Jack Strocchi attacks what he takes to be the standard leftwing view of Howard as a free-market radical, quoting among others, Alan Kohler, Stephen Kirchner and Max Walsh to support his view of Howard as a crypto-socialist. This gives me the chance to have a test run for my own, more nuanced, assessment of Howard, which will be a book chapter in due course. Comments much appreciated. Here goes
Economic policy under Howard presents a contradictory picture. Sometimes the Howard government appears as a continuation of those of Hawke and Keating, implementing the reforms those governments were unwilling or unable to introduce. At other times, as in its ‘nation-building’ infrastructure exercises, it seems like a throwback to the developmentalist ideas of the 1950s and 1960s. Still more of the time, it appears content to drift, happily taking the credit for a long period of relative economic prosperity and putting forward economic reforms on a purely opportunistic basis, as and when the political climate demands an appearance of action rather than stability.
Although he had not taken a particularly strong ideological stance during his period as Treasurer in the Fraser government, John Howard emerged in the 1980s as the strongest and most consistent advocate of free-market reform in Australian public life. His self-description “most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had” was accurate, at least in the interpretation of conservatism which encompasses radical market-oriented reform as well as conservative views on issues such as family structure and immigration.
Howard was strongly identified with a program of market reform that presented its task as dismantling the institutions built up in Australia from Federation to the 1970s, and designed to insulate Australian workers and families from the vagaries of national and global markets. In place of these policies the reformers aimed to ‘open up’ Australia to market forces, scrapping tariff protection and the arbitration system, abandoning Keynesian policies of macroeconomic stabilisation and reversing the growth in the welfare state since World War II.
Howard’s election defeat in 1987, and the failure of John Hewson’s radical Fightback! program in 1993 led him to the conclusion that the Australian electorate was inherently averse to programmatic reform. This conclusion was reinforced by the failure of Paul Keating to excite the electorate with ?Big Picture? issues such as reconciliation and republicanism, issues where Howard ran successful negative campaigns.
As a result, when he was unexpectedly returned to the Liberal Party leadership in 1995, Howard presented himself as a changed, not to say reinvented, man. He hoped, he said, for a ‘relaxed and comfortable’ Australia, words that were intended, and taken, as code for the end of the ‘storm and stress’ of the microeconomic reform policies adopted under the Hawke and Keating governments. The GST, which had assumed iconic status for both supporters and opponents of microeconomic reform was ‘dead’ and would ‘never ever’ be revived. In the leadup to the 1996 election, Howard promised not to cut public expenditure in a range of areas even if, as was generally expected, the budget deficit turned out to be worse than Labor had claimed.
Instead, immediately following the election, Howard announced that the deficit, now dubbed ?Beazley’s Black Hole? was so large that only ‘core’ promises could be implemented. The 1996 Budget introduced a wide range of cuts in expenditure, most of which violated promises now reclassified as ‘non-core’.
An obvious interpretation of these events is that Howard’s reinvention before the 1996 election was purely tactical and that, in reality, his commitment to radical economic reform was undiminished. The reality is more complex. Although Howard still adheres to the economic policy ideas of the 1980s, the belief that Australia urgently needs more market-oriented reform has ceased to drive him or his government.
John Quiggin 
John, I think the full quote was something like “I want Australia to be relaxed and comfortable with its past, relaxed and comfortable about the present and relaxed and comfortable about the future.” I took it at the time, and still do, to be a reference to black armband history. That is, stop worrying about what we did to the blacks in the past.
Howard does seem more relaxed about economic matters than he was in the 80s. The shocking current account deficit seems to be nothing to worry about now. Government is still as big as it ever was. I guess that’s called pragmatism.
Prof John “Nuanced” Quiggin thinks my “Howard is a closet socialist” theory lacks subtlety, compared to his own “sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon”
This gives me the chance to have a test run for my own, more nuanced, assessment of Howard,
Hey, this is the blogoshphere man.
Nuance is for wimps.
He has ever been a political pragmatist on economic issues, and would probably describe himself as such. He thought the political current was running towards economic liberalism in the 1980s – he thinks it’s running against it now. In both cases he was going with the flow.
But he has always had deeply conservative instincts on social issues. He was probably the sort of teenager who listened to Pat Boone rather than the Rolling Stones.
That’s what really irritates me, because that sort of conservatism is chronically prone to hypocrisy – a quality for which he has a gift. And it can drift into a sort of soft fascism where the state tries to enforce ‘morality’.
My reading of Howard’s commitment to free market reform is that he’s never had any. His perceived past free market economics is really an extension of his social conservatism – essentially it was all about creating a society of sturdy petrol station owners. For instance, his anti-unionism and commitment to industrial relations reform (this was his pet cause economically) didn’t have anything to do with any Chicago school understanding of labour markets – it’s simply that he saw unions as inimical to his small business yeoman struggling to make a buck for his picket fenced family. What about the GST? For one thing, it’s all about spending = bad, saving = better, again the yeoman ideal. Free trade? Good but also because farmers benefit. This explains why he is so blase about free trade in other areas and blase about micro reform generally. Howard is not a free marketer, he is a Poujadist,
I think that’s good Jason. He has always been a conservative, which was married to the rhetoric of free-markets when it was in, but he’s been happy to go with the flow now that reform is somewhat on the nose, or in the background (where he placed it in his initial election, as John notes). Neo-conservatism comes more naturally to the man … the upshot of which is that his basic business/economic policy approach boils down to keeping corporations happy, not economists. This is not to say that he did not put some micro-runs on the board early … as problematic as their outcomes may be.
Jack Strocchi here:
The major reason I wrote the Howard blog, apart from wanting to annoy anti-Howard people, was to establish how far Howard is from either the serious-heavy-nasty Right wing stuff:
US Economics: Norquistian (capitalist) wing of the Republicans
EU Culture: LePenian (racist) wing of the Nationalists
The Australian Cultural Left never tire of denouncing Howard, yet:
It was Howard who ran Hanson off the political stage, co-opting the Far Right back to mainstream.
It was Howard who emebedded the GST, the best long term finance source for community services.
It was Howard who has rescued the immigration & refugee program from Labor’s mass rorts and returned it to high volume/non-discrimination.
And it was Howard who helped liberated Timor, Afghan, & Iraq, giving the fascists & fundamentalists a bloody nose.
Some Right Winger!
The Left does not know how lucky it is.
Jack
Running a racist politician off the scene by adopting her policies is not something to be proud of.
I know exactly how (un)lucky we are to have Howard, that’s why I can’t wait for his departure.
Howard’s commitment to free market economic policy is patchy at best. He has
— continued protection for the car and TCF industries
— implemented a number of industry policy schemes (“Investing in the Nation”, etc)
— created a special position high in the bureaucracy, the Strategic Invesment Counsellor, whose job appears to be to give subsidies worth hundreds of millions of dollars (each) to the rest seekers with the squeakiest wheels
— kept the highest marginal income tax rate at 48%, and only slightly increased the income threshhold at which it cuts in
— funded the Alice Springs to Darwin rail line, a piece of infrastructure that is not merely a dog, it is a dog with fleas.
People talk about his workplace relations reform as being free market. Really? The Workplace Relations Act is 600 pages long. How free market can it be if work places are governed by a law of that size and complexity?
The GST is certainly not free market. It is just another way to raise taxe revenues, invented by French socialists in the 1950s.
For some reason, there are people who think that the Howard Government’s economic policy = the 1996 Budget. That budget really was a piece of free market ideology, to be expected from a recently elected conservative government that had spent 13 frustrating years in opposition. The philosophy behind that budget lasted about 9 months before the inevitable pragmatism of government took over.
Howard has vented his right wing spleen in many ways, but they’ve all been in social and cultural policy — locking up refugees, trying to nobble the ABC, vetoing heroin injecting rooms, giving a nod and a wink to Hanson and her prejudices, emasculating the Native Title Act, killing support for multiculturalism, promoting the Blainey view of Australian history, fostering a cultural war between the “elite” and “ordinary Austalians” (aka in 1996/7/8 the “battlers”), reorienting family payments to stay at home mothers — the list goes on and on and on and on and on.
But on economic policy, he has been very pragmatic. The truly radical free market reforms — National Competition Policy, seriously cutting tariffs, deregulating this and privatising that, were enacted by Hawke and Keating.
I did not call Howard a crypto-anything. I linked to Kohler as calling him a big spending/taxing conservative, which I think is an accurate characterisation.
John Howard is, above all else, a politician and his record in office reflects the political imperatives that got him there and keep him there.
It is worth recalling that earlier in his career, Howard defined himself in opposition to Fraser-Peacock. Once the ideas of the dries became completely mainstream and assimilated into public policy, some re-definition was in order, and Howard has successfully carved out a new niche. Howard’s former free market radicalism no longer suits his political imperatives as he perceives them.
I guess I would echo the thoughts of Jason, derrider and uncle Milt. Howard is a politicians politician and certainly no economic liberal.
The Liberals always look more liberal in opposition… and then run back to mediocrity when in government. On the other hand, the ALP tend to paint themself red in opposition, but when handed the reigns they tend to come back to the middle also.
My summary of Australian politics at the moment is that the ALP is a social demoratic party because that’s their principles and the coalition is a social democratic party because they are conservative and social democracy existed yesterday.
http://www.ldp.org.au
Stephen, I agree exactly with your analysis, and didn’t mean to link you specifically to Jack’s term “crypto-socialist”, but merely to refer to your piece as one of Jack’s supporting links. If I get time, I’ll edit the post to get things more precise.
Let’s cut through all this tedious “economics” filler and get to the heart of the matter. Derrida derider opined that the stripling Howard would have favoured ‘Pat Boone over the Rolling Stones.’
Not so. In a legendary interview he gave to David Leser, and subsequently published in Leser’s “The Whites Of Their Eyes,” Howard owned a liking for Bob Dylan’s music – though not necessarily the words. “Blowing in the Wind” got special mention.
The image of the bespectacled Howard Minor, hearing aid at fullbore, rocking in an understated, chappish sort of way to a lyric-free version of “Blowing in The Wind” is – you have to agree – a pretty singular one.
He also claimed that “The Bonfire of The Vanities,” Tom Wolfe’s moral fable about yuppie self-destruction, was his favourite novel. Make of that what you will.
Stroch is right. Howard liberate East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq. He saved immigration. He’s given Aborigines their place in the sun. His thoughtful contributions to multiculturalism like “I certainly don’t want people of that type in this country” and “you can’t cherry pick the Australian way of life” are things that I will always be proud of as an Aussie. And a real Aussie, not some trendy ABC-listening wanker.
Can I have the bucket Jack?
Jack, you forgot the republic.
Howard is the only PM to actually risk the adoption of a model he didn’t support when he didin’t have to.
Yet he gets the blame for undermining it (the republic).
Keating for all his progressive waffle didn’t have the balls for that!
I agree with Stephen K. Whatever Howard’s true economic bent may be, it takes a back seat to his desire to stay in Office.
People don’t become politicians to be in opposition, after all.
Jim chides me for forgetting the blessed Republic
Howard is the only PM to actually risk the adoption of a model he didn’t support when he didin’t have to.
In this case I think Howard was being a true machievellian. He used jujitsu principles in tackling his opponents, letting their own offensive energy work against them.
He offered the Republicans a chance to rewrite the constitution and they went ahead and riddled their feet with bullet holes.
The Queen and I had a good laugh at the antics of the “cultural elites” on display at the Constitutional convention, God bless Her.
All those high-flying lawyers, stuck-up academics and up-themselves celebrites couldn’t run a school tuck shop.
Save the catty asides Jack. The Dark One sunk the republic using social-choice theory, pure and simple.
Bob Dylan without the lyrics?!! What on earth was he smoking?
cs moans:
Save the catty asides Jack. The Dark One sunk the republic using social-choice theory, pure and simple.
And no-one in the clever-clever Republican side woke up to the fact of intransivity of preferences! Republicans aren’t so smart after all.
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