John Brumby

People often tell me that I should have gone into politics, and sometimes I think I might have made a good politician, but reading John Brumby’s book The Long Haul reminds me why I never made that choice. Teaching, especially in disadvantaged schools where you can really make a difference, is enormously satisfying work: it is a privilege to be in a position where the work you do can change a child’s life, and if you are a good teacher, you can feel a sense of achievement many times over in a day. But politics – as the title of Brumby’s book warns us – is a long haul. It’s an enormously complex business, inextricably dependent on dealing with people with whom you must find common ground. For good people who want to make a difference, it looks like a very frustrating job, even when in government instead of Opposition…

The Long Haul is a sort of handbook for good politics, written by a Victorian Premier who was part of a successful government. John Brumby was Premier from 2007-2010, but before that he was part of the core leadership of the Bracks government which unexpectedly unseated the seemingly indomitable Kennett government in 1999. He is also the man widely credited with having put the Party in a position to have had that unexpected win because of the work he did as Opposition Leader. This book is (of course) partly about legacy building, but it’s also about how they achieved what they did, and why.

But why should we read it? Why, if not interested in a political career and not likely to have anything to do with political processes, should any reader be bothered? Well, I think the answer to that question lies in the worldwide political mess that threatens to derail us all. Here in Australia we have a government riven by Conservative/Moderate factions so much so that they have almost no coherent policies, and we don’t know what they’re going to do now that they’ve scraped back into government. Equally worrying is that populist malcontents hold the balance of power in our senate. Overseas, which affects us too, there is Brexit in the UK; in the US there is the frightening spectre of Donald Trump, and in Russia there is Putin. The electoral success of people who don’t deserve it happens because ordinary citizens don’t assess the readiness of parties to govern. We fall into the cynical trap of despising all politicians as being in it for themselves and we think ‘they’re all the same.’ And some people, the sort of people who vote for political malcontents, think that all a politician needs is an armoury of strong opinions and that they will get what they want merely by shouting their slogans.

The Long Haul shows that there’s much more to it than that.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/08/15/the-long-haul-lessons-from-public-life-by-jo...… (mehr)