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Finally, common sense prevails in my country!

The era of John Winston Howard, the 25th Prime Minister of Australia, is finally, mercifully over. His 11 and a half years in power may have been marked by strong economic times, but there is more to quality of life, of pride in your country than money.

Put simply, we became less of a nation under his leadership. Mandatory detention for asylum-seekers (often off-shore in foreign countries!), the absolute refusal to acknowledge the very real threat of global warming, draconian workplace relations policies (the Patricks stevedores dispute, WorkChoices, etc.), the inability to say "sorry" to the stolen generation of indigenous Australians: these are the real marks of the Howard era that defined our country during his time in power, marks that made me ashamed of the face my country presented to the world.

We really should have known right from the start when he declared a whole raft of promises made before the 1996 election as "non-core" promises. Apparently it's okay to go back on your word to the people of your country if it's a "non-core" promise. But no, somehow he kept winning elections, mainly through fear-mongering and divisiveness: fear of the outside world and border security in 2001 when he turned the Tampa - a Norwegian freighter that had rescued hundreds of asylum-seekers from their sinking ship - into the most unlikely political weapon, one that turned the electoral tide his way; and fear of change in 2004, when he claimed that he, and only he, could stop interest rates from rising. It worked for him then, but became a noose around his neck leading into this election as interest rates rose rapidly.

After carving out a political career by being uncannily able to read the mood of the people and quickly work on a way to exploit that mood, this ability deserted Howard leading up to this election. He no longer had the full support of his own party, but he decided to stay on as leader for one more election anyway. Pride? Ego? Perhaps. John Howard has always been very concerned with his "legacy", the way history will view him from a distance. Maybe he really felt that he was the only person who could get things done right. Whatever, it became painfully obvious as the campaign wore on that he had stayed on too long.

History may now remember him as only the second Australian Prime Minister ever to lose his own seat at a Federal election after Stanley Bruce in 1929. The Labor candidate for his electorate of Bennelong in Sydney's north, Maxine McKew (an ex-TV political journalist who used to interview John Howard on TV every week), is just ahead in a very tight-run race. As she says, "Bennelong is on a knife edge." Even if she doesn't win, she has played her part in the Labor victory, as she forced John Howard to campaign locally every weekend leading up to the election, when he would rather have been out on the national hustings.

So onto a new government - that of Kevin Rudd and his Labor party. It's been a long time in opposition, and the time ahead will be difficult. The Senate (upper house) will still be ruled by the Liberal Party until July, so passing any new laws will be nigh-on impossible until then. After July, it seems as if minor parties will control the balance of power in the Senate, meaning careful negotiation with often conflicting interests will be required to get legislature passed.

I'll leave you with a short excerpt from a London Times article about Howard's end (surely a headline in some tabloid newspaper?), an interesting view of how he was observed by the rest of the world:

It is a remarkable comedown for the big-spending populist. He is the diminutive 69-year-old who, memorably, turned the country’s SAS forces on a bunch of impoverished, ragged asylum-seekers before winning the 2001 election. He is the former solicitor who used his renowned capacity for fear-mongering to win the last election in 2004, when he mounted a scare campaign against the Labor Party’s ability to hold down interest rates. He is the hard-of-hearing grandad who prides himself on being in touch with the aspirations of ordinary Australians.

There is no single answer for John Howard’s rapidly declining popularity. Undoubtedly he has suffered poor luck. He has, however, also been the victim of his own unfortunate timing and misread the true level of support he enjoys among his colleagues. And he has stayed too long.

Posted in: australia, chaosboy, politics on November 24, 2007 at at 9:45:00 AM