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Almost exactly 30 years ago, John Howard ended Labor’s 13 years of federal government. He sent then prime minister Paul Keating packing – along with his vision of a culturally renovated Australia that reconciled with Indigenous Australians, became a republic, and learned to live comfortably and productively with Asia.
In a new book, former Guardian political reporter Amy Remeikis, now chief political analyst at The Australia Institute, argues many of today’s intractable social problems – housing, failure to Close the Gap, increasingly privatised education – were caused (or made worse) by the Howard government’s policies.
Review: Where it all went wrong: The case against John Howard by Amy Remeikis (Scribner)
His promotion of One Australia, which rejected multiculturalism and opposed a treaty with Aboriginal Australians, laid the foundations for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and the Liberal Party’s pull to the right on immigration and multiculturalism.
She believes Howard changed this country more in the last three decades than almost any other modern politician.
The achievements of the Hawke-Keating Labor government that preceded Howard in deregulating the economy, and the churn of Liberal leaders during those years, are the book’s back story. But Remeikis is chiefly interested in how, in 2026, we should judge Howard’s 11 years of government (1996-2007).
As her book’s title, Where it All Went Wrong: The Case Against John Howard, indicates, she judges it harshly. The dominant narrative of his political success and policy acumen is wrong, she argues. And worsening Howard’s impact, subsequent Liberal leaders have essentially taken their direction from his government – with no new policy thinking in the past dismal decade and no sign of any to come.
Take housing. House prices started departing from wages in 2000, after Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, halved the capital gains tax and subsequently allowed superannuation funds to invest in housing, Remeikis reminds us. This turned housing from shelter to an investment asset. It created a landlord class and priced young people without access to family capital out of home ownership.
It is now impossible for a sole earner on the average national wage to buy a house in any of Australia’s capital cities without help. This is a national crisis and people are angry – but not everyone, and there’s the rub. People who already own a house are richer.
As Howard is oft-reported saying, no one complained to him about the value of their house increasing. The Liberal Party is girding its loins to oppose the reduction in the capital gains tax discount Jim Chalmers is considering for the May budget. And now Treasury is also considering limiting negative gearing, to just two investment properties.
Remeikis builds her case that Howard’s mean and sneaky policies have made Australia a worse place than it might have been by sweeping through a vast range of policy areas. Culture wars, race, Indigenous rights, asylum seekers and migration, housing, privatisation, revenue and managing the economy, industrial relations and wages, welfare and unemployment.
And of course, foreign policy, under the heading “America’s Bitch”, as Keating’s vision of a more independent Australia was replaced by Howard’s commitment to being America’s best friend, and following it into war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There’s plenty of detail. Much of it will be new to today’s readers, who were children when Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech attacking Asian migration and the special treatment of Aboriginal people – and Howard failed to slap her down.
When Howard stubbornly refused to apologise to the Stolen Generations for the terrible suffering inflicted on them by government policies of child removal. When he denied the captain of Norwegian freighter MV Tampa permission to land 433 asylum seekers he had rescued from a sinking vessel according to the law of the sea.
Australia’s harsh and often cruel treatment of refugees begins with Howard, and has cast a long shadow. So has his on-again, off-again support for multiculturalism. Even as he was shoving refugees onto offshore islands, he was ramping up migration. Numbers in 2007 were double what they were in 1996, Remeikis writes.
There’s an irony here. As diaspora communities from around the world grew, they challenged the usefulness of Howard’s vernacular nationalism. At the turn of the century, Howard’s praise for Australians’ practical mateship and appeals to the Anzac legend and the Great Don Bradman spoke to many more people than it does now, when 31.5% of our population was born overseas.
The collapse of the Liberal party’s metropolitan vote at the last election can partly be explained by its failure to win enough support from the overseas-born, especially Chinese and Indian Australians.
I do think Remeikis fails to give Howard credit where it is due: namely, the introduction of our consumption tax, the GST. This was not as comprehensive as it might have been, had the Australian Democrats not insisted on various exemptions to pass the bill in the senate – but it was nevertheless a major reform that lessened the tax system’s reliance on taxing income.
She also gives Howard more agency than I think is warranted, sometimes writing as if he were calling all the shots, rather than leading a government with other effective players in it. She is right, though, that he knew how to use power. She is also right to wish our current government were a little more like him in this respect.
Remeikis argues Howard’s commitment to One Australia constructed a “them” and “us”, with Indigenous Australians and people of colour firmly in the “them” camp and older Anglo Australians smugly “us”, held together by unacknowledged racism.
I felt, at times, she was mirroring this, with people like her – tertiary educated, younger city dwellers – as “us”, and people who responded to Howard’s version of nationalism very firmly positioned as “them”.
If we are to build a less rancorous, less polarised society, empathy has to go both ways.
