'The Costello Memoirs is a frank and fearless look inside the engine-room of the Liberal Party and the Howard Government.
'In a political career spanning eighteen years, Peter Costello, Australia's longest serving Treasurer, steered the Government through some of its greatest economic and political challenges, paying off Government debt, introducing the GST and fighting five elections.
'What were the backroom deals that made the GST possible? How did Costello transform the Australian economy from Asia's 'white trash' into the economic powerhouse able to withstand the financial meltdown of the late 1990s?
'What did Costello make of the Liberal Leaders he served with, and why did he find it so easy to trounce Labor's Shadow Treasurers?
'For the first time, the facts about the McLachlan memorandum on the leadership transition from Howard to Costello are revealed. How-and why-did the Liberal Party pass up the chance to make generational change and revitalise a Government that was sliding into defeat?
'The Costello Memoirs answers these questions, and charts the victories and defeats in one man's very public life.' (Publisher's blurb)
'This article compares the memoirs of Sir Robert Menzies and John Howard, as well as Howard’s book on Menzies, examining what these works by the two most successful Liberal prime ministers indicate about the evolution of the Liberal Party’s liberalism. Howard’s memoirs are far more ‘political’, candid and ideologically engaged than those of Menzies. Howard acknowledges that politics is about political power and winning it, while Menzies was more concerned with the political leader as statesman. Howard’s works can be viewed as a continuation of the ‘history wars’. He wishes to create a Liberal tradition to match that of the Labor Party.' (Publication abstract)
