Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Sean Kelly, Black Inc., $32.99.
Political adviser to former Prime Ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, Sean Kelly declares The Game is neither a biography nor is it a minute-by-minute account of insider political machinations.
“Instead, it is a book about a character, Sco-Mo; the strange, successful man who created him: and what his successes and failures, at this tumultuous time, tell us about politics, journalism, and Australia.”
As Kelly explains: “When my publisher first approached me to write something on Scott Morrison, I told him I wanted to write a different type of book. I thought then, and I still think, that the most interesting things about this prime minister are in what he reflects back to us.”
So, what happens when the prime minister views politics as a game? In this intelligible account of a man, a time and a nation, Kelly gives us the decisive portrait of Scott Morrison – a politician not quite like any other. Morrison “understands that politics has become a game – one he is determined to win. He also understands something essential about Australia, something many of us are unwilling to admit, even to ourselves. But there are things Scott Morrison does not understand. This is the story of those failures, too – and of how Morrison’s approach to politics has become a dangerous liability.”
Questions about what a person is like are unanswerable. Without really thinking about it, we know that when “we meet somebody they are performing for us in various ways. We nevertheless assume that there is some way of reaching the real person behind the performances; real enough, anyway, to allow us to interact with them in a meaningful way.”
Isn’t that what we do at an election?
The Game is requisite reading if you’re interested in current Australian politics. Often unsettling, it is also revealing and absorbing.
