Lazarus Rising: The Howard Memoirs

The Hon John Howard AC was one of Australia’s most successful prime ministers, leading the Liberal Party to victory over four elections and becoming the second-longest-serving Prime Minister in the nation’s history. His memoir, Lazarus Rising, released in 2010, records Howard’s three decades in politics and the changes he saw both inside and outside government over that time. On the 4 November 2010, John Howard addressed The Sydney Institute to speak about his book and some of the highlights of his time in office.

LAZARUS RISING: THE HOWARD MEMOIRS

JOHN HOWARD

It’s a great pleasure to be back at The Sydney Institute. Can I start by paying tribute to Gerard and Anne and all the staff of The Sydney Institute. We need organisations like The Sydney Institute; we need their objectivity and we need their balance. It’s even more important because we seem to have a very finely balanced political situation at the present time.

If you talk to anybody under the age of 45 … and you tell them that when Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister of Australia, unemployment was less than two per cent, they look at you aghast.

I always wanted to write a book about my time in politics, not only for the most obvious of reasons, and that is to explain why and how I did things, to defend the record of my government and to explain my contributions, and my errors and omissions, to public life in Australia. But also because I always agreed with Gerard Henderson that the centre-right was deficient when it came to books about politics. The centre-right has tended to vacate the field of book writing for the left. And if we do that, we end up vacating the field of book buying to the left. There are always too many stories and reviews of books written from the left side of politics and far too few from the conservative or Liberal side. What I’ve tried to do therefore, is not only to give an account of my years in politics and the early part of my life – a time of formative influence on what we do in adult life – but also to put into context and to describe certain momentous political events.

If you talk to anybody under the age of 45, perhaps even under the age of 50, and you tell them that when Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister of Australia, unemployment was less than two per cent, they look at you aghast. If you tell them that in 1972, when that change of government occurred, there was bipartisan support for a system of centralised wage-fixation, and nobody believed in reducing tariffs, or floating the dollar they look at you in blank disbelief. So you can imagine that their level of knowledge of the circumstances of the great ALP Split in the 1950s, the Petrov Affair, or indeed the circumstances of the 1951 double dissolution – the first double dissolution Australia had had since 1914 – there is an enormous knowledge gap. What I have tried to do is to briefly describe in my words, according to my research, some of those events. They’re part of the narrative, and the book is intended to be a narrative, a narrative about how political attitudes in this country changed.

When I entered parliament in 1974, nobody talked about “Islamic extremism”, because in its modern form it didn’t exist.

When I entered parliament in 1974, nobody talked about “Islamic extremism”, because in its modern form it didn’t exist. In 1974, in foreign affairs, there was still a preoccupation with the East led by the Soviet Union and the West led by the United States. The Berlin Wall still had 15 years to go before it was demolished, and people still thought in terms of the possibility of the state having a much greater role in the government of the country and in the economic circumstances of the country. I remember the very first budget I listened to. It was delivered by that genuinely decent and likeable man, the late Frank Crean. In this budget speech, Crean spoke of the circumstances that then existed which, because of the depressed state of the private sector, gave us the first real opportunity to begin the process of transferring resources to the public sector. It was seen as a virtue to take advantage of the puny state of the private sector, to enlarge the role of the state. Many years later another Labor Treasurer would justify an enormous injection of money into the economy not to weaken the private sector but rather to stimulate it at a time of global financial challenge.

The highlight, in tumult during that period of time, was an extraordinary chapter in political life – the “Joh for PM” moment. It was the biggest rupture in Coalition relations in my time in politics.

Any autobiography will contain, as this one does, an examination of the life of a political figure. I have divided mine into three parts. The first relates to my early life and my time as Treasurer in the Fraser Government. The second is about those immensely frustrating 13 years in opposition, when the Liberal Party went through the torture of the damned. We felt that we were politically damned for quite a while. The highlight, in tumult during that period of time, was an extraordinary chapter in political life – the “Joh for PM” moment. It was the biggest rupture in Coalition relations in my time in politics. But it strengthened my belief that if our side of politics was to govern effectively, and for a long period of time, it had to do so with a tight coalition between the Liberal Party and the National Party. The final two thirds of the book covers the time in office of the government that carries my name, the Howard Government.

It was a government to which many people made a huge contribution. Peter Costello, as Treasurer, made a magnificent contribution. I say in the book that he was the best ever treasurer this country had. In the early years of the government, Peter Reith was courageous. And he was courageous in what was undoubtedly the most brutal and difficult issue domestically that my government handled. That was the waterfront dispute. The waterfront dispute was visceral; it was difficult and divisive, but it was absolutely essential.

For years, both as a minister in the former Coalition government and also as an opposition figure, business figures had told me repeatedly that something had to be done about the waterfront; something had to be done to end the rorts on the waterfront; something had to be done to lift the appalling container movement rate of about 17 an hour to a practice around the world of 24 or 25. Various governments had tried to do something about it. They’d followed the well-trodden tripartite path – the unions, the employers and the government tried to broker an outcome to improve things that was satisfactory to the three of them. The problem, of course, was that no outcome satisfactory to the three groups represented any kind of reform.

In order to bring about reform of the waterfront, as my book describes, you not only needed a government with the determination to do it, but also a waterfront employer who had the courage and the willingness to see it through. We were lucky that we found that in Patricks. Chris Corrigan of Patricks emerged as a very courageous business figure. He wasn’t always popular with the business community and it wasn’t always popular with him. But he was prepared to implement a strategy to bring about reform.

Of the many things we did, there was none that made this country look more noble than the liberation of East Timor. It was a remarkable political chapter for Australia.

Although not all of the court decisions went our way, in a country governed by the rule of law everybody must accept what courts decide, including prime ministers and ministers for industrial relations. And we did. But the upshot of that very difficult dispute, in which Peter Reith well and truly held his hand in the flame, was an end to the age old restrictive work practices. We saw an enormous boost in the productivity of the Australian waterfront afterwards. And there has been a lasting improvement. Even bodies such as Access Economics, that are sometimes very critical of the reform credentials of governments, made it very clear that a page had been turned. That was a great improvement, and it was of exceptional value to many sections of the community, not least the farmers. Australia had suffered very severely as a result of the rorts on the Australian waterfront.

It was not only in the domestic area we could feel proud. Of the many things we did, there was none that made this country look more noble than the liberation of East Timor. It was a remarkable political chapter for Australia. It was also remarkable in that it united people on the right and left of politics. I was congratulated by people who then immediately said, of course I’ve never voted for you in the past and I have no intention of doing so in the future, but I nonetheless think that you did the right thing in relation to East Timor.

East Timor produced, in General Peter Cosgrove, a remarkably talented leader of men and women, probably the best known military figure that this country has had since Sir Thomas Blamey at the end of World War II. It was also a dispute and an event that enabled us to work in close collaboration with the United Nations. I wasn’t always the number one boy as far as the United Nations establishment was concerned. I didn’t always believe, and I still don’t, that some of the attitudes taken by the United Nations necessarily represented the best defence of liberty around the world, particularly of some of the resolutions that have been passed in the United Nations in relation to Israel and the Palestinian people. But that is another issue, which I won’t deal with at length tonight.

I had an exchange with Condoleezza Rice about the gun control issue. She told me, referring to the 43^rd President, “You and the President seem to agree on a lot of things.” I said, “I don’t really think that we agree on gun control laws.”

I did discover, incidentally, that it’s always a bit dangerous to talk about how proud you are of some of your domestic achievements when addressing a foreign audience. Not long after losing office in 2007, I went to Texas. There I visited College Station, which is the location of the library of the forty-first president of the United States, George H W Bush. We had a very pleasant gathering, and there were some two or three hundred people in the auditorium. They were obviously very staunch Republican supporters and therefore, almost by definition, they didn’t think I was too bad a bloke. They listened to what I had to say and were all very warm. Then somebody got up and said, “What are you most proud of Prime Minister?” They still call you Prime Minister in those countries; it’s a quaint American habit. I answered, “Well look I’m very proud of the fact that we left the country with a healthy surplus, and that we got rid of all that government debt. I’m very proud of what we did in East Timor. And I’m very proud of the national gun control laws that I instituted.” You could hear a gasp – “Oooooh.” I thought, well perhaps I’d better move on to another subject. I learned that you don’t talk about gun control laws in Texas.

I had an exchange with Condoleezza Rice about the gun control issue. She told me, referring to the 43^rd President, “You and the President seem to agree on a lot of things.” I said, “I don’t really think that we agree on gun control laws.” She replied, “I don’t think you do, and what’s more Prime Minister you ought to understand that when and where I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s one of the first things I learnt from my father was how to use a gun.” That gave me a particular perspective to that issue. However, I was proud of what we did in relation to guns. It was a case where the immense authority of the office was used to achieve a very positive outcome. That decision was not easy for my colleagues in the National Party, or for quite a number of rural Liberals.

Quite a strong theme of the book is that political parties in opposition have responsibilities, as well as political parties in government.

In the book, I traverse the great reforms, economically, that have occurred in Australia over the last 30 years. At the beginning of the 1980s it was very clear that we needed five big reforms: we needed to fix our tax system, we needed to deregulate the financial system, we needed to do something about our high levels of tariff protection, and we needed to start the process of privatising government owned bodies that should be in private enterprise hands. We also needed to do something about our industrial relations system. Over the ensuing 25 years, the story of Australian politics is essentially what happened in relation to those five things. In part, subsequent chapters in my book are a narrative of my own contribution to those reforms, and I emphasise this. Not only in government but also in opposition. Quite a strong theme of the book is that political parties in opposition have responsibilities, as well as political parties in government. The idea that you only do anything serious about reform when you are in government and you can do nothing about it when you are in opposition is completely false. From a policy point of view, two or three of the most rewarding years that I had in parliament were between 1990 and 1993, when I was the Industrial Relations and Employment spokesman in the opposition, then led by John Hewson. It was an opportunity to argue a case from opposition, a case that I believed in very strongly, and a case of industrial relations reform that I felt Australia needed.

That saga of reform, over the last 25 years, and the changes that were made in those five areas, saw both sides of politics make a contribution.

During that period of time, the opposition was able to shift public opinion. A Newspoll (I always read Newspoll – I haven’t known a political leader who doesn’t sweat on polls and take notice of them) at one stage at the time which said that 64 per cent of the Australian people believe that somebody should have the right to conclude an employment contract without the intervention of a trade union if that is what that person wanted. This represented a high watermark of the belief that people should have the right, subject to decent minimum conditions, of negotiating their own future outside the reach of the union movement if that is what they wanted.

But that saga of reform, over the last 25 years, and the changes that were made in those five areas, saw both sides of politics make a contribution. I have always acknowledged that; and I did when I was prime minister. A big contribution to that process was made by the Labor Party in government, particularly in the years of Bob Hawke’s government. And decisions relating to financial deregulation and tariff reform were very important economic decisions. If you look at those five areas you will acknowledge that contributions were made by both sides.

There was one important difference between the major parties. In opposition we were more supportive of and accommodating towards the Labor Party’s reforms than they were when they were in opposition. We supported tariff reductions. We supported financial deregulation, because the blueprint for that had been laid out by Keith Campbell’s report which I’d established when I was Treasurer. Yet, when we were in government, we received no generosity from the opposition. All of our reforms – taxation reform, industrial relations reform, the privatisation of Telstra – all of them were bitterly opposed by the Labor Party in opposition.  So, you’ll forgive me, and I don’t want to sound too partisan on an occasion like this, for rolling my eyes when I hear the current government call on the opposition to be constructive and bipartisan. I don’t remember either Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard being bipartisan or in any way constructive as an opposition in the years that we were in government.

And all of the reforms during my administration were accomplished in the teeth of passionate opposition from the Labor Party. There are obligations on parties in government, and in opposition, to contribute to the process of reform. There is no doubt that one of the reasons Australia, almost alone amongst major Western countries, has come through the global financial down turn, one is that we had a long process, a generation-long process, of economic reform. So that when we entered the furnace, we were in a far better state than just about any other country.

The rollback of industrial changes by the Rudd Government when Julia Gillard was the minister has been a very big mistake. We shall pay for it in a couple of years’ time.

The other explanation of course is to be found in the superb fiscal state left to the incoming government by the former Coalition government, along with the fortuitous reality that providence had given us all these wonderful resources which were in very heavy demand by our trading partners in north Asia – particularly, but not only, China and also Japan and Korea. These were all major reasons why we came through the global financial crisis. That process of economic reform has been important to the economic strength of this country and it’s dealt with very extensively in my book.

The one blot on the copybook is what has happened since 2007 with industrial relations. The rollback of industrial changes by the Rudd Government when Julia Gillard was the minister has been a very big mistake. We shall pay for it in a couple of years’ time when the full ramifications of it work their way through the economy. The issue of industrial relations will need, at some point, to be revisited in the Australian political scene because it’s the first time that a major economic reform has actually been turned over. We’ve actually gone back further than simply abolishing WorkChoices.

The part of WorkChoices that was objectionable and, as I acknowledge in the book, was politically in error, was the abolition of the No Disadvantage test. This allowed the unions to run a very effective fear campaign that people would lose their penalty rates and their overtime loadings, and that was quite damaging in a political sense. There’s no doubt in my mind that the changes made by the Labour Party have taken industrial relations a lot further back than that. We still have a situation where all individual contracts have been removed, and they’d operated for something like ten years before WorkChoices, quite successfully.

In conclusion I should note a couple of foreign policy issues. In an overriding sense the most pleasing aspect about foreign relations was that we were able as a government to further deepen our relationship, our very important relationship with the United States. This is a relationship above and beyond the personal links between any serving President and serving Prime Minister. It goes beyond individuals. We were not only able to do that, but we were at the same time able to intensify our links with China. Not on the basis of kowtowing in any way but on the basis that there was mutual interest in building the relationship recognising at all times that our culture and our politics were very different.

That achievement was symbolised by two days in October 2003, when on one day President Bush addressed a joint sitting of the Australian parliament, and on the following day President Hu Jintao addressed a joint sitting of the same parliament. President Hu Jintao was undertaking his first visit abroad as president of China. Neither of those men felt any sense of embarrassment, nor any sense of being given equal billing rather than prominence on their own, by reason of the fact that they were speaking on successive days to the Australian parliament. Each was perfectly relaxed about the depth, although recognising the difference in the intensity of the relationship between the two countries. I thought that was a very significant achievement.