Books by Ian Hancock

In 1968 the new Prime Minister, John Gorton, appointed Ainsley Gotto, aged 22, as his principal private secretary.  Ainsley became one of the most talked-about young women in Australia.  Hitherto, no woman had been so close to the centre of power, and certainly none was known publicly to be so close.Ainsley refused to see herself as a role model for secretaries and said she could not understand what the Women’s Liberation Movement was all about.  She thought her performance in the job answered the senior public servants, conservative Liberal politicians and some business leaders who considered it inappropriate that ‘a mere girl’ should exercise ‘power and influence’.  In November 1969, when Dudley Erwin was dumped from the Gorton ministry, he memorably and wrongly identified the cause of his removal: ‘it wiggles, it’s shapely and its name is Ainsley Gotto.’ Ainsley became a celebrity, renamed in the tabloid press as ‘Miss Wiggle’ or ‘The Wiggle’.Leaving Gorton in 1972 Ainsley took several jobs in what she called her ‘afterlife’. Remaining obsessively private, Ainsley was a great networker in a national and international setting, and her diaries are full of meetings with the rich, the powerful, the titled and the very interesting. Yet, although Ainsley’s connections, sharp mind and social skills opened many doors, she needed more than her ‘unique experience’ of government to replicate the excitement and fulfilment of her years with Gorton. This book describes and explains Ainsley’s rise from a typing pool and shows how the Gorton years provided her with many opportunities but ill-equipped her to take advantage of them and probably cost her lasting personal happiness. 

Nick Greiner was an unusual post-war Premier of NSW. He came into office in 1988 wanting to do more than change lifestyles, win re-election and remain popular, and he proceeded to implement a wide-ranging and enduring transformation of what he called "NSW Inc." Greiner's personal story is also unusual. Born in Budapest, the elder son of a Hungarian father and Slovak mother, Nick arrived in Sydney in 1951 at the age of three. His parents' encounters with Nazi and then Communist persecution explain their determination to leave Europe, to 'make good' in Australia, and to encourage their two boys to assimilate. From an early age, Nick wanted to be the best. He came top or amongst the top in every year at school, in the Economics Faculty at the University of Sydney, and at the Harvard Business School. Frustrated by his father's 'European ways' of running the family timber business, he went into politics. Within three years this self-styled 'non-politician' and Liberal Party 'outsider' was elected Leader of the demoralised State Liberals, and within another five years led the Coalition to a landslide election victory. He brought to the premiership, and his later very successful business career, the habits of thought which his Harvard and post-Harvard experience had cultivated: a commitment to change and a willingness to take risks, an emphasis on evidence-based, rational and strategic approaches to decision-making, a concentration on outcomes rather than processes and on practical solutions rather than ideological consistency. Greiner's departure from politics was equally unusual. Having almost lost the unlosable election of May 1991, he took the 'political' option of securing a job in the Public Service for a dissident Liberal in order to reclaim his seat. ICAC, his creation, found him guilty of 'corrupt conduct' within the meaning of his legislation. The Labor Opposition and three high-minded Independents, supported by an equally high-minded media, hounded him out of office before the Court of Appeal overturned a finding which looks even more absurd in the light of recent ICAC investigations. This book sets out to describe and explain Greiner's life in politics, to tell the story of someone who made a difference and yet who, being a manager and strategist rather than a conventional politician, contributed to his own undoing.