by John Howard
It did no harm to relations between the two countries, and the opposition backed it, but many Australians were puzzled as to why something like this should have been negotiated in secret. Important treaties between Australia and other nations had not been handled in that fashion. The treaty did not shift a vote towards the Labor Party. Yet one felt the Prime Minister believed it was a real opinion shaper with the Australian people.
Overwhelmingly it had become time for a change; long past it in the view of many millions of Australians. Keating was a far less popular figure than Bob Hawke had been. He had unexpectedly defeated John Hewson in 1993, and there was a sense, almost immediately after that election, that many people regretted having voted for him. Once, therefore, the Coalition stabilised, Keating’s defeat became very likely.
I came to the prime ministership with a long experience in politics. Serving as federal Treasurer is a great training ground for the top position. In addition I had been tested and tempered by the turbulence of 13 years in opposition. I had known years of rejection by my own party as well as experiencing defeat at the polls in 1987. I came to the job as a known quantity, with not all of the Australian people liking what they knew. For the duration of my prime ministership, the Australian community knew where I stood on issues and that there was a consistency of belief on certain things, according to which I would govern. From the moment of my return to the leadership on 30 January 1995, the Coalition had presented as a unified cohesive force. The old animosities dissolved almost overnight, and every section of the two parties united in a determination to make certain of victory.
There were many touching moments and gestures made to me on the night of the election; one that I shall always remember and which, literally, brought tears to my eyes, came from my brother Wal and his wife, Gwen. They gave me a caricature of Winston Churchill in the form of a mug, into which Gwen had deposited a note in her own handwriting, repeating a recollection of Churchill’s which recorded his emotions when he finally became Prime Minister of Great Britain in the dark times of World War II. It read as follows:
I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I was walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour, and for this trial … I thought I knew a good deal about it all and was sure I would not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning I slept soundly and had no need of cheering dreams — facts are better than dreams.
PART 3
THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT
21
SHAPING THE GOVERNMENT
Paul Keating and I didn’t agree on a lot. One view we did share was that to change the Government was to change the country. This has been true of all of the changes of government in Australia since World War II. It was to be true of the decision taken by the Australian people to emphatically change their government on 2 March 1996.
A wonderful aspect of democracy in Australia is the peaceful but also relatively civilised power transition which takes place. In the United States the transition is far too long, especially when the political colour of the Administration alters. Not only is an outgoing president nearing the end of his second term something of a lame duck, he is an ultralame duck in the period between early November and Inauguration Day, usually 20 January the following year. In the United Kingdom the process can verge on the uncivilised and vulgar, so rapid must be the change in residential arrangements from one prime minister to another. There were some pathetic press pictures of Edward Heath’s belongings sitting, literally, on a London street the day after he lost power to Harold Wilson in 1974.
We do things in a better, more balanced way than that in Australia. Although Paul Keating did not speak to me on the night of the election, he did telephone me two or three days later, and in the meantime there had been discussion between our respective chiefs of staff about transition arrangements. I told him that he could have as much time as he reasonably required in leaving the Lodge. He volunteered that Kirribilli House would be available within a matter of days. I was content enough with the victory and I had no desire to engage unseemly haste in taking possession of the trappings of office and power.
The day after the election was one of mixed emotions, physical exhaustion and rapid realisation of the task ahead. I was determined that the Australian people would see a difference and I knew that the impact of the early weeks and months of the Government would shape the perceptions of the nation towards us.
At 11 am on Sunday, 3 March, in the Commonwealth Offices in Phillip Street in Sydney, I met the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, Michael Keating; Bill Blick, a very senior official in the department; and Martin Bonsey, another senior official, who later became Official Secretary to the Governor-General, Sir William Deane. They gave me the two red books. One of these set out what might be called the formal structure of the Government, official obligations and the pay and rations provisions applying to myself and the future members of my ministry. The second book was a policy compendium. It brought to my attention all of the major policy issues which the department believed confronted Australia in March of 1996. Most importantly, it revealed the true state of the nation’s finances.
So it was I learned within hours of winning office that the budget was headed towards a deficit of approximately $10.5 billion without policy change. Both Paul Keating and Kim Beazley must have known this before the election. In my view they had both been guilty of deliberate deception. From the very beginning, I knew that we faced a daunting budgetary task and that how we responded and whether or not we did so with our very first budget would shape the direction of the Australian economy, and attitudes towards our capacity to manage it, over the next few years.
I did not come to office resolved to turn the nation on its head. I did not see deep flaws in Australian society or the character of the Australian people. I wanted to have a vigorous debate about the need for change and improvement in those areas where old attitudes were holding the nation back, but my starting point was one of optimism about the condition of the Australian spirit, and much pride in the Australian achievement.
I had a project for government, but I was not so arrogant as to presume that I should inflict on the Australian people a new vision for the nation. Successive generations had given Australia a good enough vision and a sense of her identity, and I believed in the fundamentals of what I saw around me. Good leadership interprets and applies the received values of a nation. In many ways the changes I wished to bring about would more directly echo the instincts of the Australian people, rather than impose on them something new, and about which they would feel uncomfortable.
How did I want to change Australia? I wanted to rescue Australia from debt and deficit and implement those specific economic policies on which we had been elected, including significant deregulation of the labour market, the partial privatisation of Telstra, and the introduction of a tax system which more adequately rewarded parents for the cost of having children. I intended that small business should have an economic and regulatory environment allowing it to prosper and expand.
I wanted to rebalance the narrative about Australia’s past. I did not want the blemishes and failures ignored, but I wanted Australians to feel legitimate pride in their history and the distinctive quality of the Australian character as something worth defending and asserting. I wanted an end to the perpetual navel-gazing about our cultural identity. The constant seminar about national identity which Paul Keating had orchestrated over the previous few years challenged the scale of the Australian achievement. There had been too great a premium placed on shame and guilt and too little on enterprise and individualism.
To me Australia was and remains an extension of Western civilisation in our part of the world, driven by the values we had imbibed from our history, our background and our experience as a nation. Although I would respect the secular traditions of our society, I would never shrink from the belie
f that Australia had been moulded by the Judaeo-Christian ethic, and that this was an asset worth preserving. Many of our institutions were of British origin, but had been shaped and changed to meet the circumstances of our part of the world, and to reflect the egalitarian nature of the Australian people. We embraced the values of liberal democracy and the Enlightenment. I would say on numerous occasions that Australia occupied a unique intersection of history and geography. We were a nation of Western European origin with strong links with North America and forever living cheek by jowl with the nations of Asia.
We were also a nation which owed it to the first Australians to understand that the greatest blemish on Australia’s history had been its indifferent treatment of Indigenous people. I did not, however, believe that the response to the Indigenous dilemma of Australia lay in separate development, but through pursuing a policy of including the Aboriginal people in the mainstream of the Australian community, whilst always respecting their special status as the first Australians and the pride they drew from their own culture and traditions.
I wanted to change Paul Keating’s seemingly Asia-only foreign policy focus. To me Asia was the first and most important region of political and economic interaction, but it was not the only one. Australia’s foreign relations needed to be rebalanced as, over recent years, we had allowed our traditional links with the United States and the United Kingdom to be taken for granted.
Australia needed an immigration policy which drew new settlers from all parts of the world, without discrimination on race, religion or nationality but with a composition designed to best promote the interests of Australia. I intended to end the divisive features of multiculturalism and place a greater emphasis on those things which united us as Australians and not those which divided us.
I also wanted an approach to social security which reaffirmed the importance of the safety net for those Australians who, through no fault of their own, couldn’t work. However, welfare policy should encourage self-reliance and not state-dependency. I wanted to resurrect the conventional wisdom of welfare policy in Australia which saw our nation avoiding the harsh excesses of the American welfare system as well as the over-paternalistic approach of many European nations.
Finally, and very importantly, I intended to give a higher priority to Defence. Expenditure on Defence had been woefully neglected by the Keating Government. From the beginning I made it clear that there would be no cuts to the Defence budget as we commenced the task of rescuing the budget from deficit and debt. As the years went by, spending by the Howard Government on Defence would increase greatly.
I intended to lead a government which was a blend of economic liberalism and social conservatism.
To do all of these things I needed to pick the best people available for cabinet and other ministerial posts. Peter Costello suggested that the Leader of the National Party might not be the Deputy Prime Minister. If this were to be so then he, as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, would have been Deputy Prime Minister. I told him this was out of the question.
We were going into coalition with the National Party, and in furtherance of longstanding practice the Leader of the National Party would become the Deputy Prime Minister. There were a few exuberant Liberals around at the time who thought that as the Liberal Party could have, theoretically, governed in its own right due to the huge number of Liberal gains at the election, then we should put the Nationals to one side. This was ludicrous thinking, and I knew that, come the next election or the one after at the very least, we would be heavily dependent on the Nationals to form a government. I was right about that, even though subsequent elections ate away at the number of Nationals in the House of Representatives.
I was a staunch coalitionist. My negative experience in 1987 at the hands of the Queensland Nationals had left me more rather than less determined to preserve our partnership with the National Party. The disunity of those years had cost us dearly. The unity between our two parties over more than a decade was one of the major reasons we stayed in office for so long. The Coalition covered the broad spectrum of centre-right politics in Australia, absent some of the extremist fringes which we certainly did not want. That was why it was so effective.
All modern political parties are, in one form or another, coalitions. The challenge is to keep the different elements of the coalition together. The key to our success was my recognition that in return for National Party acceptance on broad policy issues that Liberal Party attitudes would hold sway, the Nationals would win acceptance of their point of view on matters especially important to their followers. This was not hard. The economic views of Tim Fischer, John Anderson and Mark Vaile were very similar to those of Peter Costello and me. The old divisions of earlier years had gone. The National Party of the Howard years would not have the interventionist instincts of its predecessors.
Choosing a cabinet is the hardest people-oriented task that any prime minister has. I was determined not to squib my first attempt at putting together a government for the Commonwealth of Australia as I knew that many of the people I would choose would heavily influence public attitudes to me and to my Government in the months and years ahead. Many of the senior positions were quite obvious. Peter Costello would become Treasurer and Alexander Downer would become Foreign Minister. As Leader of the National Party, Tim Fischer wanted the Trade portfolio. As by far the most highly qualified lawyer on the Coalition front bench, I chose Daryl Williams as Attorney General. Michael Wooldridge had done a very good job as shadow minister for Health and transitioned to that portfolio quite naturally. The same could be said of Peter Reith, who had handled the Industrial Relations brief very well in opposition, so he became a very senior member of the cabinet.
One of the consequences of the election had been a major increase in the number of MPs from New South Wales and Queensland and a relative decline in the proportion of Victorians within the parliamentary Liberal Party. Cabinets should never mathematically reflect state balances, but nor should they be ignored. It is a foolish prime minister who takes a cavalier attitude to the inevitable jealousies between the various states. One of many reasons why the voters of Queensland had so brutally mauled Paul Keating was a feeling that their state had no serious players at the cabinet table in his Government, and that it was a Sydney-centric operation. His gratuitous throwaway lines about the superiority of living in Sydney did nothing to mollify this grievance.
As a consequence of these considerations, many Victorians felt that their state’s representation in my first cabinet was lower than ought to have been the case. This was nonsense as the final line-up included no fewer than four Victorians within the cabinet itself. It was simply a case of recognising that other parts of the country deserved, not only on numerical but also talent grounds, senior spots in the main team.
A prime example of this was my decision to make John Fahey, the former Premier of New South Wales, Minister for Finance and thus a member of cabinet. This upset Peter Costello, as he had expected his fellow Victorian Jim Short, to whom I gave the junior assistant Treasurer job, to be the Finance Minister. Such objections were absurd. John Fahey had had more experience in government than any other person in our ranks, outside me. Being premier of the largest state in the country does provide a lot of experience at a high level of government decision-making. Fahey proved to be an excellent Finance Minister, and also became a very close colleague of Peter Costello.
Another of my appointments which ruffled a few feathers was that of Amanda Vanstone to the post of Education and Employment. This shocked a lot of people, but I rather liked her independent attitude and sensed that she would not be frightened to take some tough decisions. This proved to be the case in respect of both university funding and the massive reform involved in dismantling the old Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) and replacing it with the new, privatised Job Network.
The other senior appointment which surprised a number of people was that of Ian McLachlan to Defence. I was conscious that this greatly di
sappointed Jocelyn Newman, who really loved the shadow Defence portfolio and did have her heart set on being the minister. McLachlan had a lot of ability and I felt very strongly that his style and people skills would be very useful in that difficult portfolio. I felt that we had a similar world-view about national security issues. I was not to ignore Jocelyn Newman’s talents. She was appointed to run the giant Social Security portfolio and also be minister assisting me on the Status of Women. She was a minister of enormous tenacity and ability, who in her personal life had struggled with and overcome serious health problems.
Two of the prime activists in my downfall in May 1989, John Moore and David Jull, were both included, with John occupying the senior cabinet post of Minister for Industry, Science and Tourism and David Jull the outer ministry of Administrative Services. Moore did a good job as Minister for Industry. His business background and contacts gave him a store of personal knowledge against which he tested departmental advice. He was also a valuable general contributor to cabinet.
Now we were back in government, I decided to follow the practice of Menzies and Fraser of personally appointing government leaders in the Senate. In opposition they had been elected by the Liberal senators. Robert Hill and Richard Alston had been elected respectively as leader and deputy leader in the Senate, and I told them I would reappoint them to those positions. I continued this appointment process throughout our time in government.
Remembering my experience in the Fraser years with the operation of the cabinet system as well as my observation of what had gone on under Keating, I was determined that the system would function productively and properly in my Government. The key to this was to restore a fully functioning and orderly system of cabinet government, with all of the major decisions of the Government being made by the cabinet or its properly functioning committees. The Government I led proved well disciplined. That was because cabinet ministers were fully involved in all major decisions and MPs generally were regularly consulted. Circumstances sometimes precluded this but, because this was the understandable exception and not the rule, discipline held.