Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} 's Second Chance by George Megalogenis Australia's Second Chance by George Megalogenis. Are you teaching Civics and Citizenship in a secondary classroom? We have the perfect book for you. George Megalogenis , bestselling author of Moment , delivers a brand new book that covers almost every content description area in the Year 9 and 10 Australian Curriculum. Most nations don’t get a first chance to prosper. Australia is on its second. For the best part of the nineteenth century, Australia was the world’s richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants. Yet our last big boom was followed by a fifty-year bust as we lost our luck, our riches and our nerve, and shut our doors on the world. Now we’re back on top, in the position where history tells us we made our biggest mistakes. Can we learn from our past and cement our place as one of the world’s great nations? Showing that our future is in our foundation, Australia’s Second Chance goes back to 1788, the first contact between locals and migrants, to bring us a unique and fascinating view of the key events of our past right through to the present day. With newly available economic data and fresh interviews with former leaders (including the last major interview with ), George Megalogenis crunches the numbers and weaves our history into a riveting argument, brilliantly chronicling our dialogue with the world and bringing welcome insight into the urgent question of who we are, and what we can become. Australia's Second Chance review: George Megalogenis' plea for more people. Australian politics can be confusing. We'd probably all agree on that. But it has been this way for a long time. In fact in 1913 even the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin found it so. After federal Labor's narrow defeat by the Liberal Party's Joseph Cook, Lenin, watching from afar, was baffled. "What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this, in which the workers' representatives predominate in the Upper House and, till recently, did so in the Lower House as well, and yet the capitalist system is in no danger?" Lenin asked. "The Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party … Actually [Labor] is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really Conservatives." Australia's Second Chance by George Megalogenis. From the point of view of a detached observer, there is much to be said for Lenin's proposition that, except on rare occasions, both of our major political groupings have much more in common with each other than they imagine. They agree on matters of defence and immigration, where there remains considerable unanimity about policy deemed to be in the national interest. Their bipartisanship has historical precedents. After Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, in the middle of an Australian election campaign, our major political parties immediately engaged in a duel of unswerving loyalty to the British Empire. Ironically, this worked best in Labor's favour. Andrew Fisher pledged that Australia would defend Britain "to our last man and our last shilling". This claim so resonated with voters that the ALP easily won the election with a primary vote of 50.9 per cent – still Labor's highest ever. As the intellectually adroit George Megalogenis aptly puts it: "Here was an egalitarian nation, ready to fight for the empire under the banner of Labor." In Australia's Second Chance Megalogenis analyses key demographic, economic, and political trends apparent in historical and current-day Australia. As the title suggests, the gist of its narrative is how to extricate ourselves from deep economic downturns and especially how to be, and remain, prosperous again. Throughout the book Megalogenis argues it has only been when we encouraged large-scale immigration and a policy of openness that we have been an economically successful nation. Hence he claims that, for much of the 19th century, "Australia was the world's richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants". In order to be prosperous and remain so, Megalogenis argues that we need to emulate our most successful examples of political bipartisanship. Perhaps the clearest indication of the fundamental agreement of the national parties is when returned federal Labor to office in 1983, after a mere seven years in opposition. But, Megalogenis writes, "this was like no previous Labor government … as it sought to promote the interests of workers by favouring business". Indeed, over 13 crucial years, from April 1983 to March 1996, the federal Labor governments of Hawke and , supported by the economic and fiscal policies (if not always the electoral rhetoric) of the federal opposition, succeeded in legislating key policies that had widespread support. As Megalogenis explains, it was the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating that "successfully floated the dollar, opened the financial sector, pulled down the tariff wall, and allowed workers and employers to negotiate wages at the enterprise level, without officials looking over their shoulder". Since the Hawke-Keating years, the major political groupings have been in fundamental agreement about other key issues of economics, finance, defence, and of matters concerning population. The only potential dissenters in Australia in 2016 are those from the right wing of the Liberal and National parties, who may well successfully argue the need for a split away from both major groupings to form a genuinely conservative political party. The reality is that the parties supposedly representing the forces of capital and those of labour both strongly support a unified approach to Australia's defence capabilities and fiscal and monetary policy. In particular, large-scale immigration is presented by both of our major groupings as the key to Australia's economic and political future. To someone like me, who strongly argues that one of Australia's and the world's major problems is overpopulation, this is a contentious claim. Yet to my mind the only observable major weakness in this weighty book is that, fact-studded and fascinating as it is, Australia's Second Chance contains no maps or other useful graphics that would have made the task of understanding Megalogenis' major thesis considerably easier. Nevertheless the ever-resourceful Megalogenis has clearly put on record, for public debate, his crucial notion that Australia's prosperity is contingent upon the continued arrival of immigrants from overseas. Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor of Politics and History at Griffith University. Australia's Second Chance : What our history tells us about our future. Available. Expected delivery to Germany in 14-18 business days. Description. In his new must-read blockbuster, George Megalogenis (The Australian Moment) reads the nation's numbers to show how our whole history points out the path we must take in the future. We've been here before. What did we get wrong, and how can we get it right this time? The bestselling author of The Australian Moment asks the most important question confronting the country right now - how do we maintain our winning streak? Most nations don't get a first chance to prosper. Australia is on its second. For the best part of the nineteenth century, Australia was the world's richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants. Yet our last big boom was followed by a fifty-year bust as we lost our luck, our riches and our nerve, and shut our doors on the world. Now we're back on top, in the position where history tells us we made our biggest mistakes. Can we learn from our past and cement our place as one of the world's great nations? Showing that our future is in our foundation, Australia's Second Chance goes back to 1788, the first contact between locals and migrants, to bring us a unique and fascinating view of the key events of our past right through to the present day. With newly available economic data and fresh interviews with former leaders (including the last major interview with Malcolm Fraser), George Megalogenis crunches the numbers and weaves our history into a riveting argument, brilliantly chronicling our dialogue with the world and bringing welcome insight into the urgent question of who we are, and what we can become. 'Megalogenis has emerged as something of a polymath. He slaps history and politics and culture like mortar in and around his knowledge of economics and numbers to build compelling, even thrilling, theses about the country of his birth and where it stands in the world.' Tony Wright, Saturday Age show more. Remarks at the launch Australia’s Second Chance by George Megalogenis. Well thank you very much and it is great to be here with George – a writer who has informed and inspired us for so long. Indeed George I was quoting from your previous book The Longest Decade in the House only yesterday it’s a very apt remarks Paul Keating made to you – which seem to apply very accurately to the Opposition at the moment. Can I welcome here as well George’s family. I have to check, my Greek is very rusty and ancient in every respect, but I have to check whether in fact this – Megalogenis – means great family or big beards. George assures me that Niki Savva, another great Hellenistic writer, says it means big beards. Yet of course you have no beard at all… but I will stick with great families. George, as you said, writes with a crisp, spare style. I say this to some of the lawyers here, who will know what I mean, that he writes with the crispness of one of the great English judges, Lord Denning. It’s something that I should try to do more of – shorter sentences. It’s taken me a while, I will work on it. There has been an enormous amount of research gone into the book. George has been ploughing through the microfiches of the Sydney Morning Herald , The Melbourne Argus , The Bulletin and right back to great regional newspapers like The Queenslander , The Launceston Advertiser and The Bathurst Free Press . Having a spouse who is writing a book is always a terrible pain for the husband or wife as the case may be. As for your daughter, I’m sure that very few children of your generation would understand why their dad is spending so much time with a newspaper – what’s that? Let alone a microfiche – what’s that? Surely he can get that on his iPad? It seems amazing that you have got to go into all those dusty archives. George’s output is enormous. This year alone he’s produced a documentary series for the ABC which has been acclaimed – Making Australia Great . Of course in his previous book I mentioned – The Longest Decade – he documented the era when Australia made up lost ground by introducing policy reforms adopted abroad, to be fair, floating the dollar, financial deregulation, adopting a target band for inflation and of course by dismantling barriers to the world whether it’s been tariffs or of course the White Australia policy. Now, Second Chance has got a different starting point. It’s the huge sweep of history from the First Fleet through to Federation and the twentieth century, explaining how we as Australians crafted a social and cultural model quite distinct from that of the old world. George is one of those very few authors that have sought to explain Australian exceptionalism and he’s done so in an unsentimental way. There was a time when Australian exceptionalism was explained in terms of the bush myth. Something my late mother wrote about many years ago, commenting on the way in which in the 19 th century there was a sort of Arcadian utopia imagined in Australia, and of course perpetuated by the bush poets Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson and so forth. So this a much more modern understanding of Australian exceptionalism and what George identifies is something that I like to talk about a lot, I think we should all talk about it a lot. How did we become the most successful multicultural society in the world? How did we do that? How did we build this multicultural society based on mutual respect and as he identifies it was originally, back in colonial, days illegal “to provoke animosity between Her Majesty’s subjects of different religious persuasions”. And of course that is reflected, to some degree, in the constitution which decrees that there will be no established religion. We created one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. The first country to provide both full voting rights for men and women and a secret ballot – of course, not excluding Indigenous people to our great shame, something that was corrected many years later. We did that for 50 years before Britain in terms of a universal mail ballot and then universal female suffrage began in the 1890s in South Australia. George quotes the Melbourne Argus from 1856, saying “Somewhere between the systems of Great Britain and America seems to lie the grand secret of the most free and effective government”. And there’s a great wisdom in that. We have a free market system, free market economy, free market tradition, culture if you like. But capitalism is not as red in tooth and claw as it is in the United States. On the other hand, the welfare state – the nanny state – is not as, if you like, as interfering as it is in Europe. So we have struck a balance between the two and that I think is to be found in the combination of egalitarianism – Jack is as good as his master, everybody’s equal, we call each other people by our first names. Australians are much less deferential than our European or indeed our American colleagues and that’s really important. In a different sense in terms of the importance of driving economic growth through innovation which is critical for every enterprise, every business, whether it’s a tech start-up or a manufacturing company 100 years old, or whether it’s a farm. Deference is very dangerous. We should always be courteous, but deference if it’s overdone can mean death because what it means is you are not prepared to say to the boss “Hey, the way we’re doing things doesn’t work anymore, we’ve got to change”. We’ve always got to be prepared to be open to new ideas. Now openness, openness to the world is one of the big themes in this book and George talks about the way Australia was open and then it was closed. And then it opened again after the 1950s and he notes that had Arthur Calwell won the 1961 election with a pledge to cut migration back, had Arthur Calwell won that election instead of Robert Menzies the great family of the Megalogenis would never have come to Australia in all probability – we would have been deprived of this book. And it’s interesting that he also notes that the opposition to the levels of migration, which was quite high around the time of the ’61 election and great credit to Robert Menzies and dare I say the party that he led – our party, the Liberal Party – stuck with the commitment to high levels of immigration, stuck with, although the term was not used in those days, a commitment to a multicultural Australia because by three years later, by 1964, public opinion had shifted and support for the migration programme was strong. That openness and multiculturalism based on mutual respect is what has defined most of the most successful societies in the world. Because I’m here in the presence of such a great Hellenic family, you can look at some of the great Greek cities when was Istanbul or Constantinople at its greatest? When it was its most diverse. When was Alexandria at its most successful? When it was its most diverse. When was Smyrna or Izmir – as it is now called – at its greatest? When it was at its most open and diverse. Diversity is our strength, our greatest asset – as the publisher said – is not the rocks under the ground, but the people that walk on top of it. And this multicultural Australia is a remarkable achievement and we should treasure it and hold it dear. I should before I conclude having discussed multicultural Australia and immigration, just acknowledge among so many other distinguished guests, Phillip Ruddock – a great immigration minister. The nation we have today – multicultural Australia today – so harmonious relative to others is the creation of millions, but it’s a creation of 23 million Australians and it’s the creation of many ministers and leaders from every walk of life. In our modern era there is no individual that has done more to create the remarkable multicultural nation in which we live than Phillip Ruddock. Australia's Second Chance by George Megalogenis. George Megalogenis is known as an Australian journalist, author, and political commentator. George was born in 1964 in Melbourne, Australia. Megalogenis went to Melbourne High School and then went on to study economics at the . After four years of college, he joined The Sun News-Pictorial as a cadet journalist in 1986. After getting a few years of experience at a journalist, he went on to work as an economics correspondent for News Limited. His stretch at News Limited lasted two years. Related Biography: Mungo Wentworth MacCallum. One of his books, The Australian Moment won the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-fiction and the 2012 Walkley Award for Non- fiction. The book was also the inspiration for his ABC documentary series Making Australia Great. He is also the author of Faultlines, The Longest Decade, Australia’s Second Chance and Balancing Act. Balancing Act includes his two Quarterly Essays, No. 40: Trivial Pursuit – Leadership and the End of the Reform Era and No. 61: Balancing Act – Australia Between Recession and Renewal.