The Pm Years

Download or read book The PM Years written by Kevin Rudd and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was the coup that killed Australian politics. Less than three years after taking government in a landslide election victory, Kevin Rudd was betrayed by his deputy and the factional powerbrokers of the Australian Labor Party, the 'Faceless Men', despite enjoying historically high personal and party approval ratings. The betrayal of June 2010 is the most significant Australian political event of the century. No prime minister including Rudd has since seen out a full term before being dethroned by their own caucus. But how did party games in Canberra spiral so catastrophically out of control?Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard on a platform of fresh ideas, progressive innovation and new leadership. He inherited two wars and the legacy of eleven years of conservative economic mismanagement. And within months of taking office, his new government would face the greatest economic cataclysm since the Great Depression - the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. But none of these deterred Rudd from his vision of bringing Australia into the modern age.In witty, forthright and audaciously honest prose, Rudd recounts his early triumphs and challenges in the hard business of government. But beyond the policy goals he kicked - from raising the pension to axing WorkChoices to laying the foundation for a decades-long Labor dream of paid parental leave - he takes us into cabinet, the prime minister's office and the back-corridor conversations that reshaped the country. We learn of the wheeling and dealing of governance as Rudd works with President Obama in the face of the financial crisis, apologises to the Stolen Generations and ratifies the Kyoto Protocol. Yet regardless of Rudd's efforts to combat climate change and his success in keeping Australia out of recession - the great moral and economic challenges of our generation - dark forces within his own party conspired against him. The unceremonious removal of a first-term prime minister from office shocked Rudd as much as it did the nation.Despite great pain, Rudd continued to serve his party, and his country, as backbencher and foreign minister. He documents his time in the wilderness before his brief resurrection as Labor leader and the 2013 election, retaking the party after it had truly 'lost its way'.After years of silence, the 26th Prime Minister of Australia is finally on the record about his time in government, in this second volume of his autobiography. This is the memoir of a prime minister full of energy and ideals, while battling the greatest trials of the modern age. This is Kevin Rudd's response to the ultimate political - and personal - betrayal.'Kevin is somebody who I probably share as much of a world view as any world leader out there. I find him smart but humble. He works wonderfully in multilateral settings; he's always constructive, incisive. And you know I think he is, like me, a pragmatic person. I think he comes to the job wanting to provide better opportunities not just for this generation but for the next. But I think you know he's somebody who isn't an academic, or just thinking about abstract ideas; I think he's constantly thinking in very practical terms about how to get something done.' BARACK OBAMA

Download or read book Marilyn Waring written by Marilyn Waring and published by Bridget Williams Books. This book was released on 2019-05-10 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1975, Marilyn Waring was elected to the New Zealand Parliament as the MP for Raglan. Aged just twenty-three, she was one of only a few female MPs who served through the turbulent years of Muldoon’s government. For nine years, Waring was at the centre of major political decisions, until her parliamentary career culminated during the debate over nuclear arms. When Waring informed Muldoon that she intended to cross the floor and vote for the opposition bill which would make New Zealand nuclear free, he called a snap election. And the government fell. . . This is an autobiographical account of Waring’s extraordinary years in parliament. She tells the story of her journey from being elected as a new National Party MP in a conservative rural seat to being publicly decried by the Prime Minister for her ‘feminist anti-nuclear stance’ that threatened to bring down his government. Her tale of life in a male-dominated and relentlessly demanding political world is both uniquely of its time and still of pressing relevance today.

Download or read book The Avoidable War written by Kevin Rudd and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A war between China and the US would be catastrophic, deadly, and destructive. Unfortunately, it is no longer unthinkable. The relationship between the US and China, the world’s two superpowers, is peculiarly volatile. It rests on a seismic fault—of cultural misunderstanding, historical grievance, and ideological incompatibility. No other nations are so quick to offend and be offended. Their militaries play a dangerous game of chicken, corporations steal intellectual property, intelligence satellites peer, and AI technicians plot. The capacity for either country to cross a fatal line grows daily. Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has studied, lived in, and worked with China for more than forty years, is one of the very few people who can offer real insight into the mindsets of the leadership whose judgment will determine if a war will be fought. The Avoidable War demystifies the actions of both sides, explaining and translating them for the benefit of the other. Geopolitical disaster is still avoidable, but only if these two giants can find a way to coexist without betraying their core interests through what Rudd calls “managed strategic competition.” Should they fail, down that path lies the possibility of a war that could rewrite the future of both countries, and the world.

Download or read book Personal History written by Katharine Graham and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 951 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULTIZER PRIZE WINNER • The captivating inside story of the woman who helmed the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media: the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate In this widely acclaimed memoir ("Riveting, moving...a wonderful book" The New York Times Book Review), Katharine Graham tells her story—one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candor, and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband—a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson—plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman’s union as she entered the profane boys’ club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted—and mastered—the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.

Download or read book Before the Storm written by Rick Perlstein and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Republican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals, and mocked "peaceful coexistence" with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller, and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s.

Download or read book The Death of a President written by William Manchester and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Manchester's epic and definitive account of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. As the world still reeled from the tragic and historic events of November 22, 1963, William Manchester set out, at the request of the Kennedy family, to create a detailed, authoritative record of the days immediately preceding and following President John F. Kennedy's death. Through hundreds of interviews, abundant travel and firsthand observation, and with unique access to the proceedings of the Warren Commission, Manchester conducted an exhaustive historical investigation, accumulating forty-five volumes of documents, exhibits, and transcribed tapes. His ultimate objective -- to set down as a whole the national and personal tragedy that was JFK's assassination -- is brilliantly achieved in this galvanizing narrative, a book universally acclaimed as a landmark work of modern history.

Download or read book The Year of Magical Thinking written by Joan Didion and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-02-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.