Joshua Black – Performance Politics

In Performance Politics historian and speechwriter Joshua Black provides an eye-opening account of how Australian politicians have become experts at fashioning and refashioning stories about themselves, their lives, personal ambitions and political entanglements.

Delving into memoirs, autobiographies, documentaries, media coverage, personal papers and original interviews, the book reveals how much of our recent political history has been delivered through the prism of the publishing house, the book launch, the documentary, and the lounge rooms where political retrospectives were broadcast. From a time when ‘telling tales out of school’ (as Billy Hughes once put it) was not the done thing, to one where the 2024 Nemesis documentary showcased backstabbing, character assassinations and high emotions.

Performance Politics shows how political life writing and documentary making has played an outsized role in creating the story-driven political culture of our times. Settling scores, shaping legacies and dramatising the democratic process, sometimes in shocking ways.

Joshua Black is a lecturer in Australian Political Studies at the Vice-Chancellor’s Centre of Public Ideas, University of Canberra. In addition to working in government as a ministerial speechwriter, he has taught at several Australian universities and published widely on Australian politics. He has been a Palace Letters Fellow at the Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Australia Institute. Joshua is the co-editor, with Frank Bongiorno and Carolyn Holbrook, of Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke government (NewSouth, 2026).

Senator the Hon. Tim Ayres is the Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science.