A Long March. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.A Long March

In 1975, as Gough Whitlam’s government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.

Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed what he regarded as the fripperies of student politics and went directly for the real thing. He joined his local Labor Party branch, signing up as an active soldier in the labour movement.

Forty-nine years later, Kim Carr is still part of the Labor army. He served in the Senate for twenty-nine years, and was a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, a secretary of the Socialist Left faction and a national convenor of the Left.

A Long March tells a rich and engaging story about a long life in Labor – the often fraught processes of the formulation and development of policy, the maintenance and manoeuvrings of factions, the personal enmities and conflicting ambitions, and the raw use of power inside party forums, political offices, unions, the caucus, the front bench and the bureaucracy. It also looks forward, addressing a key question: how should Labor argue the case for a workable, appealing, durable version of social democracy for twenty-first-century Australia?

As well as a revealing memoir, this is a comprehensive analysis of today’s political landscape told through the life of one of the ALP’s longest-serving members.

The longest-serving Victorian Labor senator in history and former tech-school teacher, Kim Carr was drawn to politics by the transformational possibilities of science and education. He was elected as a senator for Victoria in 1993 and retired at the end of his term in June 2022. Following Labor's election win in 2007, Kim was appointed Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

In 2022, Kim was made an honorary fellow of both the Academy of Technology Science and Engineering (ATSE) and the Academy of the Humanities (AHA). He was also awarded the Academy of Science Medal, becoming only the second politician to receive this honour, after Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1990.

Kim is currently a Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Fellow at Monash University, and a director of the Made in Australia Campaign Limited.