Here is a part of the review:
He came to office in 1996 with a list of people to be targeted and removed from universities, government authorities and the public service. In his first week, he sacked the heads of six departments. Those senior bureaucrats who survived Howard's purge were instructed in future to report all calls by journalists to the Prime Minister's press office. The new communications minister Richard Alston was soon lashing the ABC over budgets and bias. And the new men and women in power were deploying a new rhetoric of abuse against the critics they lumped together in a shadowy conspiracy called the left.
Touted as a contest of values, this was really a party political assault on Australia's liberal culture. In the name of "balance" the Liberal Party agenda muscled its way into the intellectual life of the country. And the party had changed. This wasn't the vaguely patrician party of Malcolm Fraser. Small business had triumphed and brought to government the ethos of the corner shop.
