Memoir

Ministerial workhorse

Item: Making Progress
Author: Emma Dawson

A munificent political memoir

by Emma Dawson •

June 2025, no. 476

Making Progress: How good policy happens by Jenny Macklin with Joel Deane

Melbourne University Press, $36.99 pb, 277 pp

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Memoir

Ministerial workhorse

A munificent political memoir

by Emma Dawson •

June 2025, no. 476

Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

Emma Dawson

Emma Dawson is Executive Director of the Chifley Research Centre. Previously she was Executive Director and a co-founder of Per Capita. She has worked as a researcher at Monash University and the University of Melbourne; in policy and public affairs for SBS and Telstra; and as a senior policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard Governments.

Emma has published reports and articles on a wide range of public policy issues. She is a regular contributor to Guardian Australia, The Age, and the Australian Financial Review, and a frequent guest on various ABC and commercial radio programs nationally. She appears regularly as an expert witness before parliamentary inquiries and often speaks at public events and conferences in Australia and internationally.

Emma is the co-editor, with Professor Janet McCalman, of the collection of essays What happens next? Reconstructing Australia after COVID-19, published by Melbourne University Press (2020). She is a Fellow of the Women’s Leadership Institute of Australia and an Adjunct Professor at the UTS Business School.