One tiny chink in legacy of street-fighting man

IT'S a shame John Howard used his memoirs to settle personal scores with Peter Costello.

NINE out of 10, Mr Howard. Pretty darn good. But not perfect. That is the short report card off the back of the former prime minister's biography, Lazarus Rising.

Published this week, the much anticipated memoirs should have been an opportunity to mark John Howard's success as one of Australia's greatest prime ministers. Instead, much of the media will focus on his failings. That the media does so with relish betrays their frequent inability to deal fairly with Howard when he was in office and now with his legacy.

Witness Monday night's Q&A where Howard haters lined up to whack the former PM, with a little help from a predictable David Hicks stunt and a pair of airborne shoes thrown Iraqi-style by a clown who then wanted them back so he didn't have to walk home in his socks.

Convicted criminals and smelly shoes aside, the launch of Howard's 711-page tome yesterday is a timely reminder of Howard's permanent legacy. Start with his support, in opposition, of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating's radical moves to open up the Australian economy to harness the power of international markets. It would track how the Howard government came into office with a $96.8 billion net government debt, reduced to zero a decade later, slashed spending by $8bn in its first budget, delivered tax cuts and left the country in surplus.

It would record a government that privatised Telstra, modernised the waterfront industry and unshackled the workplace from costly, outdated union practices.

It would record the Howard government's prudential reforms that became world's best practice, allowing the Australian banks - and the country - to coast through the global financial crisis. Any fair assessment would mark the courage of a government that took the GST - the biggest tax reform in half a century - to an election in 1998 and won.

(Something Julia Gillard did not do at the last election when she eschewed a carbon tax, which is now central to her agenda.) It would mention the important economic numbers at the end of Howard's time: unemployment at 30-year lows, real wages up, interest rates down, inflation halved.

Howard's book should also have provided the chance to mark the former Liberal PM's other great successes.

Under Howard, sensible border protection policies allowed immigration numbers to rise every year of his reign.

Unperturbed by taunts of racism and a cold heart, Howard confronted the unprogressive results of so-called progressive indigenous policies. No-responsibility welfare, treaties and separatism were exposed as the problem, not the solutions to indigenous disadvantage.

On education, too, Howard did the hard yards, upsetting the old orthodoxy of postmodernism and union domination that infected our schools to the detriment of students, marking out a path for Gillard to pursue a more rigor-

ous curriculum, greater autonomy for schools and merit-based pay for teachers.

In the broader culture wars, Howard was a lonely early warrior. Unperturbed by political correctness, he stripped "cultural dieticians" of their long-standing monopoly over our national identity. He encouraged Australians to reclaim our birthright to remember and celebrate the finest parts of our history as well as acknowledging the shameful episodes from history. On multiculturalism, Howard's way is now Europe's way.

It gets tiresome to hear critics deride Howard's "conservatism". So swap "conservatism" for straight-forward common sense. That will drive them crazy. Yet, here lies his true legacy. Why else has the Labor Party, at the last two elections, tried to mimic Howard's policies? So many of his policies are now accepted, with bi-partisan support, as the more sensible way forward for the nation.

A fair account of history must also record Howard's failures: his refusal, as documented in his book, to settle the succession of his beloved Liberal Party. In Lazarus Rising, Howard unwittingly records his inconsistencies on this front. Howard's test that he would remain for so long as the party wanted him is disingenuous.

Howard records that he privately decided he would hand over the leadership to his long-serving treasurer, Peter Costello, before the end of 2006. Howard, without consulting the party, decided this was in the party's best interests. Then, he changed his mind after Costello's "inept handling" of the revelation in June 2006 the two leaders had agreed in late 1994 for Howard to hand over to Costello after two terms. Costello may have been inept. But it was now clear it had become personal for Howard. The party's best interests were sidelined. Then, when it was apparent Howard would lose the 2007 election and his own seat of Bennelong, Howard told senior ministers he would only go if they publicly "owned" the request for him to leave. Knowing their loyalty, Howard used their reluctance to his personal advantage. Genuine leadership required that Howard settle the succession issue and that he "own" the decision to leave for the sake of the party. He failed to do so. Howard admits he did not leave in late 2006 because, on advice of his family, he "would rather go down fighting than desert on the eve of a battle".

To bolster his reputation as a fighter, Howard deprived the party of a chance to win under Costello. Asked recently at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in Sydney the one thing he wished he could have done that he hadn't, Howard replied, "win the election in 2007". Political leaders rarely see loss around the corner.

It's a shame Howard uses his memoirs to settle personal scores against Costello. It diminishes his otherwise impeccable record as a post-prime ministerial statesman above the pettiness of politics.

A four-time winning prime minister does not need to attack Costello as "elitist" or refer to Costello's "rank amateur pressure". Howard's legacy is now hijacked by the media revelling in past leadership animosities, rather than recalling how Howard changed the nation for the better.

Alas, those in the media so eager to demonise Howard have missed the real story of his autobiography. Howard has always been underestimated by his critics. Mocked as the boring suburban solicitor, he is the antithesis of Keating's big picture rhetoric and cleverly acerbic attacks.

In fact, Howard is as much a street fighter as Keating though he never showcased it in the same way. Successful leadership requires a larger than normal dose of self-belief, self-interest and, let's face it, street-fighting cunning. Too many people never fully appreciated the political powerhouse underneath Howard's demeanour, unerringly polite, never losing his temper or swearing.

This is the real insight from Howard's own record of his time in politics.

While his dogged tenacity brought him down in the end, history will record that it explains the Lazarus-like success of Howard as one of the West's great modern-day political leaders.