Reappraising Curtin.

Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister, by John Edwards; Allen & Unwin, 2005, $35.

FOR A NATIONAL LEADER there can be no greater challenge than to lead a country during a time of war, particularly a war when the country itself is under threat of invasion. If you manage to see off the threat, you are entitled to a high ranking when historians come to rank leaders. John Curtin's role in leading Australia during the Second World War has always seen him placed near the top of any list of our prime ministers, and usually at the top if the list is compiled by a Labor partisan.

The view of Curtin as our greatest leader is summed up by the title of a little-remembered 1980s biography by Norman E. Lee entitled John Curtin: Saviour of Australia. The two better-known Curtin biographers, Lloyd Ross and David Day, wrote more balanced but still sympathetic works. Now, we have a new book about Curtin, written by John Edwards. Edwards' work, unlike its predecessors, is not a full-length biography of Curtin; it is more a lengthy biographical essay focusing on Curtin's prime ministership and looking at earlier parts of his life only where they can be seen to have influenced his actions in the nation's highest office.

I approached Curtin's Gift in a charitable vein, because Australia needs more people with the range of experiences that John Edwards brings to the task of writing. People whose careers straddle the private sector, academia, political offices and writing historical biography are rare enough that we should do all we can to encourage them. Edwards' previous piece of political biographical writing was a 500-plus-page effort on Paul Keating. In that case, Edwards was helped in his understanding of the subject by his time as an economic adviser in Keating's office. With the Curtin book, he has had to make do with a year spent undertaking a fellowship at the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library in Perth.

Edwards presents a radical new interpretation of Curtin. While seeking to maintain Curtin's position as "Australia's Greatest Prime Minister", Edwards wants to replace the conventional set of reasons for this status with a completely new set and argues that "Australians cherish the memory of ... Curtin, mostly for the wrong reasons". He presents an intriguing argument that Curtin has been overrated for his role as a wartime leader, but underestimated in the significance of his actions in shaping the modern Australian economy. Unfortunately for Edwards, and perhaps more so for Curtin's historical status, the argument is more persuasive on the former than the latter.

On the economy, Edwards does make a reasonable argument for the fact that it was Curtin rather than his Treasurer Ben Chifley who drove much of his government's economic policy. (Ironically, in this regard his arguments sound very similar to those of Bob Hawke promoting his role against that of his Treasurer in the 1980s.) Similarly, Edwards does explain that the policies Curtin was pursuing were part of a long-held and coherent framework. Curtin indeed seems to have been a Keynesian before Keynes himself and as these ideas had, by 1941, become very much the fashion, one can certainly say the times suited him.

Making the case for Curtin's place vis-a-vis Chifley is one thing, but the argument for the significance of the government seems weaker. Edwards is effectively trying to overturn the model of the Australian Settlement painted by Paul Kelly in The End of Certainty. According to Kelly, the regime based on protectionism, industrial arbitration and White Australia continued from the first decade of Federation until it was destroyed in the 1980s by the Hawke government. Edwards specifically refutes Kelly by arguing that the Australian Settlement lasted only as far as the time when Curtin placed "a quite new construction upon it".

This new construction was based on "Commonwealth control over monetary policy, Commonwealth control over fiscal policy and Australian engagement in a rules-based system of global trade and finance". Claiming for Curtin a seminal place in Australia's economic history on the basis that on his watch Australia signed up for some of the key postwar international economic institutions such as the IMF and GATT seems a trifle hyperbolic. No previous Australian leader had had the opportunity to sign up, as the institutions did not exist; it is hard to conceive that any Australian government, of whatever political complexion, would not have done so.

There is no doubt that the increases to the Commonwealth's powers under Curtin were significant but, unfortunately for those of us who favour leaner governments, war does tend to produce that result. The centralising tendency was actually less strong here than in, for instance, Britain where the war's aftermath led to the sort of welfare state that fortunately Australia has been spared. Assessed overall, the Curtin government's economic changes were surely no more radical than the changes introduced by either the Hawke or Howard governments.

On the other hand, Edwards marshals the evidence that Curtin did not save Australia from Japanese invasion, did not create the United States alliance and--most damaging to the Curtin legend--did not "bring the troops home" in the way the story has usually been told. In fact, he explains that the "proposal to bring the troops back from the Middle East was actually initiated by Churchill". However, there were still significant decisions to be made about their deployment and on these matters Curtin's judgment seems to have been correct and he seems to have been able to get his way against sometimes considerable opposition.

A couple of personal gripes about this book are little factual errors in the text such as a claim that Melbourne was more populous than Sydney at the time of the First World War, and the use of unnumbered endnotes, the existence of which I was blissfully unaware of until I had a flick through the remainder of the book when I was halfway through reading the text. Also, if Edwards writes a third piece of political biography, I hope he does not feel the need to mention the prime ministerial driver in the first couple of pages, as he has now done for both Keating and Curtin.

This is an important book. Any work that makes such a fundamental reassessment of one of Australia's most significant prime ministers cannot fail to be such. He may not have been attempting to do this, but Edwards has raised serious questions about whether Curtin does deserve his number one rating. Even among Labor leaders, if economic significance is the measure, Hawke must rate higher. The irony of this is that Hawke always maintained that Curtin was our greatest leader and once lectured Edwards' former boss on the very point after Keating (in his infamous "Placido Domingo" speech) labelled Curtin a "trier". Edwards has, inadvertently, added weight to that self-serving Keating view.

The good news, for Curtin's historical reputation, is that it seems highly unlikely that Curtin's Gift will be the final or definitive word on its subject.