ON THE RECORD is a collection of the very best of Laurie Oakes' reporting over more than forty years. He is a legend in the Canberra press gallery for breaking the big stories, and asking the difficult questions. Some of the decisive points of the 2010 election campaign are classic examples of this. Some issues haven't changed - a Liberal Party report into the 1983 federal election loss that concluded the Fraser government was too often seen to be 'inconsistent, too pragmatic and, finally, too expedient' would ring true today. Others have had a different course: over 25,000 Vietnamese boat people were calmly and peacefully accepted in the late 1970s, with bipartisan support.