Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List 2024 – Podcast

Each year, Grattan Institute selects its best books of the past 12 months – recommended reading for the Prime Minister, and indeed all Australians, over the summer holidays. From the history of democracy to the stars above, each of these reads put humans squarely in the centre of the frame.

On this podcast, Grattan CEO Aruna Sathanapally, and researchers Jessica Geraghty and Nick Parkinson, discuss why we chose these six pieces.

Read more about these thought-provoking reads.

Transcript

Aruna Sathanapally: Hello, and welcome to the Grattan podcast. I’d like to acknowledge that I’m recording on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. I’m Aruna Sathanapally. I head up the Grattan Institute. And on today’s podcast, we’ll be talking about what we reckon the Prime Minister should put in his holiday suitcase.

Each year, Grattan Institute compiles a summer reading list for the Prime Minister, and anyone interested in public policy. Throughout the year, Grattan staff avidly read new releases. We look for cracking good reads that say something interesting about Australia and the world. And we thrash out what we think about these books over drinks and cheese over the year before landing on a final list of five books and one essay.

For 2024 they are Näku Dhäruk the Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy, by Clare Wright. Challenger, a true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space, by Adam Higginbotham. Making Sense of Chaos, a better economics for a better world, by J. Doyne Farmer. 70 Miles in Hell by Caitlin Dickerson for the Atlantic. Code Dependent, Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia.

Now, we are unashamedly policy nerds, which is why our list is dominated by non-fiction, but we have included one work of fiction, Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey. One of the threads that cuts across them all, for me, is the place of humans within bigger systems: government, technology, the economy, and the space race. To discuss this and other reflections, I have two of Grattan’s senior associates and most voracious readers with me today. Welcome Jess Geraghty and Nick Parkinson.

Jessica Geraghty: Hello.

Nick Parkinson: Hey, thanks so much for having us.

Aruna Sathanapally: Let’s dive in. The first two books on our list, The Bark Petitions and Challenger, they’re histories. One is Australian, one’s American, both set in the second half of the 20th century but in dramatically different contexts. Let’s start with the Bark Petitions. This book recounts a pivotal moment in the history of Australian democracy, the creation and presentation of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, or Ṉäku Dhäruk , to the Australian Parliament.

Nick, tell us about it.

Nick Parkinson: Thanks, Aruna. Also, this book by Clare Wright, look, it’s the third in her democracy series and I’m a big Clare Wright fan and she’s done it again with this one. Where it departs is it tells the story, as you mentioned, of the bark petitions. So, these are petitions written in Yolŋu Matha and English and presented to parliament really protesting against the incursion of mining interests onto traditional lands in northeast Arnhem land. One thing that Wright makes really clear throughout the book is that the petitions were making really modest requests. And despite their modesty, they went unheeded. So, one of the key requests was to have some like genuine consultation with landowners.

I think this is a really timely book. It’s also a moving work of historiography. It captures these kind of intimate sweeping moments. And key to this is a really interesting private collection from the superintendent of the Methodist Church back in Yirrkala then, Edgar Wells, and his wife. So, you get some of their diary entries, some of the letters that they sent to key players in this moment, and I just was so wrapped up in the history and in these personal stories.

Aruna Sathanapally: Now it’s a really carefully crafted work of history. It’s not a short read. Why include a history book at all for a list, you know, for the Prime Minister who’s got enough on his plate in the here and now?

Nick Parkinson: Yeah. When you see it, it is a thick read, but don’t let that deter you. And I would say to the prime minister, it’s, it’s definitely every page is worth it. It’s a comprehensive account of this important chapter. And when prime minister Albanese made his acceptance speech after winning the last election, he really underscored his commitment to the Uluru statement from the heart and within that statement is this need, this commitment to truth telling.

And I think if we’re committed to truth telling as a nation, there’s kind of almost no better book than to, to look to Bark Petitions, to look to, to what is told here. You know, one of the reasons we read history is to learn from the mistakes of the past. And this is a chapter really worth learning from.

Aruna Sathanapally: I’m not surprised to see it on several lists actually. So, I think a lot of people around the country have really, really connected with, with this piece of work. Now the second read on our list, Challenger, is also a history a history of government failure and in this book, we experienced the story of the Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded tragically just after take-off on the 28th of January 1986, killing all seven crew.

Nick, why did this one make the list?

Nick Parkinson: It’s a good question. You know, there might be some people out there thinking, An Australian policy think tank is putting a book about a moment in US history on its list. Like, what are you doing? It is one that just like, it made the rounds of the Grattan office. And I was one of the last people to pick it up.

I’ve got it here with me full of, you know, lots of little, little tab notes. And I guess, firstly, it’s just such a gripping story. So Where the book starts, instead of starting with the Challenger space, Space shuttle, we actually start with Apollo 1, and it’s really the early days of the 60s, you kind of got this tension between the US and the USSR, and it’s kind of, you, you feel the masculine bravado and this kind of excitement about the space frontier.

And there’s just this moment, like right at the start that will stick with me, which is on Apollo One, there were three astronauts who were incinerated in a space shuttle. And it almost wasn’t surprising, like they couldn’t get themselves out of the escape hatch. And this was like a known problem.

Now there’s a way of telling that story where you begin there, but what Higginbotham does is he really like lingers on these, these kind of. poignant moments. So, there’s a moment where you see this like handprint in the soot of the wreckage of the ship. You zoom into, to one of the astronauts wives, Martha, who’s preparing a coffee when the policeman comes to her house and the whole, like the whole work is like that. It’s beautiful, it’s moving, but throughout it all is this central question of like, what is acceptable risk? And that’s why it’s on our list.

It charts these policy failures that were known about. You see, like compromises in the design of space shuttles because of the U. S. national security interests, shrinking budgets, this sclerotic NASA bureaucracy.

And I think we can think of parallels in recent Australian history. Like one only has to look at how many royal commissions there have been to think, what is an appropriate risk appetite? How are we monitoring and kind of using oversight well, and how can we stop that before what is thought of as acceptable risk balloons into catastrophe.

And for those reasons, it should be on the PM’s list.

Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, it was so popular across such a wide range of people. I think that captures that sense that it was just a great read, even though it was a non-fiction. So even for those who might shy away from non-fiction, I’d suggest, you know, pick this one up and run with it. So, we’ve talked at the start a bit about systems and that’s come out in what you’ve talked about as well, Nick, but our third book really speaks to that directly. Taking the route from science through to economics. And J Doyne Farmer, he’s a professor at Oxford. He heads up the school of complexity economics and he, he makes the case for taking a complex systems approach to economics. And one of the points he makes is that.

Economics is typically used to provide a conceptual framework to help us understand the world, to understand public policy. But if it isn’t actually very effective at prediction, then we need to think about whether it’s the right conceptual framework. Jess, do you want to tell us about Making Sense of Chaos?

Jessica Geraghty: So, the core message of this book is that we can do economics better and make more useful predictions by adjusting that conceptual framework. And so, as you mentioned, at the heart of Farmer’s approach is the notion that the economy is a complex system, a bit like the brain. And so, in a complex system, simple interactions between the many different parts of the system can lead to chaotic behaviour and unexpected patterns where things can happen, and things can change seemingly out of nowhere.

And now this is a different way of looking at the economy compared to the more conventional approach with economic modelling, where there tends to be a number of different assumptions, including that the economy is in equilibrium, which is where supply equals demand and things are steady and stable, and they’re not going to change unless we somehow introduce an external shock.

Now, as Farmer points out, this approach and these style of models made complete sense when we didn’t have the ability to simulate the real economy in all of its diversity and complexity. But now we can do that. Now we have much better data, which is far more rich and detailed, and we have far more powerful computers.

And so, as a result, we can really model the economy from the ground up and do a better job of simulating that dynamic web of interactions between people, businesses, and governments that happen in the real world. And as a result, these models can make more realistic predictions. So, at the start of the book, Farmer discusses how he and some colleagues were able to predict the, the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the UK recession in near real time.

And they were able to do that far more accurately than the more conventional models that were in use at Treasury and the Central Bank. And so the book’s not written as an attack on economics, but instead it’s more of a rallying call and farmer really emphasizes the point that complexity economics in this new wave or this way of thinking can really help us understand and address some of our biggest problems like climate change, future economic or financial crises.

And it can really help us better understand the world around us. So, things like what our global supply chain actually looks like. And so, I found it quite an inspiring read. And one final point is that, you know, it might sound a bit technical uh, a bit economics heavy, but we found it, you know, really interesting, really engaging and really easy to read.

So, it got the tick of approval across the office, including from a physicist and an economist. So, I highly recommend.

Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, it might seem counterintuitive to suggest the PM should read a Professor of Complexity Economics on New Year’s Day, but trust us on this one, it’s, it’s really very readable.

Jessica Geraghty: Our next pick for the PM uh, was an essay that was published in the Atlantic magazine about the treacherous journey faced by migrants passing through the Darien Gap, which is between Columbia and Panama. So, what was this piece about, Aruna, and why did we pick it?

Aruna Sathanapally: So, I read this piece actually, on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney and even sitting, you know, in a little, in a little seat on my phone it was completely immersive. Caitlin Dickerson the writer, is a lauded American investigative journalist. And she writes for the Atlantic. And here in Australia, we’re an island. And we’re a bit removed from what’s going on in the broader world. But this piece takes you there. It takes you to this stretch of jungle that connects South America and North America to people who are just like us, who are having to put themselves through the physical and psychological, and a challenge doesn’t even really capture it, of trying to carry themselves and their loved ones to safety. And I feel this year I lost track of how many times we’ve talked about migration in the abstract.

But we talked so little about what it actually is at the human level and, and what it takes. My view is that good economic policy needs to understand the impacts of systems on humans. And that is why I’d say a piece like is required reading for 2024.

Jessica Geraghty: Yeah, I thought the article made some really powerful connections between migration policy and what, you know, what the U. S. government was trying to do and all these unintended consequences that it might not have expected to happen was certainly something that I hadn’t really thought about before.

And I think the article made that connection really, really eloquently.

Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, back to the complexity of systems, right?

Jessica Geraghty: Exactly right.

Aruna Sathanapally: You don’t just have a linear impact. A policy here doesn’t necessarily lead in a straightforward way to a reaction there. It ripples through a system.

Nick Parkinson: Like, one thing that just stuck with me and just reflecting on what you’re both saying was, you just put a name. Like, one of the things Caitlin Dickinson does really well is follows families through their journeys. You see these young children in this story. Like, there’s a five-year-old at one point who finds herself without any family.

There’s another family whose daughter who I think is maybe eight. Takes a 15-foot fall into a river as part of the kind of treacherous crossing. And it’s just, it’s these moments that really kind of reinforce, as you’ve said, that, that human cost of the way we’ve designed systems.

Aruna Sathanapally: Like 70 Miles in Hell, our next book also looks at the humans in the system. So, Jess, do you want to tell us about Code Dependent? Because this time the system is AI.

Jessica Geraghty: This is a really interesting book that looks at the way that AI is so deeply integrated into so many aspects of our lives. And it asks what this means for our society and for us as human beings.

So, the author is Madhumita Murgia, and she is the AI editor at the Financial Times. And she looks at this sort of existential question by taking us around the world to meet all these different people whose jobs and personal lives are impacted by AI. And so, we meet Hiba, who’s a refugee and she trains out AI algorithms in Bulgaria.

And we meet Diana, whose teenage son was predicted by an AI algorithm used by the police in the Netherlands to be someone who would go on to commit high impact crimes. And the book really looks at how AI can affect people’s lives and rob them of their agency through the personal stories of these two women and a whole bunch of other people.

And I think the core message of this book is that when we don’t think about how AI systems work and exactly what they’re doing. We don’t tend to see the harms that result, and those harms tend to just disproportionately affect already marginalized groups. And so, it’s really vital that our policymakers think deeply about the role of AI technologies in our lives.

How do we know what is safe? What laws might need to be amended to take AI and its potential harms into account? And at the end of the day, who is ultimately responsible for what these technologies do and what happens if things go wrong?

Aruna Sathanapally: It’s interesting because in Making Sense of Chaos, actually, there’s a reference early on to this idea of management cybernetics, which is a phrase I hadn’t heard before 2024, but is a sort of precursor to complex systems theory and cybernetics is all about information flow and another book that actually didn’t make the list this year grapples exactly with this idea.

it’s called, I’m trying to remember actually Stan Davies, The Accountability Machine. Also, about cybernetics. And I think there is in this list and in the year, we’re grappling with how to understand these systems that have become bigger than us and are hard for us to understand because we don’t really know how decisions are made.

So, it’s harder for us to hold decision makers accountable.

Nick Parkinson: Well, speaking of bigger than us and technology, let’s talk about our last pick, which is a little bit left of centre. It’s been one of my Favorite reads of the year. It’s called Only the Astronauts and it’s by Ceridwen Dovey. It’s five quirky stories of space objects. So, reading this paired along with Challenger was just a dream.

It’s the exact kind of book that I can think of myself, you know, sitting at the beach, reclining in the sun, looking up at the sky and thinking, oh gosh, maybe these objects are there. What are the stories that they can tell us about themselves? So, I reckon it’s, it’s really interesting read. Aruna this was one of the ones that I think you might’ve read first. So why do you think it would pique the PM’s interest?

Aruna Sathanapally: Look, Ceridwen Dovey is just a beautiful writer for a start. And I’m quite partial to the short story. Like sometimes that’s what you need. You just need a short piece to read over a cup of tea. Not necessarily a novel to dive into. And to be perfectly honest, 2024 has been a pretty tough year.

There’s been a lot of tough reading out there. And for me, fiction is a glorious escape. Now for this book, what better escape than to imagine yourself as a sentient mannequin, like driving a car through space.

Nick Parkinson: Yeah, it’s just a lot of fun, isn’t it? Really what Dovey’s done is kind of inhabited these objects and telling these real stories. So, one of the stories is about Sally Ride, who was the first female astronaut in space. And she had this when she went out, this all-male engineering team decided oh, you know, we’re sending a woman in space, we’re going to have to prepare the spaceship for and they, they prepared a hundred tampons for you know, a few days voyage. One of the best parts of Sally Ride right afterwards was like, I didn’t have my period while I was there, it was totally unnecessary.

So, what, what Dovey’s done is put this really tongue in cheek story. It’s one of my favourites of the collection where she inhabits the ancestor of one of these tampons, which she calls tamponauts because they’re tampon astronauts. And um, this ancestor writes a screenplay about a group of tamponauts going to Mars on a mission.

And it’s a really, it’s interesting because it’s, it’s satire. It’s poking fun at the kind of rampant sexism. It’s kind of really characteristic of the way we think about some of these STEM fields and particularly this part of the kind of space race just when Sally Ride was coming through. But at the same time, there’s real moments of like, of, of heart.

There’s real moments. One of the stories is told from the International Space Station’s perspective, and it feels really like despondent that people keep saying deorbiting instead of death. It’s like, no, this is my death. It’s just such a great read.

Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, I loved the story that’s set on the International Space Station, just documenting the very human and then sometimes cultural quirks of all the different astronauts interacting with each other, but from the perspective of a machine. And it just kind of, I think, reminds me the marvel of humanity.

We are something kind of idiosyncratic and quirky in the scheme of the whole universe. So, I think it’s, I think it’s a great way to, to close out the year.

 Thank you, Jess and Nick, for joining us today to discuss these books. I’m looking forward to wrapping them up and sending them across to the Lodge for the Prime Minister’s suitcase.

That wraps us up for today. We look forward to hearing your feedback on our books for this year. I do want to say all of Grattan’s work is available online for free. If you want to check it out, head to our website. It’s grattan.edu.au and everything we do is supported by generous donors like yourself. If you’d like to donate, please do so.

Take care of yourself. That’s a wrap for today.