Former PM John Howard admits: we need to do better

With voter alienation rife in the US and politics in a period of high volatility in Western democracies, John Howard at the 20th anniversary of his ascension to office has two warnings for Australia: economic reform is an imperative and the rise of anti-religious intolerance will generate a community backlash.

As Howard prepares for a week of commemorations of his March 2, 1996, election victory, the start of 11 years in the highest office, his loyalty to the Liberal Party cannot disguise his concerns about aspects of the Abbott and Turnbull governments or the need for the conservative side of politics to better champion its cultural beliefs.

Howard remains a political warrior. Close to both Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull as prime ministers, Howard’s views on the current Australian predicament are that the nation, despite its immense advantages, is courting risks on both the economic and cultural fronts.

In a wide-ranging interview with The Weekend Australian, Howard warns about the dangers of the Donald Trump phenomenon corroding the Australian political system as well. He identifies two factors that help to safeguard Australia from the US malaise — hefty real-wage gains for Australian workers in recent decades delivering higher living standards, and the repudiation of any constitutional bill of rights along US lines that would destroy the public’s influence over decision-making and empower judges at the cost of democracy and public involvement.

With the Turnbull government struggling over tax reform and now locked into an incremental package, Howard offers a warning that can be seen as a lament. He says the argument for raising the 10 per cent GST — just rejected by Turnbull — is “overwhelming” and cannot be avoided at some point in the cause of significant personal income tax relief.

“The argument for the change in the tax mix at some time in the future — and it’s a matter for the government to decide when — I think is overwhelming,” he says. “There is a long-term economic benefit in this country in altering the mix between direct and indirect tax in a revenue-neutral way.” This is the classic case for tax reform that has been cast aside in recent weeks.

Howard’s message to today’s leaders is that this decision cannot be indefinitely deferred. As a practitioner, he is sympathetic to the judgment each prime minister faces over how to use the political capital inherent in the early days of office.

“An iron law of politics is that if you have a lot of political capital at some point, you can be certain it will disappear,” he says. “The question is, do you dissipate it through trying to do something for the long-term benefit of the country or do you dissipate it by sitting around and doing nothing?”

This is the pivotal judgment for leaders. Howard became famous for his 1998 election victory that introduced the GST, eliminated a series of other taxes and established the basis for a long-term government. But he concedes that governing today is more difficult than it was two decades ago.

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He is undiminished as a champion of labour-market reform while conceding his removal of the “no-disadvantage test” at the time of Work Choices was a significant mistake. He is convinced that, sooner or later, labour-market reform must return as an issue, while expressing his disappointment that neither Abbott nor Turnbull has made this commitment.

Howard’s thoughts on Australia’s future run parallel to two themes that dominated his prime ministership: economics and culture. He warns that the anti-religious push in Australia tied to progressive orthodoxy has created a climate of repression and intolerance that carries a high price.

He thinks in relation to the Catholic Church there is a “get Pell” mentality in sections of the media. He says the Victorian government’s hostility to religious connections in schools is “pernicious”. He warns anti-discrimination laws are being used to silence people: witness the resort to law in Tasmania to prevent the Catholic Church from expressing its views on same-sex marriage. He says branding people homophobic for opposing gay marriage undermines rational and civil debate.

Having resisted the tide of political correctness as PM, Howard says the standards of civil society in Australia are being undermined by what he likens to a “minority fundamentalism”, espousing progressive views while seeking to silence others.

“I think the problem is that too few people are prepared to call it for what it is,” Howard says. “I think people are cowed because they think, ‘I can’t say that because I might lose votes’ or ‘I might offend somebody’. You ought to be able to have sensible discussion on these sorts of things. But there is a sense in which people are so frightened of being accused of being discriminatory or intolerant that they don’t speak the commonsense view in the community.”

The strength of his criticism raises a pivotal issue for the Liberal Party and the conservative side of politics — Howard implies that conservatives should be more resolute in defending the traditional values that have underpinned the stability of Western societies.

He attacks the new guidelines of the Andrews government in Victorian schools in relation to special religious instruction, saying that “from now on you can sing Jingle Bells in schools but not Once in Royal David’s City or Silent Night. This is pernicious.”

Howard, in fact, is highlighting the rising cultural trend across the nation — part of a broader Western trend — of ideological attacks on religious freedom and free speech. The purpose is to recast the secular state, neutral between faiths and no faith, as anti-­religious in order to drive religion from the public square, a position integral to some of the same-sex marriage arguments.

Howard says such cultural intolerance will risk a backlash. He says one reason Trump is cutting through in US politics is because people feel he is speaking directly to them, saying what many people feel but which goes unrecognised in the political system. Howard is no fan of Trump, declaring he “would tremble” at the idea of Trump as US president. But the lesson from the Trump eruption need to be heeded.

He is disappointed that the Abbott government abandoned its pledge to reform section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, saying it was probably only with the Andrew Bolt case that people began to realise the “spiteful” implications of this law.

Reflecting on his era in office, Howard nominates two policies he championed that had since gained far more international attention: gun controls and border protection. As a conservative Australian leader, Howard’s gun policies are in conflict with the US conservative majority. He attracts much attention and says he gets “almost daily” calls from the US media to discuss guns laws where the clash between Australian and US values is pronounced.

On border protection Howard says: “The Europeans and particularly the British are now looking at what we said in 2001.” He believes his famous declaration that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” is now seen around the world “in a vastly more significant light than was the case in the 2000s”.

Howards calls it a “declaration of sovereignty”, and this view has gained increasing traction and support ever since.

The claim of Howard’s opponents at the time that his position was immoral and illegitimate is now largely eclipsed. The experience of the Labor Party during the Rudd-Gillard years saw Labor embrace tough border controls and offshore processing and, more recently, boat turnarounds.

Beyond this, while there are justified complaints about the morality of offshore detention, there is now wide acceptance of the view that encouraging people to come to Australia by boat is an untenable moral position.

Howard agrees that governing has got harder — in Australia as well as in other nations. He points to the “hollowing out of the sensible centre” of political parties. Party activists are now more removed from public attitudes. Pivotal to the rising instability is that “fragmentation of political support” has gathered pace in recent years. People have less tribal attachment to parties, thereby creating a more volatile climate.

The rise of identity politics — a significant feature of the US political scene — and the cult of populist politicians with more extreme views is having a distinct impact in the US and Britain. “I’ve never read or heard any Democratic president call themselves a democratic socialist, yet that’s how Bernie Sanders describes himself,” Howard says.

He finds the Sanders phenomenon “almost as strange” as that of Trump, evidence the political centre is under deep strain in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Although he is aware of Australia’s ability to resist this process, Howard’s message is about the need to avoid complacency. “There are sufficient similarities that it might happen here,” he says.

He is scathing about the role of the judiciary in US life, courtesy of the bill of rights. Howard says: “If I were an American I would feel that it didn’t matter who you voted for because essentially the people you vote for can’t do anything, with gay marriage and ObamaCare being decided by the courts.”

It is almost forgotten now that Howard had a model of Liberal governance that proved to be remarkably successful. He did not win four elections by accident. He did not become the second longest serving PM without a governing strategy. It is best described as liberal economics, social conservatism and pragmatic politics. As PM, Howard was diligent in seeing the Liberal Party as a “broad church” and in promoting both conservatives and liberals in the party spectrum.

In office he had a capacity to shift gears from the ideological to the expedient. Howard had a refined judgment about when to operate as a conviction and ideological leader and when to give priority to pragmatism and electoral expediency. Like Bob Hawke, he possessed a keen grasp of public attitudes and the trade-off between policy and politics.

Asked about his most important achievements, Howard gives an immediate response. The first is “the very strong economy that we bequeathed to the incoming (Labor) government”. It was “debt-free, a strong surplus, a strong future fund”. He argues, correctly, that the strength of Australia’s fiscal position in 2008 when the global financial crisis hit was one of the main reasons Australia sailed through with very little pain.

The second achievement he nominates is “the way we entrenched Australia’s economic relationship with Asia”. Again, the figures tell the story. He says: “Under my government the free-trade negotiations with (South) Korea, China and Japan were commenced and they were brought to fruition under the Abbott government.” Simultaneously, “we were able to deepen relations with China while at the same time creating a new level of intimacy in our relationship with the United States”.

Howard as PM believed the notion that Australia had to choose between China and the US was “absurd”. He entrenched in the conservative culture in this country the idea that foreign policy was to seek the best of both the US and China. That view has prevailed under both Abbott and Turnbull.