When Keith Windschuttle launched, in the March 2008 edition of Quadrant, a series of articles under the general rubric “How Good was Howard?”, he prefaced the first of them by saying that they would “critically appraise the eleven and a half years of the government of John Howard”. The intention of the series, he said, “is both to look back on the Howard era and assess its place in history, and to look forward to see what can be learnt for the future from his government’s successes and failures”. Implicit in those words were two important, and related, propositions. First,…