Overview
The Labor decade 1983–1993 was a time of dramatic change in Australia. The Australian Labor party and the labour movement both enacted this change and reflected it. Ongoing electoral success, the Accord, deregulation of financial and labour markets and the primacy of the economy overall became hallmarks of the politics of Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Yet as the Labor Party modernised, many of its traditional values and priorities were forgotten or ignored. This book sets out to make sense of the Labor decade against the different images of labour tradition, from its foundation in the 1890s to Chifley in the 1940s and Whitlam in the 1970s. Within this context the book is an account of the ALP-ACTU Accord, as well as a discussion of the intellectual response to Labor in the 1980s and the prospects for the Australian left in the 1990s. This book is a timely and important appraisal of contemporary Australian political culture.