Lazarus Rising
Page 85
Running for the American presidency in 1920 and rejecting the foreign involvements which had taken the United States into World War I in 1917, the Republican Warren Harding invoked what was to become a famous slogan — ‘a return to normalcy’. Americans embraced it enthusiastically and once again turned inwards.
It is a phrase which could well describe what the mood of the Australian people might feel at the time of the next election, due in the second half of 2013. Having experienced the directionless indecision of a minority government, sustained in office by four minor party and Independent MPs whose political heritages could not be less similar, the electorate will almost certainly vote in a government with a clear majority. It will have had its fill of the bracing air of the so-called ‘new paradigm’.
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REFLECTIONS
Any person who has ever been in public life for as long as I was and experienced the opportunities that I did has no excuse for personal regrets. I believed in all of the major decisions of my Government. There were execution errors, many I have acknowledged, but the policy content I always felt to be in the national interest. Those reforms or causes in which I believed I either achieved or promoted or, to the limit of my ability, attempted to do that.
That was because I stuck to the core political values I brought with me to parliament in 1974. Compromise is a necessary political tool, but conviction is the mother of success in politics. If that proposition is doubted, ponder the words of the British author John O’Sullivan in his book The Pope, the President and the Prime Minister, written about Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and which traced those periods in the careers of those three leaders when their values were out of fashion. It memorably records the fact that, at one stage, none of them was gaining traction: ‘Put simply Wojtyla was too Catholic, Margaret Thatcher too conservative and Reagan too American.’1
Ultimately, their values did gain traction, were widely accepted within their constituencies, and profound change for the world ensued. The contribution they made together to the collapse of Soviet imperialism — the most significant political development since World War II — cannot be questioned. If Ronald Reagan had followed the dictates of moral relativism urged upon him by his many critics, the course of world history in recent decades would have been profoundly different. When he brought his simple values of freedom and individual liberty to his dealings with the Soviets, many within the left liberal intelligentsia shuffled their feet in embarrassment. They couldn’t believe it when Ronald Reagan called on Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’. Reagan certainly meant it, and his approach prevailed.
The policy attitudes I struck in government were a patent reflection of my basic political credo. My belief in the maximum degree of individual freedom meant that my Government always gave high priority to personal taxation relief, believing that people were better judges than governments of how to spend their money. It drove my support for parental choice in education, as well as my continuing belief in the worth of private health insurance. My passion for the role of small business made me a natural opponent of the unfair dismissal laws of the Keating Government. It also informed my attitude to secondary boycotts by unions, which were often used against small-and medium-sized firms. My belief in a self-reliant but fair society found expression in the Howard Government’s preference for work over welfare and work for the dole, but also the maintenance of a strong safety net for those who genuinely needed help.
My Burkean conservatism meant I would oppose Australia becoming a republic or adopting a Bill of Rights which would pass authority from parliament to unelected judges. My instinctive belief that shared values and history create the strongest bonds between nations meant that I would want, in government, to maintain close links with traditional allies such as the United States and Great Britain as well as deepening our ties with regional neighbours.
I brought a philosophical road map to government. It was bitterly opposed by some but, for a long time, supported by more. Both supporters and critics knew what I stood for. In its broadest iteration, that road map was one of economic liberalism and social conservatism. That duality was no politically convenient contrivance. I believed in it. From the late 1970s onwards, Australia needed major economic reforms to set it up for a transformed world economic environment. Those reforms had to be built on freedom and openness, not regulation and protection. That meant a lot of change, some of it quite bewildering. The more an individual’s world of work and business changed, the more he or she would seek continuity and reassurance in other aspects of life. That is why social conservatism complemented rather than mocked economic liberalism.
To me the Liberal Party of Australia has always been the custodian of both the conservative and classical liberal traditions in the Australian polity. That is its special strength. It does best when it demonstrates that duality; it should be wary of those individuals or groups who parade the view that only one of those two philosophical thought streams represents ‘true’ Australian Liberalism.
My stance on asylum-seekers, anti-terrorism laws and Pauline Hanson were depicted by critics as at odds with the ‘true’ Liberal attitudes of the party’s founder, Robert Menzies. This displayed little knowledge of Australian political history and also ignored the important injunction that ‘context is everything’.
Let me illustrate. Menzies’ 1951 attempt to ban the Communist Party, involving, as it did, a partial reversal of the onus of proof, was a deeper violation of the personal political liberties of some Australians than anything comprised in the anti-terrorism laws of the Howard Government. Those 1951 actions were justified by Menzies and his colleagues as a legitimate response to the worldwide threat of communism; many thought that World War III would be upon us in a few short years.
In 1961 a meeting of Commonwealth prime ministers refused, effectively, to re-admit South Africa to the Commonwealth after that country voted to become a republic, not because of that decision but due to the racially based apartheid system then applied in South Africa. Menzies was appalled at the decision, declaring, ‘For myself, I am deeply troubled.’2 He attached supreme importance to the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states of the Commonwealth. Also, the fact that the South African Government was staunchly anti-Communist would not have gone unnoticed. His concern on those issues took precedence over his distaste for apartheid. Other issues aside, neither of those Menzies approaches would today be seen as of the ‘small l’ liberal genre.
It is a great honour to hold the highest elected office in a democracy. One consequence of that honour is to accept that history will and should judge you entirely on what you have said and done when in office. No amount of ex post facto rationalisation, confessing or rejection of previously held views can alter that reality. I am somewhat cynical towards those who, after leaving office, self-indulgently parade a change of heart on a controversial issue, to the applause of former critics but without regard to the impact such a changed attitude might have on those affected by the repudiation of the decision taken in office. No better example exists than Robert McNamara’s recantation over the Vietnam War. It may have made the Defense Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations feel better, but I doubt that it helped the thousands who had lost loved ones in a conflict he ordered them into.
In the past 40 years, both the ALP and the Liberal Party have ceased to be mass political movements. Changed family lifestyles work against meeting attendances during evenings and weekends. Today’s generations are not the joiners of earlier years, and the impact of this goes beyond political parties. Reduced and less-representative membership has made political parties more susceptible to internal group control of the candidate-selection process. ALP head offices regularly treat branch members with contempt in relation to preselections. Some Liberal Party factions are nothing more than preselection cooperatives. As a result, far too many new MPs, especially at a state level, have had no working-life experience ou
tside a political or union office. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the talented outsider to win party favour. The Liberal Party should fully embrace the branch plebiscite system for candidate selection. This is likely to deliver a more representative bunch of future candidates.
The most overworked cliché about Australia’s future is that our best years lie ahead. Whether or not that proves to be the case depends, entirely, on the attitudes and values of future generations. If the next generation is as successful in managing economic change, whilst preserving social harmony, as was the last then we should be optimistic. Part of the Australian achievement is that, in a generation, attitudes to work, competitiveness and the interdependency of trade between nations have permanently changed for the better.
No respected Asian leader of the future would feel able to say, as Lee Kuan Yew did in the early 1980s, that Australia ran the risk of becoming ‘the poor white trash of Asia’. The mutuality of our trade with Japan and China has played a major educative role in this. Earlier generations largely saw such countries as sources of cheap imports and, therefore, a threat to Australian jobs. By contrast, the current generation knows that maintaining a booming resource trade with North Asia is crucial to Australia’s economic future.
A key determinant of our economic future will be Australia’s willingness to persist with economic change and reform, and to resist any regression to protectionism and over-regulation in the totally mistaken belief that the global financial plunge of 2008 represented a failure of market capitalism. Economic reform is like competing in a footrace towards an ever-receding finishing line. The race is never won, but one dare not stop otherwise competitors will surge past. For 25 years or more, Australia has done well in that footrace. Whether or not those competitors will surge past in the future depends entirely on our willingness to regain interest in economic reform. In recent years, reform has stagnated in Australia; in one area — the labour market — it has gone backwards.
Despite the much-trumpeted return of Keynesianism in the wake of the global financial crisis, the lasting economic development of the past 30 years has been that tens of millions of people were lifted from poverty by the twin forces of globalisation and market capitalism. Government intervention played a subsidiary role. The ongoing debate is about the mechanics of that market system, not the benefits of the system itself. In the process, the centre of gravity of the world’s middle class began to shift to Asia. By 2030, it is likely that the majority of the world’s middle class will live in Australia’s region of the world.
Economic strength is only part of our future. Cultural and national self-belief will be the armour plate of a successful and confident Australia for the remainder of this century. We have prospered to date because of who we are and where we have come from, not in spite of that. The Australian achievement has many facets; by far the most significant has been the transplanting to our island continent of Western civilisation tempered by the egalitarian and cooperative habits necessarily embraced by a small population living in a vast country. The circumstances of history allowed us to cast aside the class divisions and rigidities of our cultural inheritance but keep its civilisation.
Australia wins respect in the world when we display who we are and not what self-appointed cultural dieticians would want us to become. Multiculturalism is not our national cement. Rather it is the Australian achievement, which has many components. One of them has been, successfully, to absorb millions of people from numerous lands into the mainstream of our nation.
The past 30 years has seen a revival of interest in Australian history, not least our military history. In the 1970s there was genuine concern that interest in Anzac Day would decline; no such thoughts are now entertained. The sight of thousands of young Australians draped in the national flag visiting Gallipoli or the Western Front may offend some of the politically correct, but it warms the hearts of mainstream Australia.
I will not forget Anzac Day 2005, which included participation in the Lone Pine Service on Anzac Cove. I was greeted with spontaneous warmth at that service by thousands of my fellow countrymen and women, not as someone they all agreed with politically but as the PM of their country — there to share their pride and gratitude for something done which would be forever special to all of us as Australians.
We should keep our faith in the efficacy of liberal democracy. The United States will remain the most powerful nation in the world for many reasons, not least of which is that she is a conspicuous exemplar of liberal democracy. Just as predictions 20 to 30 years ago that Japan would surpass America proved wrong, so it will be proven the case with claims that China will outpace the United States. The growth of China has been good for China and good for the world, not least Australia, but she has challenges of demography and limitations on property rights which will bulk as ever-larger problems in the future. China will grow old before she grows rich. Beyond this lies the ultimate Chinese dénouement, between her economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. India carries many burdens, including some poisonous religious rivalries, but does not face the frightening demographic future of China. Being the largest democracy in the world, India does not face a Chinese-style dénouement. By the end of this century, India could well be more powerful economically and politically than China.
In continuing our long tradition of being a good international citizen, Australians must remember that we still live in a world of nation states and that for the foreseeable future it will be cooperation between like-minded nations which will solve the most difficult problems. Likewise, we should be wary of giving unqualified assent to the dictates of multilateral bodies whose rules are written sometimes by majorities which include nations neither believing in nor practising the rule of law.
I had a fortunate life in politics and will always feel deep gratitude towards the Liberal Party for its immense loyalty and forbearance. To my parents, members of Australia’s greatest generation, who gave me the values and determination which I took into politics, and to my wife and children, who sustained me with love and constant support through a long political career, I owe the greatest debt.
Photographic Insert
My parents married on 11 July 1925 at Marrickville in Sydney. They devoted their lives to the welfare and future of their four sons.
J.W. Howard private library
My father ‘somewhere on the Western Front’. A gas attack damaged his lungs, which contributed to his death at age 59.
Auspic
It was a short walk from home to Earlwood Primary School. Here I am aged six, sixth from the left in the third row. World War II ended the year before.
Auspic
Dad’s garage in 1954, just after going ‘one brand’. It was at the corner of Wardell Road and Ewart Street, Dulwich Hill, Sydney. I loved working there.
Auspic
The Canterbury Boys High School debating team of 1956 (second from the left, front row). Debating gave the priceless discipline of marshalling arguments.
Newspix/News Ltd
I played in the CBHS Second XI in 1956 (second from the right, front row). Captain Ian Sharpe, on my right, later a professor of economics, was a good leg spinner.
Auspic
Before a family wedding early in 1955. Dad’s health was failing; he died nine months later. The Howard brothers (from left to right): Stan, John, Bob and Wal.
J.W. Howard private library
With Mum at my law graduation early in 1961. My hearing problem made university quite taxing. It also meant I could not go to the bar.
Auspic
A safe federal seat: Janette and I show elation after the Liberals picked me for Bennelong in December 1973. It was a marathon day.
Kevin Berry/Fairfaxphotos
Our wedding day at St Peter’s, Watsons Bay, 4 April 1971.
John Hearder Studio
A polling booth at Gladesville Public School on election day, October 1980. Fraser’s retreat on taxation would later disappoint me.
Fairfaxphotos
Late 1975 with Melanie and Janette on the front lawn of our Wollstonecraft home, the scene of many news conferences in the 1970s and ’80s.
J.W. Howard private library
Family photos from the 1980s. Weekends were filled with the children’s activities. There was always sport. I loved reading to them as well.
Auspic
I became leader of the Liberal Party in September 1985 in amazing circumstances. The euphoria soon faded.
Auspic
The Liberal campaign launch for the election of 1987 struck a real chord, but ‘Joh for PM’ made victory impossible. We didn’t pick up enough speed to win.
Newspix/News Ltd/Phil Blenkinsop
Janette and I on election night 1987. Despite a 1 per cent swing to us, Hawke won four seats.
Auspic
On the verandah at Wollstonecraft in 1988. Future Directions was launched later that year. It was a clear statement of my philosophical beliefs.
Australian Women’s Weekly
On the eve of the 1996 election, enjoying one of many family holidays at Hawks Nest. During a beach walk, the idea came to me for the Natural Heritage Trust policy from Telstra sale proceeds.