Howard's Great Achievement: A Contented Country
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday March 2, 2006
TEN years after he brought the Coalition back to power, the Prime Minister, John Howard, is remarkably unchanged. His hair is greyer, certainly, and trimmed closer. He wears spectacles with enormous frames only in the imagination of cartoonists these days; the stylists have got to him, and his vision is corrected by near-invisible frameless lenses. Yet he speaks the same ideas in the same voice now as then. He is not careworn or fatigued. He completes his power walk each morning with the same spring in his step. His energy and, as he keeps telling any interviewer who hints at retirement, his enthusiasm for the job are undimmed.
Mr Howard is as careful about his Government's health as he is about his own. He shrinks from any hint of hubris. Time and again over the decade he has warned his party room against complacency and overconfidence. Caution has shaped his administration and given it enormous strength. So has luck. When he finally came to the job after a long and chequered career in Opposition, he took over an economy which had been energised by the liberalising reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments. Critics cavil that the groundwork for the Howard Government's economic success was laid by Labor. So it was, some of it. But all successful governments need luck - and also the caution, common sense and skill to make the most of it. The Howard Government has all three qualities. Australia rode out the economic storm when Asia's economies imploded in 1997. It has gone from strength to strength since, and it is now carried along by a once-in-a-generation boom in resources.WITH his luck, Mr Howard has also shown the strength and decisiveness necessary in a leader. A few weeks into his prime ministership, an armed madman slaughtered 35 people at Port Arthur. Mr Howard ensured something positive came from that atrocity: gun controls - introduced despite strenuousopposition from many on his own side - have made all Australians safer. Where voters might have had doubts about their new Prime Minister before, they saw then they were led by a politician of skill and resolution. He showed the same ability to turn random circumstances into a political opportunity over East Timor. Australia's diplomacy with Indonesia and its subsequent intervention in the territory as it moved to independence have guaranteed the freedom of the East Timorese and righted a historic wrong that previous governments - Labor principally, but also Liberal - had been only too ready to ignore. Relations with Indonesia were poor for a while, but were largely restored by generous aid after the tsunami in December 2004. It was a deft piece of regional diplomacy from a Prime Minister whom 10 years ago most people would have thought out of sympathy with the cultures and personalities of South-East Asia.Despite Australia's large commitment of troops overseas, foreign affairs have not dominated the Howard record. Its greatest achievement is domestic: the maintenance of the economy on a path of steady growth. It has not only increased the prosperity of Australians and presided over most of a record period of growing prosperity, it has, by doing so, apparently armoured itself against all criticism. Emboldened, Mr Howard is now intent upon implementing the next phase of his reform agenda, a new round of industrial relations changes. The Howard record contains failure as well as success. The children overboard affair, the Hollingworth appointment, the scandals besetting the Department of Immigration and its refugee policy, the Iraq war and lately the AWB affair have all reflected poor decisions or worse. Yet none has been fatal to the Government's popularity - and the reason is that the economy is going well. While interest rates and unemployment are low and housing is generally affordable, most voters are content to let mistakes go unpunished - indeed, almost unremarked.NATURALLY, Mr Howard has his critics. He will never, of course, please his political opponents, but progressives may reasonably be disappointed, though they will not be surprised, that he has slammed the door on developments which only a conservative leader can bring about: reconciliation with Australia's indigenous people, and a republic to embody the complete expression of Australian nationhood. Others will worry that his enthusiasm for the US alliance has aligned Australia too closely with the policies of one president - policies which risk unbalancing our diplomatic stance. Conservatives within the Liberal tradition, meanwhile, will feel disquiet at some Howard innovations. The casual contempt with which the Government has treated basic civil rights in the case of David Hicks and in the draconian provisions of its anti-terrorism law is one. Another is the politicising of the bureaucracy. All governments try to do this, but this one has succeeded beyond others' dreams.It is a dubious achievement at best. By effectively making the executive part of the Coalition team, the Government has insulated itself too far from the electors and from the responsibility it should hold. Public servants have become the fall guys for failures which are those of elected officials - ministers. Mr Howard's answer to any scandal - I was never told, the minister was never told - may well be true, but it is an abdication of duty and responsibility which flies in the face of Australia's Westminster heritage and harms this country's political process. An administration which comes to office suspicious of the very power of government will leave no great physical evidence behind, nor any new bureaucratic functions and empires. So it is with John Howard's Government. Yet Australia is wealthier than when he came to power, less preoccupied with divisive questions of national identity and quite conceivably more content. His career is far from over, but if Australia's 25th prime minister needs a monument at this point, that is where it lies.
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald