Bramston’s favourable orientation precludes necessary nuance in his interpretation of the relationship between Keating and Bob Hawke. He implicitly endorses Keating’s oft-repeated claim that Hawke started to fail as early as 1984, and that Keating ‘carried’ him thereafter. There is insufficient recognition that, despite the centrality of the Hawke–Keating partnership, it was embedded within one of the ablest cabinets in the postwar period, in which there was a brace of other egotistical, ambitious policy activists. They needed leeway to do their best work, but also direction from the chair. The government’s success depended upon collective endeavour. Bramston’s earlier book (edited with Susan Ryan) The Hawke Government (2003) demonstrated precisely this.

Bramston might thus have challenged Keating’s assertion that Hawke ‘spread himself too thinly’ by acknowledging a very different model of leadership than the crazy-brave solo performance that was Keating’s obsession. In fact, Hawke recognised that the complexity of the challenges facing government demanded a capacity to orchestrate those who could, together, do something about them, rather than assuming he could master everything himself. It was a capacity Keating was manifestly unable to match in his own term as prime minister when heroic hands-on engagement with singular preoccupations – such as Mabo – crowded out the rest of his agenda.

Bramston also advances tendentious claims. Undoubtedly, a biography benefits from a compelling argument: it is the point of differentiation, the narrative drive. This is especially the case when Keating, the figure in question, has been the subject of four previous biographies, numerous works of contemporary political history, Don Watson’s controversial insider account of his prime ministerial office, and an 800-hundred page set of transcripts on his career, curated by Kerry O’Brien, from the man himself. Political junkies and Keating fans will already be acquainted with most of the above.

What is it – apart from the further detail Bramston offers – that we have missed? Bramston’s proposition, notwithstanding such predecessors, is twofold: that Keating was a uniquely ‘big picture’ thinker, and that his contribution to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s has too often been overlooked and needs reassessment. Keating himself has continually insisted upon these points. This, then, is the biography that Keating has wanted. But are they persuasive arguments?

Four senior members of the Australian Labor Party at the time of the Fraser federal government, 1978. From left – Colin Jamieson, leader of the WA state party in opposition; Paul Keating then federal shadow minister for the north-west and for minerals and energy; federal senator Peter Walsh and federal MHR Stewart West (photograph by Brian Jenkins, Wikimedia Commons)

Keating, to his credit, had a vision, and pursued it relentlessly. But with respect to big-picture objectives, he cannot touch the sheer range and scale of Whitlam’s ambitions – and, despite the chaos of the Whitlam government, so much has survived. Again, Bramston himself has had a part in reminding us of this in his (edited) book The Whitlam Legacy (2013).

Regarding the big ideas on which Keating stakes his claim, one recalls Keynes’s much quoted remark: ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’ Keating, like most politicians, never had an original idea. He was not an originator, but was fiercely intelligent and imaginative in seizing on ideas already in play for his purposes.

Treasury had begun to question Keynes’s model and to advocate a return to classical economics by 1971. Informal bipartisan groupings of dries were seriously debating neo-liberalism well before Malcolm Fraser’s defeat in 1983. The Accord, about which Keating was initially sceptical, was initiated by Ralph Willis and Bill Kelty. The debate about an Australian republic precedes Federation; the current Australian Republican Movement was initiated by Tom Keneally, Donald Horne, Jenny Kee, and others. Asian engagement stretches back to John Latham in the 1930s, Frederic Eggleston in the 1940s, and in its postwar incarnation to Harold Holt (as both Whitlam and Fraser acknowledged). Nor should the influence of Hawke’s adviser Ross Garnaut’s Australia and the Northeast Asia Ascendancy (1989) be overlooked.

To be fair, Bramston acknowledges that Asian engagement had a prehistory, but suggests with this, as with all the other ideas, that Keating’s intervention was so profound as to make it his own. Keating’s ability to adapt and apply these ideas – not least in tackling the politics of their implementation – was a substantial achievement. But they are incremental parts of a longer story. The image of Keating listening to Mahler and spinning it all out of his head ignores the ‘bigger picture’ of what was going on.

Paul Keating (Flickr)Does Bramston’s recurrent assertion that the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s manifested the greatest reform governments since Federation withstand scrutiny? The ‘settlement’ achieved by liberal progressives, orchestrated by Alfred Deakin, Andrew Fisher, and others between 1901 and 1914, comprised reforms internationally lauded at the time by the likes of James Bryce and Henry Jones, despite the anachronistic derision of those who now fail to see it in historical context. It prevailed for fifty years. The title of Stuart Macintyre’s recent history of postwar reconstruction, Australia’s Boldest Experiment (2015) immediately stakes a claim for the Curtin and Chifley administration as another contender for the crown. Their Keynesian consensus lasted thirty years. And now the reform project championed by Hawke and Keating (and Howard) is unravelling, after roughly thirty years. Can we not accept that there is a series of policy and reform highpoints, that there can be no agreement on which was the greater, but that policy cycles inevitably reach exhaustion? Perhaps that would be to acknowledge a lesson in humility foreign to Keating, and hence untenable for Bramston.

Finally, the assertion that Keating’s contribution has never been properly acknowledged and needs reassessment beggars belief. The sheer volume of books and articles in which Keating’s centrality to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the economic resilience that has followed is refutation enough. These include, but are not limited to, best-sellers: Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002); Paul Kelly (Bramston’s mentor), The March of Patriots (2009); George Megalogenis, The Australian Moment (2012); and Kerry O’Brien, Keating (2015). That Bramston is moved to take up the cudgels in the face of this deluge indicates that he has fallen for Keating’s spell. And for Keating, it seems, no amount of recognition will be sufficient. The reader, however, may conclude that enough has been said.