Ten years ago Stephen King and I wrote a book called Finishing the Job. It was published by Melbourne University Press who timed it to coincide with just missing a Federal election and another book of theirs also dealing with economic policy. Consequently, it did not get the interest we had hoped for.

We continued to think the policy ideas as they related to housing, health insurance, education funding and road congestion pricing were very important but alas the text was locked down with the publishers who saw little interest in putting out new editions.

I noticed recently that the book no longer is in print. So I have seized the moment to re-release it for the first time in electronic book format. You can get it worldwide (rare for Australian books) on Amazon Kindle (for $0.99 but DRM free) or on iBooks (a prettier version and for free; Amazon doesn’t allow that) or as a pdf. The version was our final draft — before MUP made it different. So it is the authors’ cut. I also designed the cover to be something I could be more proud of than the bland thing MUP produced.

The book is dated in that it was written in 2004 and some things would need updating. But nothing has really happened on those policies in Australia so the ideas themselves are still fresh. If there is sufficient interest, Stephen and I may update it and give it all another push.