On this basis, it would be an interesting exercise to hypothesise what might have happened if John Howard had won a fifth term. Although this is along the lines of ''what would the world be like if Germany had won the war'', we know enough about the Howard government's policies and actions to plausibly conjecture how it might have responded to these crises.

In the course of the 2007 election, Howard announced his own $9.4billion ''cash splash'', including cash handouts to families and tax cuts. It is reasonable to assume that, as the financial crisis started to bite, we would have seen a replay of Howard's infamous ''core versus non-core'' promises, resulting in the deferral or outright abandonment of some election commitments. We can safely assume that Howard would have interpreted an election win as a confirmation of the electorate's ambivalence about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. It goes without saying that he would not have signed the Kyoto Protocol and an emissions trading scheme would not be on the cards. Howard would also have interpreted a win as an endorsement of his government's industrial relations reforms. WorkChoices not stimulus payments would have become a key plank in his government's response to the financial crisis. Workers' rights and entitlements would have been further eroded and wages and conditions driven further down, ostensibly to enhance the viability of businesses and maintain jobs. Rebates, subsidies and tax breaks were used to great effect by the Howard government to curry the electoral favour of Australia's ''aspirational class''. They tended to reward those already on higher incomes and were often portrayed in terms of their purported ''trickle down'' effects. The Howard government effectively used targeted handouts to re-mould Australian society and alter the political landscape. If re-elected, Howard would have continued to use the tax system to encourage people to opt out of public health and education, leading to further disinvestment in social programs.

A Howard government would also likely have responded to an increasingly fragile labour market by, perversely, further restricting access to social programs by those most vulnerable to economic dislocation. The object would be to soften up the labour force, forcing them to either accept lower pay and conditions or opt out of the labour market altogether (both of which would flatter unemployment statistics).

A Howard government would presumably have had Peter Costello as its treasurer, which, in turn, would have meant jealously safeguarding its surplus even while the country's economy staggered. Howard liked to evoke the analogy of the household budget: when times are tough, take a second job, cut back on luxuries, divest liabilities and pay off the mortgage if you can. In the face of a cataclysmic economic downturn and declining tax receipts, maintaining a surplus while cutting taxes would have inevitably meant spending less. As a consequence, investment in public infrastructure by a Howard government would have been meagre, prospects for private sector co-investment few and capacity bottlenecks in the economy would remain unaddressed.

Any remaining public assets or government operations capable of being privatised (such as Medibank Private) would have been put on the block for sale with proceeds used to pad the surplus. Public sector cuts would not have been matched by cuts to ministerial staff, resulting in increased centralisation of policy formulation (if that is possible) and a continuing politicisation of the public service.

The federal adventurism of the pre-election period in relation to areas of state and territorial jurisdiction might easily have spiralled out of control post-election. The Mersey Hospital farce and the Northern Territory intervention let a genie out of the bottle that a Howard government would have found hard to put back, and would have set the stage for increasingly adversarial Commonwealth-state relations.

Howard would have been unable to resist using scapegoats of one sort or another to distract attention from the government's performance in other areas. The recent spate of asylum-seekers arriving by sea (attributed, wrongly, by the present Coalition to the Rudd Government's ''softer'' immigration policies) would have been seized upon by a Howard government and presented to the electorate as a ''clear and present danger''. No doubt the advent of swine flu would also have been co-opted into a narrative of ''threat'' requiring more stringent border protection measures. Of course, there would have been no apology to the Stolen Generations. Reconciliation with Aboriginal people would not only be effectively consigned to the back burner, Howard would have been left free to point to dysfunctional Aboriginal communities as an ''enemy within''.

Of course, the stalking horse of Peter Costello would have been a feature of the fifth Howard government, just as he is now. This would have lent a degree of instability, although it is possible that in the face of the GFC they might have forged an uncomfortable alliance as a bulwark against a cabinet and backbench tempted to borrow and spend their way through recession.

Of course, all this is purely academic. Howard didn't win in November 2007. The truth is, the country wanted change and what the foregoing analysis demonstrates is that we got it. Whatever else one might think about the Rudd Government, its performance to date marks a clear departure from what we might have seen under a fifth term Howard government.