I acknowledge the First Australians on whose land we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history, and as he is the subject of much of this book, let me also wish Mr Howard well for a full recovery after his recent time in hospital.
A couple of weeks ago I had the honour of launching the first volume of Tom Keneally's new history of Australia. It covers a period stretching from the beginning of time through the origins of European settlement to Eureka - now that's about 40,000 years in 700 pages.
Now, Paul has also clocked up nearly 700 pages in this mighty tome, but managed to cover a mere 10 years - albeit 10 years of our more recent history.
So were we to apply the Kelly principle to the Keneally task, and were Paul to embark on a comprehensive national history, we would be anticipating a canon of some 22 volumes covering the period of European settlement alone, which in turn would make Manning Clark a mere writer of short stories.
Of course, one of the more frightening features of Paul's 22 volumes is that Paul would also have been present for most of the key events.
Paul has been writing defining political histories since before any of my staff were born.
From The Unmaking of Gough in the 1970s, to The Hawke Ascendancy in the early '80s and The End of Certainty in the early '90s, and that was after a career in the Prime Minister's Department in Canberra that began in the late '60s.
His achievement has of course been recognised by his peers, by the industry and in academic circles - his double Walkley in 2001; the Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year in 1990; the honorary doctorates from the University of Sydney, the University of NSW, and of course, he is also a Brownlow Medal winner and has been inducted into both the Australian Football Hall of Fame and the Australian Recording Industry Association Hall of Fame, although Lockie did say something about that being a different Paul Kelly.
Let me first congratulate Melbourne University Press, and the University of Melbourne, for this significant publishing achievement.
This is a stupendous piece of work.
Since The End of Certainty in 1994, there's been a sense of expectation about the next volume from Paul's pen.
End of Certainty, of course, is known for that one big idea - that the great structural reforms of Hawke and Keating in the 1980s had brought to an end an essentially bipartisan consensus which Paul described as 'the Australian Settlement':
* industry protection;
* state paternalism;
* wage arbitration;
* imperial benevolence, and
* the White Australia Policy.
That concept of the Australian Settlement has become the reference point for capturing the breadth of the sweeping changes achieved by the reformist Labor administration of Hawke and Keating.
It's a tribute to Paul Kelly that this book was re-published last year, 14 years after its release.
Today, the long wait for the sequel to End of Certainty is over, and can I say, the news isn't all good - a conservative government gets elected and stays in office for a long time.
But don't let me spoil the book for you, except to say it has a good ending, though it takes a while to get there.
In this book, Paul argues in support of what he describes as an essentially bipartisan 'Australian Exceptionalism':
'a transformation from the pre-1983 protected economy of the old Australia settlement... faithful to Australian values of economic pragmatism, social egalitarianism and practical utility. It avoided the laissez-faire laxity of the American system and the stifling controls of the European system.' (p267)
This, I suspect, is where debate around March of Patriots will focus, and I expect the debate will be robust, and perhaps some of the participants in the Keating and Howard eras themselves might even be keen to chip in to that debate - particularly Mr Howard and probably a fair bet Paul Keating as well.
I suspect Tony Jones and Leigh Sales have the next month of Lateline interviews already lined up. I'm actually looking forward to it.
If we break down Paul's core argument in March of Patriots into two parts, I think we find one element that is compelling, and one that is more contentious.
When Paul speaks of an Australian exceptionalism, he is touching on a much larger story that reaches back to Federation and further back into Australia's early foundations since the beginning of European settlement. As I said in launching Tom Keneally's new book, we often do not appreciate just how remarkable Australia's national story truly is.
For all our faults, the Australian story is indeed exceptional.
A nation that has carved an economy from an inhospitable earth to build one of the most prosperous on earth.
A nation that has so often led the world in social progress like rights for women and rights for working people - building one of the most open, most progressive, least class-based societies in the world.
A nation that from its beginnings has etched within its soul, in fact within its DNA, an almost inalienable sense of fairness - what we call in our own vernacular the 'fair go'.
A nation that time and again has shown itself open to extraordinary adaptation and change - moving in less than a generation from a White Australia Policy to embracing the diversity of the cultures that now contribute to our national identity.
A country and community confident of its place in the region and in the world - straddling uniquely the challenges and complexities of our Indigenous antiquity, our European history and our Asian geography.
Within that context, Paul rightly highlights the extraordinary achievement of economic modernisation in the '80s and '90s alongside our commitment to the fair go - 'an Australian-made synthesis of a decent society and a strong economy' (p2).
And the reform debate in this nation has often been more far reaching across the full span of economic and social policy, than in the UK where it has focused primarily on public services, and the US on individual policy areas like health reform. Our has been a broader canvas for debate and the breadth of the canvas itself is something exceptional.
The second part of Paul's core argument is how this achievement comes about during the past quarter century. Paul attributes it to what is essentially a bipartisan consensus.
Within that argument, Paul notes that:
'The origins of the economic model that defined Australia's long expansion from 1991 to 2008 belong with Hawke and Keating. John Howard did not create the model; he adapted the model.
Its creation lay with Hawke and Keating in the post-1983 reform era and this creation is one of Labor's epic monuments. The Labor foundations were the float, financial deregulation and tariff reductions. Upon this, Labor built a central bank that started to target inflation, competition policy and privatisation, enterprise bargaining and a long-run fiscal trajectory to return to surplus.' (p266)
'...Labor's policy contribution over 1983-96 was distinctly more dynamic and substantial but the Liberal contribution over 1996-2007 was important and path-breaking in changing conservative ideology.' (p267)
As Paul goes on to note:
'In its last term the Howard Government was tired, short on ideas and beguiled into soft options by the post-2003 China boom and the income surge it delivered Australia... Howard's most serious economic failure [was] his refusal to maximise the boom year revenues in the cause of long-run reform and productivity gains.' (p268, 276)
This is not a minor critique. Productivity is, more than anything else, the basis of a nation's prosperity. As Paul Krugman says, and as I've often quoted - productivity is not everything, but in the long run it's almost everything.
The Liberals' failure to advance a framework for increasing national productivity is not a minor blemish on their economic record. It reflects a fundamental failure of long-term economic reform and casts legitimate doubt over the extent to which the Liberal Party can be regarded as partners with Labor in the great project of economic modernisation for Australia.
And indeed, Paul alludes to specific aspects of this failure:
'Howard had failed to value sufficiently investment in education and in human capital; he had been too slow in responding to global warming and too reluctant to better coordinate infrastructure investment.' (p4)
Again, these were not matters of minor oversight.
Further, Paul's narrative confirms that the economic policy outcomes of the earlier Howard years were largely in place already in the final term of the Keating Government - such as with the transition to inflation targeting and the independence of the Reserve Bank from 1993 (p109), which was formalised in the Accord in 1995 (p120).
Mr Howard did not even agree with major elements of the micro reform agenda from which he subsequently reaped great benefits - like the National Competition Policy reforms that came into effect from 1995 - as is revealed in Arthur Sinodinis's remark to Graeme Samuel in 2003 (p124).
As Paul says, Mr Howard chose a 'golden moment to ascend' to Government in 1996, with the economy set up for a long period of growth with low inflation locked in, and the economy in the middle of the greatest period of productivity growth on record.
By contrast, when Labor came to office in 2007, we inherited rising inflation and productivity levels that had been in decline for a decade.
This was to be followed by the worst global recession in three quarters of a century, existential threats to financial systems around the world; rising unemployment and severe fiscal constraints for all governments ahead.
To this should be added climate change which had been left unaddressed over the previous decade, and the need to effect a fundamental transformation to a low carbon economy.
But governments are judged, and will be judged, not on the circumstances they inherit, nor the adversity they confront, but on the decisions they make, and that will be true of this Government as well.
We would argue that Labor has always approached economic and social reform differently to our opponents.
Labor has consistently understood that prosecuting an economic reform agenda without a social reform agenda dooms both to failure.
Fundamentally, Labor has always rejected the view that President Obama described in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last year, a view that people should somehow:
'Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.'
By contrast, the nation-building Labor reforms of the '80s and '90s reflect a deep understanding of the social contract between governments and citizens, in which a government undertakes difficult structural changes while doing whatever is possible to look after working people while those changes are underway.
That has meant specifically targeting assistance to those Australians most disadvantaged from the reform process, such as when Labor phased out of tariff protection in the 1990s, when Labor implemented the structural adjustment programs specifically targeted to help those who would lose jobs in manufacturing through payouts, re-skilling and transition to other work opportunities.
It is true that there are many social reforms that have endured through long periods of Liberal rule, but this is not because our opponents believed in them. This is because these reforms had become so widely accepted as part of the Australian way of life that it became too difficult to uproot them - but try they did.
Consider, for example: Medicare; universal superannuation; the HECS system to provide equitable access while making the expansion of tertiary education sustainable; and the provision of fairness in the workplace through a decent safety net.
These are reforms that have defined Australia as a fairer society than other western democracies like the United States.
The Liberals sought to undermine each of those reforms - with cuts to public hospital funding, opposition to the Superannuation Guarantee; the creation of full-fee student places, and of course, with Work Choices.
The fact that these reforms proved resilient to their attacks is a Labor achievement, not a matter of bipartisan consensus. Further, many fundamental social and economic reforms that are now regarded as part of what might be called the 'Australian contract' have been achieved not because of bipartisan support, but despite conservative opposition.
The Liberal Party opposed Medicare.
It opposed targeted welfare reforms, like the assets test that helped make our age pension system sustainable.
It opposed the crackdown on tax loopholes in the 1980s.
It opposed the 1993 reforms to establish a workplace relations system based on enterprise bargaining.
The great social reforms of the Hawke and Keating era were critically important to sustaining public support for the difficult work of modernising our economy to make it more competitive in a rapidly globalising world.
This in fact was (and remains) the great Australian contract.
It is the only way to bring the country and community with us if we are going to be able to deliver the continuing program of economic reform that is necessary for Australia to carve out its future in a harsh and forbidding world.
This is what Paul has described in the past as hard heads and soft hearts - a phrase I have often borrowed to describe our course for the future, whether in microeconomic reform, Indigenous policy in the Territory, or a mandatory transparent public reporting agenda for our nation's schools.
But Paul, I fear we may part company on the question of whether this contract is actually shared between the two dominant traditions of Australian politics, for on the economic reform agenda, we would describe our opponents as indolent - perhaps not always opposing the great transformational reforms engineered by Labor during its 13 years in office, but barely adding to that reform agenda during their 12 years office.
Opportunity squandered, rather than opportunity seized when public revenue was awash with the proceeds of a global resources boom.
And on social reform, again we find it hard to construct an argument for consensus following a decade riven with the orchestrated politics of asylum seekers, Hansonism and a refusal to embrace the term 'multiculturalism' for most of our opponents' time in office.
Which brings me to one final point for debate in a book which is obviously designed to provoke a bucket load of debate. Paul says 'neo-liberalism' died in the Liberal Party in 1993 with the death of Fightback!.
He argues this on the basis of his definition of neo-liberalism as 'big bang reform'.
Neo-liberalism is more than the dimensions of a political project - it is the ideological content of that project, and for neo-liberals, that project is clear-cut: it is the theory of self-regulating or self-correcting markets and of an ideal role for government which is shackled in its role as market regulator, as well as restricted in the provision of public goods.
For our political opponents, that ideology did not die with Fightback. We see it as alive and well more than 15 years later.
We have seen it in workplace relations where Work Choices effectively saw labour as no different to any other commodity to be traded on a free, barely regulated market at the lowest market price.
We have seen it in climate change - described as the greatest market failure in economic history - where the Liberal Party refused to act, because its majority believed that somehow the problem would solve itself absent the state intervening to regulate for a market to set a carbon price.
We have seen it not only on global financial markets in the lead-up to the global financial crisis, but also nationally when despite multiple recommendations, our predecessors refused to implement a deposit insurance scheme because they were captive to the banking industry's argument that statutory protections for consumers in our financial system were unnecessary.
And in the fiscal response to the crisis, we see the same ideology at play which argues against fiscal stimulus to cushion the impact of the global recession - presumably because of a belief that the macroeconomy is best left to correct itself.
Of course, technically it may be able to correct itself - so long as you are prepared to accept hundreds of thousands of Australians as collateral damage as a consequence of a 'market correction'.
This, of course, is not the Australian Government's view, nor is it the view of the 20 largest economies around the world wrestling with the current crisis through the G20.
There is, therefore, in our view, on the Labor side of politics, a continuing ideological common denominator to much of the policy behaviour of our opponents: a form of free market fundamentalism which has little in common with the philosophy and policy of the reforming centre of Australian politics to which we belong.
Of course the challenge for us now is to apply the tradition of the reforming centre that has served us so well in the past, to the great challenges that lie in the future.
On the economy, Australia has so far emerged better than most through the global economic recession, with stronger growth, the second strongest employment, the lowest debt and the lowest deficit of all the major advanced economies, and the only one to have thus far avoided technical recession.
But the challenge now is not to yield to complacency but to seize the great global opportunity that now presents itself to the nation, to build on the global competitive advantages of the Australian economy and to consolidate with an all-embracing program of microeconomic reform to boost productivity growth for the long term:
* A quality and quantity education revolution.
* Productivity-enhancing infrastructure investment by both the public and private sectors.
* A communications revolution by breaking the power of monopoly and rolling out one of the greatest productivity enhancing investments possible through a national broadband network.
* The creation of a seamless national economy, collapsing 27 sets of conflicting regulations into a streamlined set of uniform rules.
* Maximising our global competitiveness through targeted tax reform.
All measures designed to make Australia the best economy to trade with, invest in and do business with.
And all throughout, making the necessary long-term social reforms in such areas such as health, aged care, retirement incomes policy and the environment to continue bringing the broader Australian community with us on the great national reform program that lies ahead, a program that is necessary to secure our nation's future in a tough, competitive and unsentimental world.
History will be the judge on whether we succeed or fail, but our ambition from the start is to make a fundamental difference - not to be here for the sake of being here, but indeed to be a government of hard heads and soft hearts.
So with those reflections on Paul's considerable achievement, and my wide extrapolations from them, let me again congratulate Louise Adler and the team at MUP, and congratulate Paul once again for this historically important contribution to Australian political debate.
This is a monumental account that will become a benchmark for future research on this period of Australian history, and it provides perspective that could only come about through Paul's proximity to those in power through this period.
Whatever perspective people take, this book will no doubt help shape that debate for a long time to come.
It is an honour to launch March of Patriots.
Let the debate begin.