This thread is designed to accommodate anyone who wants to write their own retrospective on John Howard. I won’t impose length limits, or do much moderation, but I remind everyone that the rules regarding civilised discussion remain in effect. If you don’t recall them, please read the comments policy, linked at the top of the page.

So many political careers have come to an end in the last week that it’s not going to be possible to say much about all of them. But John Howard’s thirty or more years in Australian politics deserve some sort of notice beyond what we’ve seen so far, mostly motivated by the internal disputes of the Liberal Party .

I’ll start with the positives. Despite his carefully cultivated ordinariness, Howard was the most substantial figure produced by the Liberal party since the party itself was created by Menzies from the ruins of the old United Australia Party. In important respects, he epitomised the ‘forgotten people’ to whom Menzies appealed, and, on a number of critical occasions (after the Port Arthur massacre, on East Timor, after the Boxing Day tsunami), he represented those people at their best.

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While we wait for the new government take shape, we should be thinking about the first steps in policy (updated a little bit). But it’s impossible to avert our eyes from the trainwreck on the other side of politics.

Perhaps my perspective is skewed a bit by being in Queensland, where a Courier-Mail net poll has overwhelmingly nominated Mickey Mouse as the best choice to lead the State Libs (and indeed, his would be a more accurate name for the party). Not only are the eight members of the Parliamentary Party split down the middle, but they only want the job for the sake of the ex officio position on the State Executive which controls the spoils of defeat over which they are struggling (breaking news on this is that hopeless incumbent Bruce Flegg is about to stand down).

It’s easy to write this lot off as a provincial joke. But it doesn’t seem as if things are much different elsewhere

At this point, Turnbull seems like the only hope the Liberals have for change from within. If he succeeds, the party will be changed beyond recognition from that of Howard and Costello. If he fails, it’s hard to see the Liberal party surviving in its current form.

Reader Stephen Ziguras has sent me this interesting graph on public preferences regarding the choice between lower taxes and more services.

It illustrates what Andrew Norton has called the issue cycle. Although our preferences differ quite a bit on this, I think Andrew and i share much the same political analysis. Voters are broadly satisfied with the moderate social democratic settlement that’s been in place for the last twenty-five years or so. When taxes go up a lot, as they did, thanks to bracket creep in the 1970s, they want tax cuts. When the quality of services like health and education gets squeezed, they want more public money spent on those things.

Those who want to argue for either a substantial enhancement or a substantial cutback in the role of the state have their work cut out for them. In this context, much of the me-tooism we saw in the recent election campaign is not that surprising, and nor is the defeat of the Liberals. There’s not much risk that the state will expand far beyond its current role, and a pretty strong feeling that lots of public services are in need of expensive repairs.