The Howard Years, which still has two episodes to run on the ABC, started badly but got better. It is well made, as one would expect from the ABC, which only made the superficiality and bias of the first episode worse.
That initial episode dealt with Port Arthur, Pauline Hanson, reconciliation, the war on the waterfront and Peter Costello's ambitions, and failed to get to the point, as it did at the time when the events now being recalled were happening. It was amazingly shallow, but it was nevertheless thoroughly applauded in The Sydney Morning Herald.
The newspaper's television critic, Ruth Ritchie, found it unpleasant even to be reminded that John Howard was once prime minister. A year was not long enough to forget the pain of those 11 years, she observed. For Alan Ramsey, the Toad, as he called Howard, was dead and fly-blown.
But the depiction of the tension between Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello was accurate. It marked the whole of the nearly 12 years of the Howard government. The irony is that we have never had a better prime minister nor a better treasurer. Together they balanced the budget, brought it into surplus, and eliminated the national debt.
But did Costello deserve to be handed the prime ministership as a sort of reward, and because it was his turn?
Certainly not. He only did what all treasurers are supposed to do, and the fact that he was the only one to succeed in such spectacular fashion does not alter one salient fact.
The job was not Howard's to give. First, he must be offered up by the parliamentary party, and then it is the gift of the Australian people. And finally, Costello never had the numbers. Both in the electorate and in the party room they wanted both men to stay just the way they were.
Right at the end, social issues boiled up. A handful of senior figures saw the writing on the wall and wanted Howard to go, but handled it badly. It would have been more interesting had Fran Kelly observed that John Howard lost the election because he was too popular.
Then there was the waterfront, where Luddite dock workers ensured that cargo was handled as slowly as possible, where such work practices, had they been occurring in the Soviet Union or China, would have constituted the crime of industrial sabotage.
The wharfies eventually caved in, and as a result productivity as measured by the number of containers moved per hour at Port Botany doubled. It was a great achievement. That point wasn't made.
Nor was the shabbiness of the treatment of the strike-breakers, ex-servicemen who were training in Dubai. The Howard government abandoned them, although they had forced the wharfies to accept a settlement.
For the ABC, the issue was not such extraordinarily successful reform, but how truthfully the industrial relations minister, Peter Reith, answered questions at the time. Achievement didn't count.
Howard won praise for banning the ownership of semi-automatic rifles after the Port Arthur massacre, a massive infringement of civil liberties which cost $500 million in compensation, enraged respectable owners of firearms who were suddenly equated with a mass murderer, and chopped into the huge Coalition majority won in 1996.
It achieved nothing, other than to provide Fran Kelly with an occasion to say something nice about the subject of her series.
In the second episode, Kelly gave Howard credit for the negotiations with the Democrat leader Meg Lees that secured passage through the Senate of the GST legislation. Howard was determined to get an outcome, and ran the negotiations until he did.
The Indonesian President B.J. Habibie was prepared to give East Timor autonomy. Howard proposed in a letter that East Timor be offered a referendum on self-determination at the end of 10 years.
Habibie responded with a decision to have the referendum within six months, and Howard found himself with a situation that could have escalated into hostilities between Australia and Indonesia.
Howard kept his nerve, pre-positioned aircraft, pushed for a UN force and pressured the US into providing support. For the first time in the series we were learning something about the seriousness of those events that we hadn't quite realised at the time. We were also seeing the decisiveness of Howard in a crisis, and his ability to play an international role.
We saw that again when the illegal Muslim migrants began arriving from the Middle East. Howard set troops to board a Norwegian freighter that had picked up boat people from a sinking trawler and whose captain was determined to dump them on Australia.
He found a country, Nauru, where they could be held, and he stemmed the flow.
Within a couple of months the boat people, who had called themselves asylum-seekers but who had paid the people smugglers heavily, stopped coming.
The test of a government is whether it can run a country with full employment, high real wages, low inflation and budget surpluses that keep the government from competing with private enterprise in the money markets. The Howard government did that. Whether the ABC acknowledges that in the two remaining episodes will be the test of its integrity.
David Barnett is a Canberra writer.