 November 1993; it was so moving that I had to pull off the road to avoid causing an accident. Some of the speeches Keating delivered, and Don Watson scripted, are among the finest Australian politics has produced.

Paul Keating lays a wreath at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, 1993 (Photo by Ray Strange, News Limited)

There are other reasons for our enduring fascination with Keating. He seemed to shoot across our nation’s history with the intensity of a comet. More than any other figure since Gough Whitlam, he was original, courageous, creatively articulate, and had a genuine personal agenda for making Australia a better place, and the political skills and commitment to get others to support his plans. He was immensely self-confident and hyper-aggressive, and he loved Mahler, French antiques, Zegna suits, and European architecture. He travelled so far from his working-class roots in culture and economic understanding, yet somehow they all gelled together in him.

Keating, unlike Whitlam, also had a keen economic understanding, able colleagues – something he fails to acknowledge – and a generally loyal party behind him. First as treasurer, then as prime minister, he changed the country for the better, and he changed it with style. The willingness of today’s Liberals to praise the economic reforms of the Hawke–Keating years – many of which, such as Medicare and compulsory super-annuation, the Coalition opposed at the time – is testament to the fact that Keating delivered reforms that were politically hard, and of lasting value.

But if that was how we all saw Keating, why did we vote him out of office? Day brushes over this question. He is not uncritical of Keating, but this is a biography by a true believer, in which the Liberals are the bad guys and Keating (at worst) occasionally misguided. Yet most Australians of the time blamed Keating for pitching the country into its worst recession since the 1930s. The real blame lies even more with the senior staff of the Reserve Bank and Treasury; as Edwards’s book recounts, only Bernie Fraser, then Treasury secretary, kept his head as policy-makers succumbed to collective madness.

One of Keating’s great weaknesses was his habit of relying on officials to guide him; he was instinctively dismissive of alternative views, rather than weighing up their merits against those put forward by his team. In 1988–89 a series of reckless interest rate rises – in today’s terms, equivalent to twenty-eight rate rises in fifteen months – sent the cash rate to eighteen per cent, and prime interest rates to twenty-two per cent. Businesses went broke, investment collapsed, unemployment soared by 450,000 to eleven per cent, and the working lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians ended prematurely. What Keating called ‘the recession Australia had to have’ is the first thing many Australians remember about him. It was why John Howard’s dismissal of the 1993–94 recovery as ‘five minutes of economic sunshine’ resonated so strongly.

Time's up. Opposition leader John Howard looks at his watch during Question Time on 23 October 1995 (photograph by Andrew Taylor, Fairfax)

No prime minister was ever more popular with the press gallery or (until recently) less popular with the public. The creative insults and aggression that delighted the journalists cost him support in the electorate. Opinion polls invariably found that more Australians disapproved of him than approved.

It is a tribute to Keating’s political skills and ruthlessness that his relentless campaigning against John Hewson’s plan for a GST and free market reforms managed to turn that around, to win the ‘unwinnable’ 1993 election. But it was just a reprieve. As prime minister, Keating became strangely detached; Day speculates that his medical and marital problems sapped his enthusiasm for the job he had fought so tigerishly to win.

Keating’s years as treasurer changed the economy forever, especially in the financial sector, replacing regulation with free markets. His years as prime minister left an outstanding legacy in important areas: establishing a fair and firm basis for native title, persuading Bill Clinton and other leaders to upgrade APEC to an annual meeting of the region’s eladers, creating a firm base for Australia’s relations with Indonesia, and persuading Australians that their future lay in Asia. Yet in 1996, John Howard swept him from power in an electoral landslide. Years later, it is sad to see Keating and Hawke, partners in one of our best governments, engaging in an endless vendetta of mutual sniping, as Keating tries to persuade us that Hawke played little part in the Hawke government. David Day’s book reminds us that at one time they had better things to do, and did them well.