Tribute to John Howard

Geoffrey Blainey

November 27, 2007 12:00am

JOHN Howard convinced the people he called his battlers to sweep him to power in 1996, but in 2007 these same battlers deserted him.

The defeat of John Howard at the polls will long be remembered. He could not have been defeated without valid fears, widely felt, and silently expressed in the ballot box.

At the same time his reign, second only to that of Sir Robert Menzies in number of years, will eventually be honoured.

While his enemies lick their lips, and while Kevin Rudd deservedly rejoices in his win, John Howard has much to feel proud of.

In more than 11 years in office he never failed to promote the virtues of democracy. Knowing that it takes at least two major parties to run a democracy, he was more willing to give praise to his opponents, at the right time, than were nearly all other major politicians.

Even when he was a very young federal treasurer, serving under Malcolm Fraser, he gave the most generous praise to his Labor predecessor, Frank Crean.

A believer in debate he appeared endlessly on radio, television and wherever there was a listener.

It is slightly ironic that he was defeated by an able and highly articulate candidate who went to some lengths to avoid awkward interviews.

Mr Howard's government had a success in creating jobs, useful jobs, which every prime minister before them would have applauded or envied.

Mr Keating, in his stirring speech on election night of 1993 to his true believers at the Bankstown Sports Club, promised to care especially for the unemployed: we want to get them back to work.

Instead, it was Mr Howard who got them back to work.

While rising inflation and rising interest rates helped to alienate many voters on Saturday, Howard's earlier success in combating inflation, year by year, was impressive.

His predecessors, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, made several notable economic reforms. but their failure to check inflation, by world standards, was even more notable.

It was the Howard government, which, through Peter Costello as treasurer, implemented in July 2000 the first strong reform of the tax system seen since World War II.

The goods and services tax, understandably, was opposed by the Labor Party and a wide section of the public.

And yet, by a strange turn of the wheel, it was the resultant stream of GST revenue, flowing straight to the states, that enabled Labor governments from the year 2000 to avoid financial crises and so win many elections.

Mr Howard did not sell his economic policies as effectively as in the beginning of his reign. Thus it became the received wisdom that it was China, and its booming economy, that was handing us on a plate our present high level of prosperity.

This is a one-sided myth. China is booming not only because of its own vigour but because Australia had one of the most efficient mining industries in the history of the world, ready to supply China with cheap coal, iron ore and other minerals even before Beijing was wealthy enough to afford them.

The strength of the mineral industry here owed infinitely more to federal and state Liberal ministers, especially to Sir Charles Court in Western Australia, than to Labor governments, some of which obstructed the opening of new mines and ports.

This is one of the reasons why the big swing to Mr Rudd did not eventuate in WA.

It was Mr Howard's triumph at his first election victory in 1996 to sell to these blue-collar and white-collar battlers his economic and cultural message. He knew they were not naturally Liberal voters. This new constituency does not represent a permanent realignment in Australian politics, he wrote in 1996.

And on Saturday they largely deserted him.

His ability to persuade was a secret of his long success. He was one of the outstanding debaters in the nation's history. On any topic, almost without notice, he could speak energetically and persuasively. On the republican issue he was the skilled persuader, after giving the whole nation the chance to make up its mind.

In answering questions he usually was forthright. Not that he was forthright on every occasion.

Who is?

Democratic politics, at times, is the art of camouflage coupled with the art of skywriting.

He was not one of the great formal orators like Menzies or Whitlam, or like Paul Keating when Don Watson wrote speeches for him.

He shunned the set speech handed to him by a writer. But day after day he held his audiences, who listened to every word.

You really have to marvel that John Howard stayed in power for so long.

Except in the two world wars, no other prime minister in our history has had to face such a procession of jolts and setbacks arriving from the outside world.

He faced the dangerous Asian meltdown, which was expected to give our economy a black eye.

He faced the upheavals in Indonesia when President Suharto fell, the chaos in East Timor.

The effects of the terrorist attack on New York in 2001 and the rise of terrorist threats within Australia, the assassinations in Bali, and the crises in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He did not dither.

His government acted.

More and more critics now argue that Australia should not have joined the American alliance in the invasion of Iraq.

But it is too early to judge whether Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to continue to preside, unfettered, over his own torture house.

The American alliance, under Labor and Liberal, has been the backbone of Australia's defences. No previous pair of leaders in Canberra and Washington have enjoyed the kind of personal rapport that united Howard and George W. Bush.

Mr Rudd in his first year in office will probably have a running start, because of that unusual empathy, which Howard established.

Wide criticisms are directed at the Howard government. They extend from its policies on global warming to its policies on Aborigines, both of which are moral mountains on which many of his critics like to stand and do nothing.

Despite the fervent talk, there is no sign that even 5 per cent of Australian voters are seriously prepared to sacrifice part of their standard of living, and even cut down on overseas travel, in order to reduce pollution.

There is now an attempt to dethrone Mr Howard as a major political figure.

Critics say that in losing his own seat of Bennelong, he has suffered a unique humiliation.

Only one other prime minister, Stanley Melbourne Bruce, suffered the same punishment.

That was on the eve of the world depression when, like Mr Howard, he vexed swinging voters by trying to reform the workplace.

Bruce's Liberal seat was Flinders, which in 1929 was a farming as much as a bayside suburban electorate.

What is now forgotten is that Bruce won it back two years later, with ease.

Other political leaders, federal and state, have avoided humiliation by finding a safer seat. Billy Hughes was prime minister in 1917, during World War I, and seemed likely to lose his Sydney seat.

He took the drastic step of moving to the Victorian electorate of Bendigo where he was an easy winner.

In recent years Mr Howard could easily have transferred to a safer Liberal seat in Sydney as the demographics moved against him. Liberal supporters would probably argue it is to his credit that he did not move.

Most likely he concluded it would damage the prospects of his own party if he abandoned his own marginal seat and stood for a safer Sydney seat held by a colleague who had made no mark in Parliament.

The emphatic lesson of Saturday's election is that a successful political regime is bound to be in grave trouble once it approaches its 12th birthday.

Having carried out its main tasks, it loses its sense of purpose and mission.

The crushing defeat of the Hughes and Bruce period of government in 1929, the near-defeat of Menzies in 1961, the resounding end of the Hawke-Keating reign in 1996, and the emphatic defeat of Mr Howard on Saturday are part of the same decisive federal pattern.

In the week after such defeats, the deposed national leader looks for all the world like a headless chook.

But in the end, John Howard will be seen by vast numbers of Australians as one of the great prime ministers.

Professor GEOFFREY BLAINEY is Australia's pre-eminent historian and has served on federal government committees since 1967, when Harold Holt was prime minister