The Twilight of Exceptionalism is veteran journalist Paul Kelly’s latest contribution to the chronicles of Australian political history. In the tradition of Edward Gibbon, it’s a story of the decline and fall – not the rise and fall – of the Coalition government from 2013 to 2022. And in this tale, there are populist barbarians pressing at the gates. The book explores the policy dilemmas of the era and the personal characteristics of the three prime ministers at their centre: the “warrior” Tony Abbott, the “technocratic” Malcolm Turnbull and the “pragmatic” Scott Morrison. It recognises some policy achievements, but tells a story largely of problems unsolved and potential unfulfilled.Review: The Twilight of Exceptionalism: The Liberal and Conservative Era – Paul Kelly (Melbourne University Press)Kelly describes The Twilight of Exceptionalism, his 13th solo or coauthored book, as the most “difficult” of them all. In his acknowledgements, he reflects on managing competing professional responsibilities as editor-at-large at The Australian and tackling personal and health setbacks. All the same, it is striking that such an experienced political writer found the Coalition’s decade in power so hard to put on paper.A bigger picture?Big books are getting rarer. In an end-of-year column on 2025 book trends, Nikki Gemmell said slim novels of 100 pages or so were all the rage. “It’s a reflection of changing reading habits,” she wrote, “of fracturing attention spans in a screen dominated world.” This trend also applies to nonfiction publishing, which requires authors to tackle big topics with fewer pages. Against that backdrop, The Twilight of Exceptionalism is itself exceptional at roughly 700 pages, excluding the endnotes and index. This gives Kelly an enormous canvas on which to paint what Turnbull might have called a “bigger picture”. All the major milestones of the era are covered: the destructive budget in 2014 that broke election promises and slashed funding for healthcare and pensions, two bruising leadership changes in 2015 and 2018, the Coalition’s premonitory weak election result in 2016, and the same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017. There were divisive debates over national security, free speech, climate change and energy policy. Then came the pandemic and a major reorientation of Australia’s strategic outlook with the AUKUS agreement in 2021. Veteran journalist Paul Kelly takes a maximalist approach to political history. Melbourne University Press One benefit of the maximalist approach is that Kelly can coax the leading protagonists into going on the record. In their testimonies, the reader sees the three prime ministers as Kelly probably sees them. Abbott appears relentlessly ideological. Turnbull is soaringly self-righteous. Morrison is incapable of sharing credit or accepting blame. Their senior staffers and public servants leave a vastly better impression across the board.Most of the memorable scandals and crises are discussed. These include Abbott’s decision to award a knighthood to Prince Philip on January 26 2015. Kelly also gives Morrison’s widely remembered leadership failings full treatment: the Hawaii holiday during Black Summer, the slow vaccine rollout, the clumsy approach to women’s political dissatisfaction, and the assumption of five ministerial roles in secret.A book like this is useful, because it can explore narrative roads less travelled in shorter accounts. The Abbott government’s convulsions over its failed proposal to remove hate speech protections from the Racial Discrimination Act are captured here.Kelly also refers to the “dual citizenship” crisis in 2017, which disqualified many sitting members from parliament and contributed to the Turnbull’s government vulnerability. This story, astonishingly, was omitted altogether from the ABC’s Nemesis documentary about the Coalition’s period of government.Kelly’s most stunning revelation, mentioned more than once, is that Abbott, as prime minister, inquired into the capacity of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) to conduct assassinations abroad – as if this would solve problems ranging from people smugglers in Indonesia to the Russian aggressors involved in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014. Kelly never goes so far as to say that this was madness, but it is perhaps implied.Moral and media mattersThe Twilight of Exceptionalism shows how complicated politics has become in the 21st century. The major parties of old are losing political capital. Media saturation and social media make the task of persuasion harder. The electorate is increasingly looking to alternative representation. Civic institutions are not always fit for purpose; governing capability has declined. Voters want more from their governments, but are less accommodating when changes are proposed. The sum of these factors is a decline of conviction, a revolving-door prime ministership and a political disillusionment that is far from unique to Australia.Kelly sees other reasons for the Coalition’s political dysfunction in office. He places heavy emphasis on the argument that Australian progressives enforced new secular moralities on everyone else, while conservatives clung to an older, Christian and Enlightenment model of civic life. More than 100 pages are devoted to these ruminations, speckled with long quotes from Australian economists such as Gary Banks and Chris Richardson, and US thinkers ranging from psychologist Jonathan Haidt to conservative commentator Yuval Levin. There are perils in this ponderous approach. It relies on generalised theories rather than empirical rigour. It minimises the role that inequality and uneven economic outcomes played in this era – the “dog days”, as economist Ross Garnaut called them. And it allows for real blind spots. For instance, there is not much reflection on the role of traditional media in The Twilight of Exceptionalism. Kelly’s employer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, was at the centre of the era’s political contests. It editorialised against Labor’s re-election in 2013, against Turnbull’s leadership in 2018 and in favour of Morrison’s net zero policy in 2021. In an infamous instalment of the ABC’s Q&A panel show, Turnbull gave Kelly a public dressing down over the Murdoch news empire’s role in making climate and energy policy so partisan.People have been morbidly fascinated by the Murdochracy in recent years. Books, podcasts and documentaries about their dynasty abound. The popularity of the Netflix series Succession, loosely based on the Murdoch family, reflects the depth of interest. Yet Kelly’s index includes just four references each to Sky News and The Australian newspaper, both of which he groups with other “right-wing” or “conservative” media. In doing so, he suggests an equivalence between News Corporation, and left-wing and progressive media outlets. Both sides are charged with ideological conformity and cultural politicking. The argument is unsurprising, and unconvincing. The patriarch’s shadowThe real patriarch of this story, though, is not Murdoch but John Howard. The former prime minister appears in The Twilight of Exceptionalism as a political guru and meddlesome forefather, whose interventions were sometimes endured rather than welcomed. We see him advising Abbott to sack his chief of staff Peta Credlin and treasurer Joe Hockey over lunch at Kirribilli House. He rings Turnbull in the wake of the 2016 election result to say Abbott must be appointed to cabinet as defence minister. Also recited in these pages is the story of treasurer Josh Frydenberg calling Howard in 2020, seeking intellectual solace on the eve of the JobKeeper package, which distributed billions of dollars in wage subsidies.The political elites of the 2010s worked in their predecessors’ shadows. The Labor Party (a minor character for much of this book) fell short during that decade, in Paul Keating’s estimation, because its leaders no longer understood the “middle-class economy Bob Hawke and I created for Australia”. Howard and his former treasurer, Peter Costello, similarly feel themselves custodians of Australia’s modern economic success. Costello is described in this book as too often “privately supportive” but “publicly critical” of his successors’ policies.Kelly tends to adopt the Howard and Costello attitude. He says the 2014 budget needed to be “less confrontational, more incremental”, yet also more ambitious in its “productivity-enhancing agenda”. Turnbull’s government was disappointing partly because of the prime minister’s “inability to implement an ambitious pro-market economic reform agenda”. Kelly suggests Labor was unwise to abandon the “the old Productivity Commission agenda” in favour of an “ACTU wish list” of workplace relations changes during its campaign against Morrison in 2022. For Kelly, the economic reform project of the 1980s and ‘90s remains the zenith of Australian policymaking. This is the Australian “exceptionalism” alluded to in the title: leaders such as Keating and Howard transcended Australia’s insular, protectionist past, in the national interest. It was exceptional, too, because Australia was better than its global competitors at blending pro-market deregulation with good social and democratic outcomes. Unchanged modelsA seasoned chronicler like Kelly knows that overt nostalgia makes for poor history.He pre-empts exactly this type of criticism. “Nobody,” he writes, “expects Labor or the Coalition to merely repeat the past.”Always with a theory to hand, Kelly says recent leaders were grappling with a “great transition”. This included new challenges for Australia’s productivity growth and competitiveness, new technological shocks and strategic vulnerabilities, energy uncertainty where previously there was energy abundance, and a social revolution that has alienated conservatives from wider society. The 2013 election, in this respect, was a Pyrrhic victory for the Liberals in the context of what Kelly views as a much larger decline. The book captures the “great transition” fairly convincingly. But there remains a problem for the argument: Kelly judges a changed world using unchanged models and metrics. The Hawke, Keating and Howard economic model (smaller government, fiscal restraint, microeconomic reform, tax changes and labour market deregulation, often regressive) still seems to hold the key to the future. Reform agendas that do not fit that mould are easily dismissed as populism of one variety or another. This is, I would argue, an anachronistic assessment. Howard governed in more benign global conditions. His successors, for all their faults, were responding to a world where commitment to free trade was weaker, economic shocks more frequent and traditional security partners more volatile. Intense competition between global superpowers was again the biggest strategic threat on Australia’s horizons (save for climate change). In the 2020s, the measure of Australia’s economic success is not chiefly whether governments produce regular surpluses or sustain yesterday’s tax breaks. Instead, economic success is measured in Australia’s capacity to make the things it needs in times of crisis. Economic resilience has assumed greater importance than the liberalising ambitions of the previous political generation. The country needs to steel itself against external shocks and provide economic opportunities more equitably than during the so-called golden age of reform.Kelly catalogues the political shift better than most commentators. But he seems resistant to the idea that our judging criteria might need to shift, too. That would have made for a difficult writing exercise indeed.Joshua Black does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.