Shipwrecked in Arcadia: the Contemporary Australian Experience - Paul Kelly

Shipwrecked in Arcadia: the Contemporary Australian Experience Paul Kelly, Editor at Large, The Australian, delivers the Inaugural Australia Lecture at the UCD Australian Studies Centre, University College Dublin (26 Nov 2013). In this lecture, Australia's most eminent and distinguished political journalist, Paul Kelly, considers what has happened to Australia over the past 30 years in economic, social, immigration and strategic terms. He argues that Australia's experience is divorced from most of the rest of the West in Europe and America -- its resources mean it is highly integrated into Asia and China; it retains a tight alliance with the US; it has had 30 years of growth and missed recession in the 2008-09 global crisis. Yet it is now facing serious problems of complacency and reform exhaustion following the highly disappointing six years of Labor Government. The task of the new Abbott Government is to rekindle reform, re-structure the economy and restore discipline in a deteriorating fiscal environment. The risk for Australia is that it has squandered the prosperity of the past decade with far harsher times coming. About Paul Kelly Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large on The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of the paper and he writes on Australian politics, public policy and international affairs. He has covered every Australian government from Gough Whitlam to Tony Abbott. He has reported and assessed at close quarters eight Australian Prime Ministers. He is a regular television commentator on Sky News program, Australian Agenda. Paul is the author of seven books including The Hawke Ascendancy, The End of Certainty, November 1975 and in 2001 he presented the five part television documentary for the ABC '100 Years -- The Australian Story' and wrote a book under the same title. His most recent book, The March of Patriots, offers a re-interpretation of Paul Keating and John Howard in office. In 2014 Paul will publish a new book on the six years of Labor Government 2007-13. In 2003 Paul co-edited with Peter Dawkins, a former Director of the Melbourne Institute, the book Hard Heads, Soft Hearts on a new domestic reform agenda for Australia. Paul was Graham Perkin Journalist of the Year (1990). He holds a Doctor of Letters from Melbourne University and in 2010 was a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at Melbourne University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and in 2006 was a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Paul is a long-standing participant in Australian-American Leadership Dialogue. He served for many years on the board of the Australia-Indonesia Institute. He has interviewed a number of world figures including Tony Blair, George W Bush, Jiang Zemin and Lee Kuan Yew. He has attended many conferences in Asia, Europe and Americas including World Economic Forum meetings at Davos. Paul has been a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a visiting lecturer at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard.