There have been two topics on which former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has been a persistent, passionate commentator in the three decades since his retirement. One was intensely local: Sydney urban planning. The other was as wide as the world: the global order and Australia’s place in it.

Each came out of what James Curran calls “his deep desire to find unity or harmonious integration in all things”. Or, as his adviser Allan Gyngell put it, “Keating liked things that worked, that fitted together well, properly. So a good piece of policy was to be appreciated as much as a French imperial clock.”

Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia by James Curran (Simon & Schuster)

Curran is one of Australia’s leading political historians and foreign policy commentators. Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia is based on deep archival research, but has also benefited from the author’s access both to Keating’s personal papers and to Keating himself.

The book is highly readable. Keating is famous for his turn of phrase and Curran surely rises to the standards of his subject, in references such as “the barrow boys of the British press”.

International reforms and ‘open regionalism’

Keating is unusual among recent Australian prime ministers in having produced no memoir. But as Curran indicates, he has still been active as “curator and commander of his own historical record”. When he came to the prime ministership in December 1991, however, he was something of an unknown in international affairs.

That said, he had long been a reader of history and biography, and counted Napoleon Bonaparte, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, above all, Winston Churchill as heroic makers of history. He also engaged publicly with international affairs as early as his maiden speech in 1970, where he critically referenced the Coalition subservience to the United States’ policy on the Vietnam War and praised John Curtin turning to America when Britain abandoned Singapore and Australia in 1942. There would be more of that a couple of decades later.

Keating’s preoccupations as treasurer in the Hawke government had been largely and necessarily with domestic economic policy. Still, his reforms often had an international dimension.

The narrative was of the opening of the Australian economy to the world: through the floating of the Australian dollar, the licensing of foreign banks, the easing of restrictions on foreign investment and the reduction of tariff........

© The Conversation