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Memoir

Ministerial workhorse

A munificent political memoir
by Emma Dawson
June 2025, no. 476

Making Progress: How good policy happens by Jenny Macklin with Joel Deane

Melbourne University Press, $36.99 pb, 277 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

 


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Making Progress: How good policy happens by Jenny Macklin with Joel Deane

Melbourne University Press, $36.99 pb, 277 pp

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.


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Comments

Patrick Hockey
Tuesday, 03 June 2025 12:12
Call me a radical thinker, but in my mind the words 'frenzy' and 'frenetic' are not normally correlated with optimal outcomes. Rather the opposite.

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