The knack of successful political leadership in parliamentary democracies is to balance the politics of unity with those of division, to put yourself forward as the representative and protector of the nation as a whole while using every trick in the book to attack and sideline your opponents. The qualities needed for the two tasks are diametrically opposed. For the first, a leader needs to be able to find common grounds of national belief and experience which override the differences, to be able to build consensus, to develop the best possible policies to defend the national interest, and to use language in ways that bind rather than divide. For the second, a leader needs aggression, a forensic eye for opponents' weaknesses, a capacity for scorn, and not too much reflection on the beams in their own eye. And to achieve this balancing act, a leader needs to be a master illusionist, able to convince both him or herself and enough of the public to win government that there are no unworkable contradictions between the thrusts and parries of adversarial conflict and the purposes of governing in the national interest.

Since at least mid-May, when Peter Costello's budget failed to lift the government's approval ratings, it has become clear to John Howard, to many in the Liberal Party, and even to a perplexed and out-of-touch press gallery, that Howard is no longer the master illusionist he once was. He admitted as much when he said there were no more rabbits left in the hat. When and how did Howard turn from a master illusionist into (as Bill Bowtell has put it) the Wizard of Oz, just an old man behind a curtain after all?

First, we need to remember that almost half the electorate never believed in Howard as the leader of the Australian people, and always saw him primarily as a partisan figure of conflict and division. Left-liberals were appalled by the way he gave permission to Pauline Hanson to air her racist views; by his evasion of responsibility for the children-overboard affair and for the scandalous behaviour of the Australian Wheat Board; by the harshness and hypocrisy of his asylum-seeker policies; by his stacking of public bodies with right-wing warriors; by his government's unrelenting hostility to the ABC; by his bullying of public servants; and so on. Many trade unionists and working-class voters never trusted him not to govern as Liberal governments always do, in the interests of small and big business. And many Australians of ethnic background distrusted his backward-looking, British-centric version of Australian nationalism. These people are all still there. And, as the rising vote for Labor in blue-ribbon middle-class Liberal seats shows, liberal Liberals with moral qualms have also been defecting.

For his first three terms, though, Howard has been a confident master illusionist of the nation. I have argued elsewhere (see in particular Quarterly Essay 19), that Howard has been astonishingly successful in creating a new language of national unity for the Liberals. When he became leader of his party for the second time, in 1995, this seemed an almost impossible task, Keating having so successfully deflected the negativity and divisiveness associated with economic liberalism onto the Liberals. But with astonishing adroitness, Howard shifted attention away from the conflicts of the economy to the cultural unity of the nation, and staged a successful takeover of the symbols and imagery of popular Australian nationalism which had once belonged to Labor. Through Howard's words, the Liberals became the guardians of Australia's traditions of mateship and the fair go, of practical common sense and an endearing informality of manners. And in tracksuits, Akubras and cricket hats, our off-duty prime minister became a reassuringly suburban Australian everyman.