Labor in Power (1993)

Original title

Labor In Power

Directed by

Sue Spencer

Genre

documentary television program

Country

Australia

Length

1 season, 5 episodes

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary series covers the first ten years of the Hawke-Keating government in Australia from 1983 to 1993. It looks at the power struggle between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating for Labor Party leadership. The series uses over 120 interviews to show how power works in Australia from an insider perspective.

informativeinside-baseballpoliticalpersonalfactualemotionalcandidchronological

What happens

Labor in Power is a 1993 Australian documentary series about the first ten years of the Hawke-Keating government produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It was divided into five one-hour episodes and originally broadcast from 8 June to 6 July 1993. In a decade of profound change, from 1983 to 1993, the ABC Television News and Current Affairs Political Documentary Unit compiled a unique series, capturing the key elements of the Australian Labour Party's ten-year rule. The battle between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating for the Labor Party leadership was one of the most divisive in Australian political history the seeds of which can be traced back as far as 1980. The series is an intensely personal examination of the Hawke-Keating relationship, and through more than 120 interviews with Cabinet Ministers, senior bureaucrats and staff advisers, the series offers an insider's view of who wields power in Australia, and how. The five episodes are; "Taking power", "Taxing times", "Conserving power", "The recession we had to have" and "The sweetest victory". The documentary was filmed with the interviewees anticipating electoral defeat in the 1993 Australian federal election. The final ten minutes of the last episode document the surprise result that returned the Keating government for a final term. The longest period the century-old Australian Labor Party spent in office was the 13-year Hawke-Keating government. A long-running thread within the series is the secret Kirribilli Agreement of 1988 and the expectations it created. Episode 1 covers both the 1982 Australian Labor Party leadership spill and 1983 Australian Labor Party leadership spill which preceded the 1983 federal election in which Labor came to government, and the following 1984 federal election which reduced Labor's majority in parliament. Episode 4 covers the early 1990s recession, and Episode 5 includes events of the Gulf War, reflections on the June 1991 Australian Labor Party leadership spill and the December 1991 Australian Labor Party leadership spill, then the subsequent 1993 federal election. Although produced before the end of the period in which Labor was in government, producing long-format retrospectives on Australian federal governments would soon become an ironclad ABC tradition. Labor in Power was followed in subsequent decades by The Howard Years, The Killing Season and Nemesis, which have each focused on the whole of the government's time in office, the ABC having learn from Labor in Power not to produce such documentaries until after a government's time in office has ended. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• The Killing Season (2015)
• Nemesis (2024)
• The Howard Years (2008)
• Brilliant Creatures
• New Look at New Guinea
• Colour of War: The Anzacs
• Shitsville Express
• True Believers (1988)