This book is the result of four years of work and, more to the point, of much good fortune. I was fortunate to have the support of many institutions and colleagues that I shall do my inadequate best to acknowledge. I was also allowed a unique access to the top echelons of the Canberra state apparatus at what turns out in retrospect to have been an extraordinarily opportune moment in its history. With the benefit of hindsight it is clear that many of the fundamental directions of Australia's passage toward the twenty-first century were either cast or were only just becoming visible in the moments in which this study was made. As events would have it no one before or since could have had quite such a privileged view of those events for a number of reasons. In 1985 and 1986, the costs and benefits of ‘economic rationalism’, and indeed the winners and losers of that orientation to national policy, were only dimly visible. Moreover, the climate of economic gloom and of general apprehension about the future of this nation had not really pervaded the consciousness of broader sections of the Australian population to the extent that it has today. And so for these and other reasons my respondents were exceptionally open and trusting in all that they proffered to us in the interviews. That is why the first people whom I must thank are the respondents themselves.