Canberra
John Howard is defying political gravity. After nearly ten years as Prime Minister of Australia he has no serious challengers. Tony Blair, by contrast, hobbles along performing an excellent impression of a fellow in the crippled poultry phase of his leadership. At 66, Howard is 14 years older than Blair. He has served a year longer in office, and he has won four elections to Blair’s three. You might think that Howard would be at least as burdened by scandal, disillusion, infighting, ennui and fatigue as the younger man. But you’d be wrong.
Indeed, Howard is being encouraged by many in the Liberal party — Australia’s equivalent of the Conservative party — to soldier onwards and upwards to a fifth campaign in 2007. Like Blair, Howard has an impatient deputy frothing to take his job. But the Australian PM has been way too canny to set himself an exit date.
Peter Costello, Howard’s long-serving, long-suffering Treasurer, wants his boss to resign after his tenth anniversary in office next March. Most of the government backbench, however, hopes that Howard will stay. If Costello were crazy or brave enough to challenge the PM, he’d fall laughably short of support.
Blair must regard Howard with a mixture of bewilderment, envy and awe. They are chums of a sort, drawn together after the September 11 attacks by their unfaltering support for the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Yet while Blair has struggled to justify Britain’s involvement in the messy conflict, Howard suffers no discernible backlash from Australia’s involvement in the war — unpopular though it is. This is in part a consequence of scale and distance. The war is being fought a long way away, and Howard’s troop commitment has been strategically low-key. Once Saddam Hussein was removed, most crack Australian SAS troops were immediately withdrawn from Baghdad and other danger areas.
The bulk of remaining Australians are based in Al Muthanna, a southern province so safe that an Iraqi official declared recently — and rather embarrassingly for Howard, given the woes of his allies — that they were no longer required. While the US and Britain have suffered heavy casualties, Australia has lost only one soldier: he died last month during a training drill in Kuwait.
Unlike Blair, who won Tory support for Britain’s involvement in Iraq, Australian Labor opposed the war. Yet Howard has benefited from a ramshackle opposition, on its third leader since September 11. Ironically, whenever Howard is questioned by his political opponents about the war, he gleefully and mischievously lauds Blair as a courageous and responsible left-of-centre ally who spreads freedom and democracy.
The fear factor helps to sustain Howard’s war leadership, and the PM employs his national security trump card often and deftly. While there has been no terrorist attack on Australian soil, Australians have been killed in Bali (twice), London and New York. Howard was in Washington on 9/11, and dining with Blair in Downing Street this year when the second wave of (non-fatal) attacks occurred in London.
Call this bad luck or good management, but Howard’s closeness to Bush and Blair, and his curious knack of finding himself in trouble spots, feeds the powerful image of Prime Minister as Great Protector.
Australians haven’t totally abandoned their scepticism, however. The recent flood of warnings about prospective threats — including reports of alleged plots to attack the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and just about every other iconic or prominent antipodean landmark — has persuaded many Australians that the government has been rather overegging the terror pudding. While the public is being cautioned to ‘Be Alert, not Alarmed’, there’s a cynical awareness that heightened fear levels play to the incumbent’s strength. That said, the nation’s ‘she’ll be right’ mentality was shaken in October when police swooped on 18 alleged terrorists — all Muslims — purportedly preparing for violent jihad in Australia, including an attack on Sydney’s nuclear reactor. Forget ‘alert’; this was genuinely alarming.
The London bombings prompted a re-writing of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws and, again, Blair must marvel at Howard’s wizardry and sway. While the British PM recovers from a battering over his failed attempts to detain suspects for 90 days, Howard has won bipartisan support for a parcel of laws including new powers for police to hold citizens without evidence for a fortnight.
Howard’s new laws have angered many in opposition ranks but Labor, fearful of being seen to be out of step with the Great Protector, is committed to backing the PM in his response to the terror threat. Not that it much matters; Howard’s fourth election victory gave him control of the Senate (by one seat) as well as of the House of Representatives. It was the first time in a generation that an Australian government has had a majority in the upper house. Howard can now do pretty much as he likes.
No one, meanwhile, is accusing Howard of running out of policy puff, which is more than can be said of Blair. Besides the terror laws, Howard has legislated for the full privatisation of Telstra, Australia’s equivalent of British Telecom and potentially the biggest float in the nation’s history. While this has been contentious, it is Howard’s pursuit of industrial relations upheaval that ruffles many Australians. Again, Howard cites Blair’s trade union reforms to quieten critics, but the Australian version threatens to emasculate organised labour and erode wages and conditions.
During a parliamentary debate Howard was accused of imposing ‘laws of Thatcherite conservatives’. It was meant as an insult, but the PM leapt up to declare that Lady Thatcher is one of the most significant figures in British history and responsible for the recent resurgence of its economy. ‘I do not walk away from the achievements of that remarkable individual,’ roared Howard. Howard’s dominance is underwritten by the longest economic boom in the nation’s history. While growth is slowing, record profits, low inflation, surplus budgets and surging house prices have made Australians wealthier, if more indebted, than ever. The formidable combination of economic delivery, national security cred and tenacious longevity allows Howard seemingly to transcend the day-to-day static of domestic politics.
Just a dozen years ago the image of Howard as formidable PM was laughable. After a swift rise to Treasurer in the late 1970s, Howard was an unpopular, unsuccessful leader of the opposition. Dumped after losing an election, he absorbed the humiliation and waited. Desperate for stability after years of failure and infighting, the Liberals turned to Howard in 1995, and Howard has never looked back.
Howard is in rude health for an OAP, rising most days at 6 a.m. for a vigorous morning walk. He and wife Janette are political junkies, not obviously taken by anything besides family and politics. Unlike Cherie, Mrs Howard is not interested in a public profile and does not cause her husband any embarrassment. The thought of Janette (or, indeed, John) Howard scouring department stores for freebies or exploiting her position for financial gain is ludicrous.
Like all successful generals, Howard has exploited his share of good fortune. As his government gets older and staler, Blair has been the subject of a series of unflattering books, most recently Sir Christopher Meyer’s depiction of the British PM eager to be ‘up the arse’ of the White House.
There’s been no shortage of political literature in Australia, but most of it dwells on the woes o f the opposition. Howard has been the subject of one over-long, non-bestselling biography, but dissecting Labor has become a booming industry. Mark Latham, the volatile Labor leader beaten in the 2004 election, quit in a huff and published an extraordinarily vitriolic diary, packed with insults directed almost exclusively at his colleagues. For the record, Howard’s current opponent, Kim Beazley, is dismissed by Latham as a weak, grubby, boring, reactive windbag.
Howard’s government is behind in the polls, which is not surprising after a flurry of reform and attacks from the trade unions. Yet the PM’s personal approval rating is strong and, with Australia’s economic prognosis remaining healthy, few doubt that Howard has Labor’s measure.
Dubbed ‘Man of Steel’ by George W. Bush, the Australian PM may yet decide to quit in a blaze of glory. More likely, Howard will decide to fight another election and potentially govern into his seventies. Either way, it will be John and Janette’s choice. Tony and Cherie can only dream of such omnipotence.