WE'RE celebrating John Howard's decade, and commentators are letting rip. They're telling us about a man with an unsurpassed grasp of the middle Australian psyche, hugely popular, a champion of the cultural, economic and history wars who wins elections with ease and could go on for decades if he wanted. And that's just from his enemies; the PM's fans are screeching from the rafters.
But tales of Howard's prowess rest on a falsehood: that his government's electoral record has been phenomenal. In truth, in reasonable context, it has been mediocre.
There's a widely held belief that Howard's wins have been record-setting. They have been nothing of the sort: the previous Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, easily trumped him on any electoral measure, and Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke received higher primary votes. In fact, the only Howard record was negative: in 1998 he received the lowest winning federal two-party preferred vote since the introduction of preferential voting in 1918.
Consensus also has it that 10 years, encompassing four elections in a row, is an "astounding" achievement. The previous administration, Labor from 1983 to 1996, should introduce a little perspective. In fact, in conservative Australia where federal Labor has barely gotten a look in, if this government ended tomorrow it would be the second-shortest non-Labor stretch since 1913.
We live in salad political times for comparable governments around the world. Look at the performances of Tony Blair in Britain, Helen Clark in New Zealand and Canada's Jean Chretien. And at our own state premiers Jim Bacon, Peter Beattie, Steve Bracks and Bob Carr. All these leaders were elected between seven and 13 years ago and found themselves, as did Howard, in the longest period of sustained international growth in generations.
All presided over unemployment and interest rates lower than have been imagined for decades. Then they got the war on terror, an undeniable boon for any incumbent.
So agreeable have these conditions been that all these party leaders except Howard sailed into huge re-election wins without appearing to raise a sweat. Most (all but Carr and possibly Clark) did actually set vote records. The Australian prime minister alone has repeatedly come from behind, and then only achieved modest wins.
This was because he didn't enjoy much electoral currency and the opposition was a mile ahead in opinion polls. Coming from behind is great theatre, and spawns fables of a "scrapper" who is "best when his back is against the wall", but a political colossus should have done better, and an above average politician probably would have.
When Howard turned around his Government's dreadful standing to win the 2001 election, bizarre adjectives such as "historic" crept into our collective narrative, when in truth he simply avoided leading the first two term conservative government since World War I. Howard accolades tend to be off a low base.
The Howard era has spawned other political myths. One is that of "Howard's battlers", that he receives more support from "traditional Labor voters" than previous Liberal Prime Ministers did. Even the ALP buys into this - it contributed to the Latham disaster - but we only have to go back, again, to the previous Coalition government. Fraser's wins were, if anything, more blue-collar heavy than Howard's.
A subset of the above, that Sydney's west is now choc-full of Liberal voters, is also nonsense. Labor MPs sit in about 80 per cent of western Sydney seats, and have done over the last decade. And yet another overblown journalists' tale: the secret to Howard's success is that he is a "conviction politician", sticking to his beliefs and being rewarded by a respecting electorate. (Presumably, the man he defeated, Paul Keating, was a shrinking violet and a hand-wringer.)
In truth, Howard's trajectory was familiar: wishy-washy and trying to be all things to all people in opposition; then strong and take-charge in office. That is, like all successful opposition leaders. Howard actually jettisoned many of his long-cherished beliefs (remember the Medicare evil?) to become PM, and kept them away.
The PM is, like most leaders produced by our two major parties, intelligent and hard-working. His discipline is above-average, and he knows his bases in the electorate and the media and how to play to them. And he is the country's second longest-serving PM.
But Howard's greatest feat has been to convince his party they couldn't win without him, contrary to any rational assessment of his political talent. He could only do this, perversely, because he was an electoral fizzer. Just who the joke is on is not clear, but we know whos laughing.
Peter Brent is publisher of mumble.com.au and a PhD student
at the School of Social Sciences at
the Australian National University.
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