‘Lessons in statecraft’? Political memoirs, tax reform, and the National Taxation Summit 1985

Former politicians produce political memoirs for a variety of reasons, many of which are self-serving. However, given that active politicians who aspire to emulate or at least learn from the example of their predecessors often read political memoirs, we need to understand how these books conceptualise the policy process. In this article, I argue that political memoirs are a manifestation of their author’s (mis)conceptions of the policy process itself. Adopting the Hawke Government’s Taxation Summit of 1985 as a case study, I comparatively analysed the way that six political memoirs and autobiographies account for that policy process, examining the varying significance that each author ascribes to policymaking agents, chiefly the leadership, the executive, the bureaucracy, the intra-party factions, and external community interest groups. I conclude that memoirs are conditioned by genre conventions, and by their author’s specific vantage point within the policy network.