RECOLLECTIONS
OF A BLEEDING HEART:
A PORTRAIT OF PAUL KEATING PM
by Don Watson
In January 1992,
less than a month after Paul Keating became Prime Minister, Don Watson
was employed as his speechwriter.
Though trained in history rather than economics and generally regarded
as a 'bleeding heart liberal' he became a close advisor and friend.
Based on notes
Watson kept through the four turbulent and exhausting years he spent with
Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart is a frank, revealing and engrossing
portrait of this brilliant and perplexing man, and a unique reflection
on modern politics, government and Australia itself.
If he had never become Prime Minister Paul Keating's place in Australian history would still have been assured.
He was the Treasurer who deregulated the economy; the weaver of Labor's modern story; its heavy weapon in the parliament.
He was also the great enigma - a self-educated boy from Sydney's working class and a defining element of the head-kicking Labor right who loved Paris, Mahler and Second Empire clocks.
Paul Keating did become Prime Minister. In December 1991 he wrested it from Bob Hawke and the bruises from that struggle were part of the baggage he brought to the job: the other parts included the worst recession in 60 years and an electorate determined to make him pay for it.
Keating defied
the odds and won the 1993 election, and in his four years as Prime Minister
set Australia on a new course - towards engagement with Asia, a republic,
reconciliation, a social democracy built on a modern export-based economy
and sophisticated public systems of education and training, health and
social security.
Widely regarded as a quintessential economic rationalist, Keating's record clearly shows that his vision was infinitely broader and more complex.
BLEEDING
HEARTS, an ultraconservative view of the ultraliberals, as those whose
"hearts have bled for the poor", who are "suckers"
for every "sob story", and who place tax burdens on all in a
mistaken effort to cure social ills. 'The liberal who is so labelled considers
the one who calls him a "bleeding heart" to be reactionary.'
WILLIAM SAFIRE, Safire's New Political Dictionary
'We are the
entrepreneurs of political life and are the people who dream the big dreams
and do the big things. There are no bigger dreamers than in our office.
It's a mixture of econocrats and bleeding hearts.'
PM PAUL KEATING, MARCH 1993
Don Watson has written on Australian history, culture and politics
for more than twenty-five years.