The Role of Interests and Ideas in Policy Change

The foregoing chapters have been concerned with the central issue of the political consensus which was built around Keynesianism in Australia, and, more pertinently, the collapse of this consensus which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. It has been argued that the problems which are ascribed to Keynesianism have been wrongly ascribed, at least insofar as the Keynesianism which took form in the 1950s and 1960s was considerably limited vis-à-vis an otherwise more authentic Keynesianism (particularly with regard to the politically economic problems that the latter could have been called upon to address in the 1970s). In showing that these ascriptions have been without foundation, the aim is to refute the more general claim that Keynesianism was abandoned simply because it was based on weak theoretical foundations or that its economics was bound, sooner or later, to encounter its own internal contradictions.