John Howard
Why did Australia vote against the Voice referendum?
... (read more)Patrick Mullins reviews 'A Sense of Balance' by John Howard
Since his (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage comparisons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy. And while he does not don the knightly robes that Menzies did on the cover of his volume of essays, The Measure of the Years (1970), Howard does ape Ming’s serene, far-seeing gaze on the dust jacket of this, his third book, A Sense of Balance.
... (read more)Lyndon Megarrity reviews 'Trials and Transformations, 2001–2004: The Howard government, Volume III' edited by Tom Frame
Queensland MP Charles Porter’s book, The ‘Gut Feeling’ (1981), relates the story of former prime minister Billy Hughes being pressed in the 1940s to pass judgement on a Liberal Federal Council statement on an industrial issue. ‘No bloody good,’ he pronounced. ‘Not sufficiently ambiguous!’ If, as Hughes implied, ambiguity is a key virtue needed for political survival, then by 2001 the Howard Liberal–National Party Government appeared to have embraced it. Indeed, any objective analysis of the Howard era is fraught with difficulties because of these two factors: the verbal, unrecorded nature of some political incidents, and the emotive left-versus-right culture war that marked John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007).
... (read more)Lyndon Megarrity reviews 'Back from the Brink, 1997–2001: The Howard Government Volume II' edited by Tom Frame
Back from the Brink is the second volume of a projected four-volume series that investigates the performance of the four Howard governments (1996–2007). The first dealt with the Liberal– National Party coalition’s election in 1996 and their first year in power. The work under review focuses on the period from ...
... (read more)The unusual case of David Hicks is one of the most spectacular and politically supercharged miscarriages of justice in Australian history. Like the infamous Boer War case of Breaker Morant, Hicks was politically scapegoated and grossly denied a fair trial. Unlike Morant – a war criminal who murdered prisoners of war – even Hicks’s accuser, the United States, n ...
John Howard has long been concerned with countering what he regards as the domination of Australian historical writing by the left. His project was initiated before he gained the prime ministership, most notably in his Menzies Lecture of 1996, in which he claimed that most of the distinctiveness and achievements of Australian politics were grounded in the liberal tradition. It continued during the ‘history wars’ from 1996 to 2007 – a subsidiary element in his largely successful attempt to reshape the contemporary understanding of liberal individualism. His massive new book on Menzies and his times is the summa of this enterprise.
... (read more)Paul Morgan reviews 'The People Smuggler: The True Story of Ali al Jenabi, the "Oskar Schindler of Asia"' by Robin de Crespigny
Do you remember them on the television news? Stumbling down gangplanks onto our shores, with flickering cubes of light instead of heads. Wearing strange clothes and eating stranger food. They harboured terror and disease. They were said to sacrifice their children. How did it come to this?
... (read more)John Hirst reviews 'Lazarus Rising' by John Howard and 'A Journey' by Tony Blair
John Howard and Tony Blair both came to the prime ministership in landslides, Howard in 1996, Blair in 1997. They were on opposite sides of the traditional political divide, Howard leading a Liberal Party opposed to Australian Labor and Blair leading the British Labour Party ...
... (read more)The Australian ritual of a federal election campaign every two or three years is one in which voters are invited to participate in hyperbole. Reality is magnified a thousand times as the actors perform a finely choreographed political quadrille while their every word and gesture are scrutinised for meaning and analysed for nuance. Yet for all the expensive and lavish hoopla that now constitutes an election campaign, Australians are a reluctant people when it comes to getting rid of governments, however short they fall in expectations. On only eleven occasions in the 107 years of federation have they opted for change.
... (read more)Patrick Allington reviews 'Exit Right: The unravelling of John Howard' by Judith Brett and 'Poll Dancing: The story of the 2007 election' by Mungo MacCallum
Since the November federal election, kicking John Howard while he’s down has become something of a national pastime. While Howard’s take no-prisoners-except-on-Nauru behaviour has now exposed him to gleeful mass taunting, the idea that the end of his resilient political career has instantly created a noble Australia, its citizens and institutions cleansed and renew ed, is wishful thinking. In this context, Judith Brett’s new Quarterly Essay injects some welcome clear-headedness. Brett rains blows on Howard, but she is not a Howard-hater in the counterproductive and grandiose style of, say, Phillip Adams. Instead, she takes aim at the former prime minister in a characteristically nuanced and astute way. She bridges a gap – too often in Australia, a gulf – between scholars and interested laypeople, offering prose that is accessible and lively but that avoids dumbing down complex issues.
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