With spirits afloat.(A Political Rake's Progress: Verses Born of Frustration in Public Life and Joy in Private)(Book review)

A Political Rake's Progress, by John Hyde; Access Press, 2008, $30.

POETRY CAN STRIKE without regard or respect for occupation. Among those generally acknowledged as among the greatest poets have been an actor-manager, a German professor, a French pickpocket, an American loafer, an Anglo-American banker and a librarian. No profession seems entirely safe.

However, an Australian farmer and federal Liberal MR best known as a leader of the economic Dries and, after leaving parliament for having, with others, founded and run political-economic think-tanks for twelve years, still seems at first glance a slightly unlikely poet.

John Hyde is a man of major accomplishments. He became a successful wheat farmer in Western Australia despite losing his right arm in an accident at the age of twenty-three; as a Member of Parliament from 1973 to 1982 he was courageous in rejecting strong pressures to become mere division-fodder and in pushing an economic reform agenda against the entrenched orthodoxies of the Coalition, offending many vested interests and, "with all the survival instincts of a kamikaze pilot", drawing upon himself what Adam Smith called "the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists". Like his mentor the late Bert Kelly he became a newspaper columnist with a powerful and elegant style, showing a strong ability for lateral thinking.

Declaring an interest, I worked for him for two years at the Australian Institute for Public Policy and it was among the most enjoyable and stimulating employment I have had.

Like Roy Campbell, he is a poet at the opposite end of the human spectrum to the now largely defunct grant-supported and often barely-literate poetic establishments of Fitzroy and Balmain. He is a man who has done things.

A Political Rake's Progress is subtitled, "Verses born of frustration in public life and joy in private." Some of its content is unashamedly political doggerel, but good fun, like the limerick (and limericks generally ought to be bad, like puns) concluding: