Howard's secrets 
International Herald Tribune
December 28, 2004
Philip Bowring

How did such an apparently unremarkable man become the second-longest serving prime minister in Australia's history?

It is no insult to John Howard to say that his looks are unmemorable, his oratory no more than competent, his ideology fuzzy. He has brought no big change to Australia and made scant impression on the outside world — apart perhaps from a negative one among Asian neighbors. But eight years, nine months and counting is a very long time given Australia's three-year electoral cycle. He must have got something right.

Howard understood his electorate because he represented the essential conservatism of a numerically small, prosperous, relaxed, largely suburban society cut off by distance from its cousins in Europe and North America. It has a need to feel that it belongs with them, while worrying about vulnerability of its vast land mass to populous Asian neighbors.

Australia's continuing prosperity has been the bedrock of Howard's success — a growth rate near the top of the OECD league. One could argue that much of Australia's success under Howard was rooted in the liberalization conducted by his Labor predecessors. But he built on that base, enabling Australia to ride the changing fortunes of Asia from the 1997-1998 financial crisis to the current China-driven boom in commodities.

Equally one could argue that for Australia — as for the United States — prosperity has come at the price of a housing price bubble, excessive household debt, a massive current account deficit and an unsustainable rise in foreign ownership of Australian assets. But such costs are problems for the future.

Following America into Afghanistan and Iraq may have been viewed by the non-Anglo-Saxon world — and many in Australia — as unseemly and obsequious. A free-trade deal with the United States seemed more motivated by politics than economics. But especially after the Bali bombing, Howard's political instinct was right.

Australians felt comfortable with the U.S. relationship and nervous of Islam and Indonesia. They were also a touch resentful that the efforts of the previous Labor government to "mesh with Asia" had been rebuffed by neighbors like Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad of Malaysia. Howard has made a virtue of being non-Asian. Whether this is good for the national interest is questionable. But it works at the polls.

Howard also showed that Australia's sometime over-hyped sense of nationalism is compatible both with following Washington and preferring the monarchy over republicanism. It is a conservative identification of Australia with traditions that link it to its Anglo-Celtic roots.

Howard has declined to apologize for past treatment of Aborigines, while making much of Australia's contribution to the allied cause in Europe during two world wars. He has exploited reasonable (and unreasonable) popular resentment at the political correctness and multicultural excesses of the previous decade.

Similarly, Howard's incarceration of asylum seekers behind barbed wire, his expressed willingness to take pre-emptive action against neighbors, and cutbacks in immigration have appealed to a nation eager to protect itself and its prosperity from Asian demographic forces.

That is not to say that Australia is racist. It has absorbed diverse immigrants with remarkable ease. Multiculturalism is a fact. But Howard's more restrictive policies seemed to reflect his own preferences as well as the political necessity of choking off the electoral appeal of the anti-Asian far right.

Prosperity, the U.S. alliance and a restrictive immigration policy are not always sure bets. The Liberals lost in badly in 1972 partly because of their involvement in the Vietnam and despite a strong economy. But that was after more than 20 years of conservative rule and faced with a Labor party with a leader, Gough Whitlam, with personal appeal and a strong agenda of social change, economic nationalism — and Asian engagement. Today's Labor party as yet has no such leader and offers only modest changes in national direction.

Maybe an economic or international crisis awaits that will produce new leaders and radical shifts in policy. But for many reasons, Howard's once improbable dominance of Australian politics is likely to span at least a decade.

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