The Insider

Paul Kelly’s End of Certainty is perhaps the most influential Australian political book written since Donald Horne’s Lucky Country. In it, Kelly argued that during the 1980s the turbulent surface of political life was given meaning by something deeper going on – the gradual unravelling of a peculiar national political culture, which he called the Australian Settlement. The Settlement had crystallised in the decade following Federation. Its main ingredients were White Australia; Empire loyalty; all-round protectionism; the habit and expectation of government economic interventionism; the centralised system of industrial arbitration. By the end of that decade of struggle, he argued, a new political economy and political culture had been formed. The End of Certainty was superior to the earlier series of contemporary Australian political histories written by Alan Reid, The Power Struggle, The Gorton Experiment, The Whitlam Venture, and by Kelly himself, The Unmaking of Gough and The Hawke Ascendancy. For the first time a political chronicle was married to a historical analysis.