John Howard appeared to be a practical and commonsensical man of affairs. In reality, he was not only an unusually ideological prime minister but also, according to an entirely accurate self-estimation, the most conservative leader in the history of Australia. Influenced by the patterns of thought that had taken hold since Thatcher and Reagan, he attempted to reshape Australia along neo-conservative and neo-liberal lines.
Already it is becoming clear that his attempt has failed. A decade ago, when John Howard led the Coalition and Pauline Hanson fascinated the country, the ideological balance of the electorate tilted very clearly to the Right. Since 2007, however, opinion polls have consistently shown that younger Australians have abandoned the Liberal Party. They have also shown, as George Megalogenis pointed out in the Australian on 11 April, that the parties of the Left (Labor and the Greens) have a very comfortable lead over the parties of the Right (the Liberals and the Nationals). The meaning of this shift in the ideological balance has one obvious party-political implication. Howard’s attempted makeover of Australia – his populist conservatism especially on matters connected to ethnicity and race; his mimetic pro-Bush foreign policy; his climate change foot-dragging and denialism; the passionate enthusiasm he expressed for American-style capitalism before the arrival of the Great Recession – has bequeathed to his Liberal Party successors a toxic legacy that they must overcome.
22 July 2009