Eleven Decent Years

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, those articles were in no way intended to constitute the kind of hagiography with which the realm of Australian political biography—most of it dealing with figures from the Labor Party’s pantheon—is littered. Second, and consistent with that, was the proposition that the Howard government’s term in office had been marked by both successes and failures—and that, by delineating the one from the other, some useful lessons might be learned for the future of political governance in Australia.

Even as Keith Windschuttle was conceiving his project for an assessment of the Howard years, David Martin Jones and Ray Evans, quite independently, were conceiving theirs. Although the coverage of their project differed in detail, it also fully shared those two aforementioned propositions. So when, as a result of a chance discussion between the parties, it was decided to meld the two projects into a single book, they fitted like the proverbial glove.

The result is the handsome book you see before you, which I have been accorded the privilege of launching tonight. So let me set about doing so.

The general complexion of the Howard government was a basically decent one—a not unsurprising conclusion, given that it took its lead from a basically decent man (and I take this opportunity to recognise the presence here of that basically decent man this evening). Yet in my respectful opinion, that otherwise decent complexion was not without its blemishes—sadly scarred, for example, by such incidents as:

• Gun control, an opinion-poll-driven decision that punished blameless gun owners for a crime they had no hand in, while leaving criminals’ access to guns virtually unaffected.

• The GST debacle, leading directly to the Howard government becoming the highest-taxing government in Australia’s peace-time history.

• The serial offences against the federal nature of our Constitution, including—but by no means confined to—the use of the corporations power in the WorkChoices matter.

• The (further) debauching of the Commonwealth Public Service, maintaining and reinforcing the Hawke and Keating debasement of that once highly respected institution.

• The manifold misjudgments on public appointments, Archbishop Hollingworth being only the most notable example.

And these are only the sins of commission.

As for the sins of omission, consider:

• The almost total failure to address the growing Muslim problem in Australia, with all the threats that implies for the future, as the Europeans are now belatedly discovering.

• The not unassociated failure, in the formulation of our immigration program generally, to comprehend the immense value of Australian citizenship as a “prize” to be captured by those who succeed in coming here, whether legally or illegally.

• The failure to develop any coherent policy of tax reform—as distinct from some ad hoc and almost grudging tax reductions—despite the unparalleled opportunity to do so provided by the once-in-a-lifetime leap in our international terms of trade.

• The failure to address the flagrant ideological bias of both our taxpayer-funded broadcasting organisations, the ABC and the SBS.

And that list also could go on.

That recitation may serve to illustrate that first proposition I referred to earlier. Clearly, there is no hagiographical mission here.

Having said that, however, let me now make it clear that, tonight, I come to praise John Howard, not to bury him. In one of the essays in this book I said that, “despite the many valid criticisms that can be made of him, nevertheless John Howard has a strong claim to having been Australia’s greatest prime minister”, and that, “Menzies apart, it is hard to see how that claim could be challenged”. Then, after settling to describe him as “Australia’s greatest (or at least equal greatest) prime minister”, I noted that “whether Howard’s achievements exceed, or only equal, those of Menzies merits an article in its own right”.

I should emphasise that, in saying those things, I had no wish to denigrate the record and achievements of Sir Robert Menzies—whose daughter, Heather Henderson, understandably disagreed with my judgment, saying in a letter to Quadrant that “no one can hold a candle to my father”. Yet although, as I said when I telephoned her after seeing her letter, I would have been surprised if she had failed to defend her father’s own outstanding reputation, I must respectfully insist upon my own wholly disinterested judgment.

I have no intention this evening of essaying that “article in its own right”, comparing the records of the two very different men. Nevertheless, let me briefly sketch the basic reasoning underlying my own judgment. It is to be found in the wholly different times in which they served, and the challenges, therefore, that they faced.

During his prime ministership Menzies faced a Labor Party riven by the postwar divisions in its ranks deriving from the then still powerful influences emanating from Moscow. In 1954 that culminated in the split leading to the formation of the Democratic Labor Party. For the next eighteen years that, more than any other single factor, kept Labor out of office, and for twelve of those years Menzies in the Lodge. Howard, by contrast, faced a Labor Party which had been governing Australia for the previous thirteen years and which, although badly bruised by the final years of Paul Keating’s prime ministership, nevertheless continued to offer (most of the time!) a credible alternative government.

More importantly still, the two men confronted hugely different times, and hugely different Australian electorates. Menzies took office in the aftermath of the Second World War, amidst a sea of shortages, rationing, controls of all descriptions, but with an Australian people broadly united in their outlook on the world and their understanding of what it was to be an Australian. It was a decent, essentially middle-class society.

Our universities then were generally respected as centres of genuine learning. “Our” ABC then had a genuine claim to that now totally dishonest soubriquet. Our media more generally produced journalists then of world standing. Our jurists for the most part then understood that their job was to interpret the laws made by the legislatures, rather than seek to remake them in their own judicially activist images; and so on. The afflictions of official multiculturalism had not yet been visited upon us. Our immigration policies—where we chose our own immigrants, rather than having them foisted upon us by people-smugglers or a corrupt United Nations High Commission for Refugees—were a successful model for the world. There was no tortured public debate about “national identity”. On the contrary, Australians knew very well who they were.

The Commonwealth Public Service then was headed by outstanding men. (They were then, I regret to say, all men; indeed, female public servants were then required to resign on marriage! Autre temps, autre moeurs.) I think of my own first Treasury boss, Sir Roland Wilson; Sir Alan Watt (Department of External Affairs); Sir Alan Brown and, succeeding him, Sir John Bunting (Prime Minister’s Department); Sir Frank Meere (Customs); Sir Harold Raggatt (National Development); Sir Tasman (Tas) Hayes (Immigration); and believe me, the list went on.

By the time John Howard took office, forty-seven years after Menzies did so, all that had changed. Australia had become a different country, being torn apart by developments such as:

• The militant feminist revolution, with its attack on the family symbolised by Lionel Murphy’s Family Law Act 1975, and the rising tide of divorce, broken homes and single parent “families” that revolution has fostered.

• The Nugget Coombs-led separatist policies of the Aboriginal industry, from which a good living had been made by assorted fraudsters posing as Aboriginal Australians, as well as by others (why does Fred Chaney come to mind?) perpetually parading their “compassion” while the failure of their policies lay all around them.

• The continuing degeneration of what used to be called “the humanities” faculties in our universities—part of a more general broad decline in standards of scholarship in those institutions.

• The mounting tide of anti-Americanism, a product in large part of leftist envy of the achievements of what is still the greatest democracy, and most benevolent superpower, in the world.

• The rise of the ever-darker Greens, perpetually insisting that the modern world should be stopped so they could get off, while enjoying every comfort of that world in their own lifestyles.

• A Commonwealth Public Service already so diminished by the Hawke–Keating “reforms” that, immediately on taking office, Howard had to replace six departmental heads—with another, the head of his own department, to follow in short order.

• The proliferation, and growing political influence, of such public busybodies as Amnesty International, Oxfam, the Tim Costello-led World Vision, a plethora of United Nations agencies intent on running the world, and so on.

• Media organs essentially run by journalists who, almost to a man and woman, routinely ignore the oft-proclaimed “ethics” of what they still like to call their “profession”.

• A major shift in the sources of our growing immigration streams, and the replacement of our earlier successful assimilation policies by the highly divisive policies of ethnically-based cultural separatism known as multiculturalism.

• The doctrine of cultural equivalence. Perhaps the most important development of all in terms of its potential influence upon Australia’s future, this doctrine tells us, for example, that the culture of Islam is as much to be respected as that of the Judeo-Christian West. Among other such untruths, it tells us too that the Stone Age culture of Australia’s Aborigines is also worthy of equal respect, and that the tribal cultures of violence-torn black Africa should, for the same patently fallacious reason, be welcomed into our own hitherto largely peaceful society.

This, then, was the divided and still fracturing country with which, on taking office, John Howard had to contend. His successes, over the next eleven and a half years, in gradually restoring some sanity to our national debates on such issues—in the face, only too often, of dissent and undermining from elements within his own party—place him, in my considered judgment, on at least the same plane as Menzies.

None of that implies that Howard did not make mistakes. In that same essay mentioned earlier, I referred to Churchill’s famous dictum about democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Churchill himself, who is universally acknowledged to have been among the greatest prime ministers of Britain, made many major mistakes during his long political career. Perhaps the worst of them was in 1925, when as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Baldwin government he took sterling back onto the gold standard, off which it had been forced during the First World War. That decision per se was not necessarily a bad one: but to attempt to do so at the pre-war sterling parity with gold was an act of such supreme folly as to beggar description. For Britain, following that decision, the Great Depression can almost be said to have started four years early.

Or let us consider another heroic figure among British prime ministers—Margaret Thatcher, whose achievements put her on at least the same plane as Churchill. In the early 1980s, in order to bolster the case for nuclear energy in Britain, she threw her weight behind the then still nascent hypothesis that man-made carbon dioxide emissions would, over time, lead to a dangerous heating of the planet. By thus aligning her government with what was then emerging as the latest fad of the dark Greens, she hoped to undermine their opposition to (carbon-dioxide-free) nuclear energy. This led to the politicisation of the previously highly respected British Meteorological Office under the infamous directorship of Sir John Houghton, which did so much to buttress the bogeyman of “global warming”. This classic example of “the end justifies the means” was not, I regret to say, Mrs Thatcher’s finest hour.

Similar examples could readily be drawn from the careers of Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, Robert Menzies. The fact is that even the greatest statesmen (or in Thatcher’s case, stateswoman) are never perfect.

That fact illustrates a more general proposition about democracies, namely that democratic elections are never about electing perfect governments. As Jefferson observed, all governments are a threat to the citizenry. The best you can do is to elect the least threatening from among those offering.

To this point I have, so to speak, been judging the Howard era on the basis of absolute standards. Judged on this basis that era, like all others, inevitably comes up short. In the real world, however, it is not absolute standards, but relative ones, that must be the test of any such judgments. So, without elaboration, let me just make a few points, staccato, bearing on that more realistic test:

• The Menzies era apart, there is certainly no former postwar Coalition administration that could compare with Howard’s. One has only to mention the names—Gorton, McMahon, Fraser—to see how derisory such comparisons are.

• As for the pre-war period, while Alfred Deakin might have his supporters, we should never forget that it was Deakin who consigned Australia to the twin evils of protectionism, on the one hand, and the entrenchment of trade union monopolistic privilege, on the other. For the rest of the twentieth century, this “Deakinite settlement” condemned Australia to a steadily diminishing relative place in the world.

• As for the post-Menzies Labor administrations, that of Gough Whitlam was, in my considered opinion, the worst government in Australia’s history (although the Rudd government is now bidding fair to outstrip it). While the Hawke government was not without its achievements, its failure to face up to the twin problems of inflation and trade union power meant that Australians were little better off when it ended than when it began. The Keating government did mark up some pluses (including, paradoxically, the recession that in fact we did have to have in order to “snap the stick of inflation”), but these were hugely outweighed by the Left-pandering panoply of policies visited upon us by a prime minister who had once sneered (rightly) at “the basket-weavers of Balmain”.

There is a further possible basis on which, at least conceptually, the Howard era might be judged—namely, to contemplate the possible alternatives. On that basis, I suggest, the relative record of the Howard era would be outstanding.

There is no time this evening to play that counter-factual game; but consider the following possible alternatives: a continuation of the Keating Labor government after the 1996 election; or, a Coalition government then —or any other time, for that matter—led by the Young Pretender, Peter Costello—a politician over whose post-2007 career the kindest action is to draw a veil.

Now add to those two counter-factual scenarios two others, based on the post-Howard history of the last two years: a Labor government led by Kevin Rudd; or, a Coalition government led by Malcolm Turnbull.

Need I say more?

So much, then, in elaboration of that view that John Howard has “a strong claim to having been Australia’s greatest, or at least equal greatest Prime Minister”. Now let me say something, briefly, about the record underlying that claim.

All Australian governments come to be judged first and foremost on their economic records. On that test, the Howard era was outstanding:

• Over the twelve-year period from calendar 1995 through calendar 2007, Australia’s real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose by 54.0 per cent.

• Over the same period, real GDP per head of resident population grew by 32.4 per cent.

• Because of that once-in-a-lifetime improvement in our international terms of trade referred to earlier, the real purchasing power of income generated by our domestic product—what the statisticians call real Gross Domestic Income—rose by 44.7 per cent per capita.

• Jobs were abundant. Over the twelve years from December 1995 to December 2007 total employment rose by more than two and a quarter million (2,261,000), or 27.1 per cent. Full-time employment grew by 21.1 per cent and part-time employment by 45.4 per cent.

• This growth in jobs reflected not merely the full employment of a growing workforce but also, most importantly, a massive reduction in the level of unemployment, which fell from 8.1 per cent of the workforce to 4.3 per cent over that twelve-year period.

• Not only did the Howard economy produce all those jobs, but they were also increasingly well remunerated. To take but one measure, earnings of adult males working an ordinary working week in full-time jobs rose in real terms by 24.4 per cent. Other such measures of real average weekly earnings rose by similar proportions.

• During these years Australians saw a massive upswing in private investment—both in dwellings and, even more notably, in business fixed investment, which by 2007 was running at record levels as a proportion of GDP.

• With jobs growing in abundance and real average earnings rising by roughly 25 per cent, real living standards rose commensurately. Over the period, the volume of household consumption expenditure on goods and services per head of population rose by 36.1 per cent.

• Household wealth exhibited a similar story. The cost of borrowing for Australians to finance the purchase of their homes shrank appreciably. Sales of new passenger vehicles and four-wheel-drives soared by 56.4 per cent, far faster than the 16.3 per cent growth in population. Share ownership—both direct, and indirect via superannuation funds—widened considerably; and so on.

In short, whether or not, by late 2007, Australians had become more “relaxed” may be a matter for debate, but there can be no doubt that they had become greatly more comfortable. And as the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling at the University of Canberra has confirmed, all this was accomplished without any significant increase in inequality of incomes. Almost everyone became better off doing the Howard years, and in broadly similar proportions.

So much for the macro-economic record. In turning to some other aspects of the Howard era, it may be salutary to consider what has happened, in each case, since that era ended.

Trade Union Power. During 1996–2007 the long, slow decline of trade union power—and of the thuggery long accompanying it—continued. What had been seen as immutable verities in this area came increasingly under question, and the public status of trade unions steadily declined. That progress, however, is now strongly in reverse. The so-called Fair Work Act 2009, which began coming into effect last July, but which has yet to unfold more fully, has reinforced the powers and privileges of some of the most reactionary forces in Australia. Industrial disputation, both actual and threatened, is now strongly on the rise, with inevitable consequences for productivity performance. The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Almost Everything, Julia Gillard, is well advanced on the government’s project of paying its political debts to the trade union movement—a project which can only be to the detriment of the national interest.

Multiculturalism and Immigration. Here too such progress as was made during the Howard era is under threat. Even before the formulation of a special deal for seventy-eight recalcitrant Sri Lankans bent on entering Australia illegally, the Rudd government had moved to tear down virtually all the deterrents to illegal entry erected by its predecessor—with predictable results. Before our very eyes, Australia is more and more being invaded by people determined to come here whether we like it or not. So far, Mr Rudd’s reaction has been to “process” those people faster, with predictable future consequences for Australians as criminals, disease-carriers and even security risks among their numbers are not only freely admitted to our society, but also provided with every form of social benefit on doing so at our expense. As part of this process also, the already weak citizenship test put in place by the Howard administration has been weakened further. We are, in short, no longer deciding, in large degree, who comes to this country, or “the circumstances in which they come”.

Aboriginal Issues. Here too the rats have been nibbling. Mr Rudd’s celebrated “Apology” of February 13, 2008, accepted, without question, the tissue of lies, half-truths and evasions that constituted the Bringing Them Home report—parading, in the process, one untruth after another. Even more importantly, by stating that “symbolism is important, but unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong”, it opened the door to the primary and unvarying objective of the Aboriginal industry at all times—money, money, money. Most recently, having apparently learned nothing from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission debacle, the government now proposes to establish another so-called “representative” body. More jobbery, more money, more waste, more futility.

International Governance and the Loss of Sovereignty. With the egregious exception of the International Criminal Court, the Howard government generally brought a well-founded scepticism to most forms of international governance, and particularly to that most corrupt of bodies, the United Nations. The attitudes of the Rudd government, and of Mr Rudd personally, could hardly be more different. As was recently revealed in the run-up to the Copenhagen Conference, the draft treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol—in the drafting of which Australian officials have been enthusiastically complicit—would involve a massive transfer of Australia’s sovereignty to an organ of world governance. This, moreover, is only the latest and most serious example of such attitudes. I do not know whether —as rumoured nearly two years ago—Mr Rudd has set his sights on becoming the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. Such an ambition would certainly explain the many actions of his government which entail the sacrifice of our national interests to the power-grabbing propensities of the United Nations and its agencies.

Good Manners and Civility. In that earlier-mentioned essay I noted “the good manners and civility that Howard has invariably brought to the process of public debate”, including in the parliament. On those matters, the degeneration of standards in the past two years has been stark.

In his lively introduction to this volume, David Martin Jones reminds us that:

“For Edmund Burke, political instinct, a recognition of the legacy of the past and our

‘"inherited freedoms’ for political conduct in the present, was more important than abstract ideological speculations, which [as Burke said] ‘in proportion as they are metaphysically true are morally and politically false’. Or as Howard put it, ‘A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.’ "

Let me then close by quoting a passage from the Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen biography which might well serve as John Howard’s epitaph: “Like Menzies, Howard found his forgotten people. They shared his belief in the family, national security, law and order, social unity, individual responsibility and a strong economy.”

The Howard era, reflecting as it does the revival of those virtues, is certainly not without blemish. Nevertheless, and all other aspects aside, the strong growth in real incomes, the huge growth in jobs, and the widely disseminated burgeoning of prosperity, can lead to only one fair-minded conclusion. These were good years for Australia and Australians. On the record of the past two years, Heaven alone knows when—or even if—we shall see their like again.

Ladies and gentlemen, it now gives me great pleasure formally to launch this book, The Howard Era.

This is the speech with which John Stone launched the book of essays The Howard Era (Quadrant Books, $44.95) in Sydney in December.