Love and Money.(Straw Polls, Paper Money)(Poem)

Straw Polls, Paper Money, by David Love; Viking Penguin, 2001, $32.

THE NAME of David Love will be familiar to many readers of Quadrant as economics writer for the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review and producer/manager of Syntec Economic Services. He has now published a remarkable book that is unlikely to be surpassed as a layman's guide to Australia's foreign and financial policies and prospects.

The core of the book consists of interviews with leading Australian policy makers and commentators of the past twenty years. On each topic, after a short explanation of the issues, the interview is cited verbatim, David Love's questions followed by the respondent's answers.

Most of the discussion revolves around two issues: Australia's position between the USA and Asia and the benefits Australia has derived from the economic reforms of the 1980s. On the foreign policy issues, Love sought the views of academic authorities, such as Drysdale and Garnaut; on the economic and financial ones those of central bankers, such as Bernie Fraser and Bill Phillips, and--presenting "A View from the New Right"--former Deputy Treasury Secretary Des Moore. Centre stage is taken by four top politicians, Malcolm Fraser, John Hewson, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

"Malcolm, dear reader, is crazy like a fox", well to the left of Kim Beazley, with his outspoken views on Aboriginal activism, environment, immigration and human rights. But Fraser's main point in the interview is that "we are clearly in danger of jeopardising relations with East and South-East Asia by being too close to America".

Keating takes the same view: "The Coalition believed in security from Asia ... ...