Book Details

The Costello Memoirs

Peter Costello with Peter Coleman

The Costello Memoirs is a frank and fearless look inside the engine-room of the Liberal Party and the Howard Government.

About this Title

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.

Erratum now available online. Click the link below to download.
www.mup.com.au

About the Author

Peter Costello was Australia's longest serving Treasurer, and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 1994 to 2007.

Peter Coleman has been a member of the Federal Parliament (1981-87) and the New South Wales Parliament (1968-78). He is a writer/journalist and has been editor of The Bulletin and Quadrant. His many books include a study of the intellectuals in the Cold War, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, and the autobiographical Memoirs of a Slow Learner.

He was a foundation member of the Australian Council for the Arts (1968-73) and Chairman of the Australian Film and Television School (1971-73). He was Administrator of Norfolk Island (1979-81.) He is Peter Costello's father-in-law.

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978-0-522-85582-1