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The Book Show – Jim McClelland (1991)

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The mug politician

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Jim McClelland had been a minister in the Whitlam Labor Government (1972-1975). He talks to Dinny O’Hearn about being a politician and his naivety in thinking that this meant changing the country. Instead he discovered that it’s all about power.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

Jim McClelland was one of Australia’s most intelligent, witty and honest politicians. He began his career as a solicitor and a good friend of John Kerr until 1975 when Kerr as Governor-General dismissed the Labor Government. They never spoke again.

The excuse for this entertaining and discursive interview between Dinny O’Hearn and Jim McClelland is the appearance of Jim McClelland’s latest book called Conversations in Cabs (1991). It’s a collection of his Sydney Morning Herald columns over the years, in which he’d write about absolutely anything, from the state of the nation to the state of another of his great passions, his garden in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

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