However, when we meet for lunch at Alfredo's at Bulletin Place in the Sydney CBD, Emerson, conscious of a series of business meetings and media engagements that afternoon, abstains from alcohol. His business these days revolves mainly around economic consultancy, while the sudden spike in his media profile is the fruit of The Boy From Baradine , Emerson's second book and first memoir.
Craig Emerson had a hardscrabble and painful childhood but he eschews mawkishness and sentimentality in his memoir. Janie Barrett. Lovers of political autobiographies jaded by the formulaic battler-makes-good narrative have nothing to fear: Emerson did, indeed, endure a hardscrabble, and often harrowing, childhood in country New South Wales and western Sydney before carving out a distinguished career in economics, civil service and politics. But his account of all this eschews mawkishness and miracle moments in favour of a raw honesty that needs no literary constructs.
If a well-crafted memoir is one that explains why someone is like they are, then this one hits the spot. The regular emotional and physical abuse meted out by his mother — depicted in the book as a largely unhappy, sometimes suicidal soul addicted to sleeping tablets — partly explains Emerson's hypersensitivity to children's suffering. This often manifests itself as tears at what Canberra-hardened colleagues might consider inappropriate moments. I watched Emerson break down mid-interview on a couple of occasions in Parliament House television studios.
Before we check the menu he reminds me of such an episode while we were taping an instalment of Annabel Crabb's popular Kitchen Cabinet at his electorate apartment in Logan City, an area south of Brisbane which can itself be a battle zone of domestic violence, welfare dependence and crime.
Not that Emerson ever used his troubled upbringing to elicit sympathy or buttress his working-class credentials during his 20 or so years in politics, first as an adviser to Bob Hawke and later as member of Parliament and minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments. Nor had he planned to dig up all that childhood pain when he set about writing what became The Boy From Baradine. The regular emotional and physical abuse meted out by Craig Emerson's mother Marge pictured left with Craig and his father Ern partly explains Emerson's hypersensitivity to children's suffering.
I remember Emerson in and tossing me a few rough chapters of what had the makings of a humorous, anecdotal account of his years as an economic adviser to Bob Hawke. Fast-paced and rollicking, it sported a peppering of racehorses, form guides and larrikin behaviour among detailed recollections of macro- and micro-economic reform, trade unions, the Tasmanian wilderness and Hawke and Paul Keating's end-game.
I expected it to be one day published as a colourful vignette about life in a s political office. And so did Emerson. Spoiler: You're not. Now silent under the Taliban, a Kabul cinema awaits its fate. Travellers, states and territories told to 'pay up' millions owed to NSW in quarantine fees. Attempts to decapitate Mahatma Gandhi statue a day after being unveiled by the Prime Minister. Medi-hotel escapee who used fire escape allegedly entered SA with stolen driver's licence.
Another Gaddafi in Libya? Muammar's son pitches for power as presidential election draws near. Popular Now 1. Nick had a wife, a baby and job — but he couldn't buy nappies without asking his parents. This is merely the latest calamity in Australia's economic transition - an unalloyed disaster for thousands of workers and related businesses.
Yet unfortunately, it is also a harbinger of broader decline. A powerful symbol of the essential vulnerability of Australia's once dominant manufacturing sector, whose demise threatens a cascading effect through the economy and would signal the end of related competencies as diverse as medical equipment innovation, and defence and heavy engineering. The state's Labor Treasurer, Tom Koutsantonis, has resisted politics, suggesting rather that the federal Industry Minister, fellow South Australian Christopher Pyne, has engaged actively in the search for solutions.
That should help, but short of an actual bail-out, significant restructuring of the company with accompanying job losses is probably the best the town and the vulnerable South Australian economy can hope for. In the end it wasn't the carbon tax's python squeeze or its wrecking ball that put the town on its knees.
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