It's the second of March nineteen ninety six, thirty years ago. This week, Paul Keating takes the stage in front of hundreds of true believers at the Bankstown Leagues Club.
I've always passionately believed that all power, all power came from the public, every last morsel of it, and it's the nation's perfect right to decide who they want to govern it. I take this opportunity to congratulate John Howard. I wish him and his government well.
Keaton's government had just been ousted in a landslide at Trouncing after thirteen years of labor and power. There was much a moment of reflection, as it was one of concession.
We've opened the country up. We've opened the country up and turned it towards the world as never before, and we've done it in a way which has also put a high premium on social equity and social consensus. We've also taken the bigger view and tried to do something about some of the intractable problems, like a proper basis of reconciliation of our indigenies, which we held a.
Bit for The door on the hawk Keeping years was coming to a close and another was about to open on a new political era, one that would change the country are one that is still impacting the way politics is run today, all shaped by one man.
Can I say to you, and my first words are addressed to all of the people of Australia, that I.
Am very conscious of the enormous responsibility that has been based upon me and upon my colleagues by.
The verdicte of the Australian people.
Today.
I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven Am. The course how It's set for the country during is eleven years in the nation's highest office, redefined the Liberal Party, reshaped the economy, hardened the culture wars and transformed the
way power is exercised in Campra. In this three part series, author Amy Rimikers, who just released a book on John Howard, takes us back to his years and power, from his improbable rise to the Prime ministership in which he resurrected a political career many had written off, to the way he consolidated power and reshaped the nation in his own image. This is the Howard Effect. A series by seven Am. Episode one Australia's Sliding Doors Moment.
And I want to say that the government that I will leave will be a government not only for the people who voted for us, but also for the people who voted against us.
Amy, tell me about the size shift that was about to occur on the night of March second, nineteen ninety six, as power transition from Paul Keating to John Howard.
Yeah, it's a moment in history. I don't think we think about enough because it essentially set up Australia from the direction that it was heading in in terms of opening itself up more to the world, reconciling itself with its indigenous history, shifting away from the anglosphere into the more geographical position of the Asia Pacific, and all of a sudden, John Howard is elected not because his policies necessarily spoke to Australians, but because he was not Paul Keating.
I want to thank Paul Keating for his gracious words.
I want and that is something to remember in talking about all of this. It's that Paul Keating had become so unpopular, mostly because of the early nineteen nineties recession.
Ah, I thought these damn fool things were supposed to go up. We keep feeling the thing with hooty act, don't get your glands and I'm not bob, it'll make yourself learning.
But also because he was forcing Australia to accept some really uncomfortable truths. And there's this idea now that perhaps he was moving too quickly to try and push Australia into, you know, into the future. And so then comes along John Howard who tells Australia that if you are feeling uncomfortable with the direction that Labor and Paul Keating in
particular at taking you in, vote for me. I'm an average bloke who wants average bloke things, and I will make sure that you are famelessly relaxed and comfortable.
Aimy comfortable and relaxed became a defining catch frame of how It's campaign a country at ease with its history, present and future in his mind, what did he consider uncomfortable about Australia.
It's a really interesting question because you have to go back thirty years to what was happening in Australia. And if you look at the ninety four and ninety five cabinet papers, so the last couple of years of the Keating government, these talking about wanting Australia to become a republic, which is shifting Australia away from the motherland of England
and the anglosphere. About wanting to build a cultural identity for Australia beyond sport, Paul Keating was saying, Hey, I think we've matured enough as a country that we can start actually being a middle power and start having more cultural impact in the world, which meant, of course, also
reconciling with Australia's atrocious indigenous history. And while you can't say that we were definitely on the steps to reconciliation, you could say that it was the beginning of the reconciliation process under Keating.
Now give me a great pleasure to had produced the Prime Minister of Australia, mister Paul Keating.
As he had done the famous Redfern speech.
It begins, I think with an act of recognition, recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol, We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers.
He had spoken about the inequality between indigenous Australia and white Australia, and how we needed to start closing that gap.
We cannot imagine that will file, and with the spirit that is here today, I'm confident that we won't file. I'm confident we will succeed in this decade. Thank you very much for listen.
Around the same time, we had things like Marbo at the heart of today's ruling, a ten year battle by the Merrian people of the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait for recognition of their traditional rights to the island.
By recognizing the island as native title, the courters acknowledged the land belonged to the indigenous people before white settlement.
And so all of this was happening at a time when Australians, white Australians, previous labor voters, working class voters, were feeling very uncomfortable about the cultural shifts, but also quite uncomfortable about their own individual wealth because of the recession that we had just gone through. And John Howard, in an electoral preview that he did with Liz Jackson, a journalist with four Corners at the time, was asked what his vision was for Australia.
Can you give us a John Howard vision for the year two thousand to the Australian public, such that they will see, yes, this is the person we would like to be Prime Minister.
Let me respond to your question, And almost by accident, he later said.
I would like to see them comfortable and relaxed about their history. I'd like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the present, and I'd also like to see them comfortable and relaxed about the future.
And that really ended up resonating with a lot of voters.
The pace of reform during the hawks Keeping years transformed the economy, floating the dollar, cutting tariffs, opening Australia to the world. But for John Howard that Bragneck change came at a cost. Both men grew up in suburban Sydney during the mensies years. They saw the same Australia, but
they drew very different lessons from it. For Keating, the nineteen fifties were a warning a country protect did complacent and falling behind, as he told Parliament in no uncertain terms in nineteen ninety two.
And then, of course we had then a flurry of comment by the Member for bed Long about the fifties, what a very good period.
It was a very very good period. He said, a golden age. This is the golden age.
This is the golden age when vast numbers of the stade that's never going to look in, that the women who.
Didn't get a look in but had no no equal rights and no equal pain, where migrants were factory partner. Wherever it's respirted from the system, where we had these Xennifiers running around about Britain and boat steps and an awful cultural cremdge under Menzies, which told us back for Neli our generation.
But for the Member for Benelong, John Howard, the fifties were a utopia, a place he wanted the country to get back to. Menzies was his hero.
Yeah, and the him being a big fan of Mensiism. It was cherry picking what parts of Menzies Australia that he wanted and what parts of that, you know, nineteen fifties white Australia he wanted. And you really have to go back to how John Howard grew up. He grew up in a white Methodist conservative suburb of Earlwood in Sydney.
It was not a multicultural suburb and you could see that in his you know some of his first policy documents that he created famously, there's one that he released in nineteen eighty eight called One Australia, and if you read it now, it's almost like a primer for not only the Australia that Howard built over his eleven years
in office, but also for one nation's policies. And back then it was Asian migration, and he ended up losing the Liberal leadership after cautioning against more Asian migration.
There is some concern about the pace of change involved in the level of Asian migration, and I think any government is entitled to take that into account.
And Australia and more importantly, the Liberal Party at that point, were not so comfortable being so openly racist. This was still an Australia that was reckoning with the white Australia policy. But then you get to the mid nineties and as he said, the times will suit me, and they did. And all it took was the economic insecurity of the early nineties to create the sort of environment where someone like Howard would.
Flourish coming up from punchline the political powerhouse. The Howard comeback in not only five John Howard became Liberal leader after a party room showdown called by Andrew Peacock.
It is certainly in a personal sense that a very significant day, and very important day in my own parliamentary career. I accept the leadership of the Liberal Party with a sense of great responsibility, a profound gratitude that my colleagues had proposed that confidence in me.
And after the public rejected his platform with the nineteen eighty seven election, he was booted as leader by the party in nineteen eighty nine and said this about the chances of a return to leadership.
The prospect of mounting some return leadership bit of his own, he dismisses with scorn as Lazarus with a triple bypass.
It's hard to imagine that at one stage he was almost seen as a laughing stock of Australian politics. So it was a remarkable comeback and assent to power.
It is completely remarkable. In modern terms. You almost cannot imagine that we will ever see somebody who lost as much as Howard did come and take over the leadership of the party given a second or third and then managed to hold that party, you know, almost completely by himself.
In the direction that he wanted, but not necessarily because Australia suddenly became more conservative, although there certainly was elements of that, which follows all times of economic insecurity, and I think we can even say that we're seeing that play out now. Howard knew how to seize on that, but he also spent most of his political career up until the mid nineties laying the foundations for the times
that he wanted. Looking back, you can see that Howard had three main priorities that he wanted to address almost immediately. One was his lifelong battle against industrial relations. He really wanted to nobel union power. He could not stand unions, and one of the first things that he did was essentially set up the Waterfront Dispute as a way to break the unions.
It was a human barricade several hundred deep across the road, frustrating the passage of trucks into the Port Botany terminal. On April the seventh, fourteen hundred plus workers were summarily and illegally dismissed from their jobs in the middle of the night with armed guards with dogs onto.
The NA will be once again responsible for damaging businesses and losing people jobs.
And he convinced Australians that the waterfront dispute was about greedy unions who were trying to take advantage of Australians, when what he was doing was handing over worker power to corporations and to their bosses.
In Kens, the Prime Minister defended his actions, saying an efficient waterfront was vital to the country's future.
Unless we create the economic weapons and tools for Australians to compete effectively with the rest of the world.
We're not going to.
The other things that he wanted to do were slow down any steps towards indigenous reconciliation, stop the republic, and stop any slide away from Australia's identity within the anglosphere. And he started that almost immediately.
Australians at this generation should not be required to accept, build and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.
And the other thing that he wanted to do was reform the tax system. So he was an economic conservative, so he set about reforming the beginnings of Australia's tax system and we still see that today with baked in middle class welfare, a housing market that's out of control.
I mean i'my slowly and you're taking this into episode two at a rated knots stop for that.
Yet all of those things we can trace back to Howard.
No matter where you stand on Howard's politics, there's little doubt than purely political terms, he was the most gifted politician of his time. A mixture of rigid ideologue and fleet footed pragmatist.
He was really slick, but not obviously so so. I mean the year before he was elected in nineteen ninety five, he was saying about what Keating was doing at the time, no one owns the national identity.
Let me say, mister speaker, that the interests of eighteen and a half million Australians are more important than the identity of one.
That was basically him saying, somebody telling us what the national identity is is not correct, because we know instinctively what the national identity was.
And if we do want to achieve change that unifies and doesn't divide, then we need to choose a method of facilitating that change that the entire Australian community can feel comfortable about.
And we are still having the arguments around Australia's national identity that were put in place when average Joe John Howard came along and said, oh, actually, I just think that it's an Zac Day and Australia Day and that nobody is better than anybody else, which we all know is a dog whistle. But he was so effective at it that nobody could really get a handle on how to counter him. At the time.
You argue Howard didn't invent the culture wars, but he did master them. What did he understand about identity politics that others didn't.
He understood about identity politics that it truly was emotional, that it was not rational, it was not something intelligent, It's not something that you necessarily could teach people. It was about weaponizing feelings. Howard just absolutely mastered being average.
So if he chose three words, they'd be I hope I'd like to be seen as an average Australian blag.
So most people saw him as being quite benign, bumbling.
As a person. I think somebody very much with quintessential Australian values.
But that was a very cultivated political costume that he was wearing. He knew exactly who he was speaking to, and.
I can't think of I can't think of a nobler description of anybody than to be called an average Australian blag.
He was speaking to Australians who felt they had been left behind. Howard Cell was going, Oh, I'm not actually selling you anything. I'm just pointing out that you are right to feel discomforted by all of this. And while he was doing that, while he was started waging a
lot of these culture wars. At the same time, he was winding back union power, he was winding back government regulations, he was winding back a government support and all of these other things that people had relied on for community, for organizing, for being able to, you know, actually get ahead. He presented all of this to the Australian people in a way where they felt he was speaking for them, even when what he was doing was essentially setting them
up for failure. What he did was set us up for generations of inequality, you know, division, and put us backwards not only on the world stage but also domestically.
The other politically seismic event of nine ninety six was Pauline Hanson's made in speech to Parliament.
Iron most Australians want our immigration policy policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped Iasians between nineteen.
Eighty four and ninety did Howard see the speech and the reaction to it as a threat or an opportunity.
Oh, it was absolutely an opportunity. And he had learnt from nineteen eighty eight where he had gone out on a limb when it came to migrant Asian migration, how far he could go as somebody who was in the mainstream, and how he would be held to account for what he said. So he did not criticize Pauline Hansen.
People do feel able to speak a little more freely and a little more openly about what they feel. In a sense, the pall of censorship on certain issues has been lifted.
It wasn't until the lead up to the nineteen ninety eight Queensland state election where Pauline Hansen was starting to become a force in Queensland and threatening to take Ellen Pece. It's that Howard started playing things a little bit tougher.
The Prime Minister has made his strongest attack yet on Independent MP Pauline Hanson's anti Asian stand.
She is wrong when she says that Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians. She is wrong to seek scapegoats for society's problems.
And it wasn't a moral stance that he took, but he did do a decree for political reasons that she was to be put last. But then we also have to remember that when she came back into the Senate in twenty sixteen, it was John Howard who gave the Liberals and the Nationals the approval to be able to work with her, effectively lifting the ban of putting her last by saying that you have to work with her. Now, of course, ten years on, we know that that has
cannibalized the Liberal and the National Party. That one nation is once again rising in the polls, and they're so far. They're doing it at the expense of the Liberals Nationals, And ironically, from a polling position, if they did do the put her last, it actually would probably stemy enough of her vote at an election booth where they wouldn't
be as panicked about losing as many seats. So you could say that John Howard set the Liberals and Nationals on the path that we see today for election annihilation.
Amy, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you.
Next time on the Howard effect.
When you think about the Howard government, you think of strong economic management.
There is no doubt, my fellow Australians, that this country desperately needs a new taxation system.
Not the circumstance of high iron ore prices, a mining boom, and increased tax receipts all coming in at the same time to basically give him a giant treasure load of revenue.
I haven't found anybody in seven and a half years shake their fist and mean say how I'm angry with you for letting the value of my house increase.
Buoid by the mining boom, Howard funded sweeping tax cuts and rewired the tax system so higher earners received larger breaks than those on lower incomes.
It was Howard readdressing the tax system to put more onus and responsibility on individual taxpayers rather than richer people and corporates who actually could afford to be paying more tax to pay for the services that we all need and use.
That's tomorrow. See there