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Chris
Aulich and Roger Wettenhall (eds)
Howard’s Second and Third Governments:
Australian Commonwealth Administration
1998–2004
UNSW Press, $39.95 pb, 269 pp, 0 86840
783 6
A
FLURRY OF BOOKS have been produced about
the cultural aspects of John Howard’s
governments: for example, Andrew Markus’s
Race: John Howard and the Remaking of
Australia (2001), Stuart Macintyre and
Anna Clark’s The History Wars (2003)
and Carol Johnson’s Governing Change:
From Keating to Howard (2000). Useful
edited collections have also been produced
on each of the elections of 1996, 1998
and 2001, and on the republic referendum.
In 2004 Robert Manne published an edited
collection called The Howard Years, which
was wider ranging than the cultural agenda,
but generally critical in its tenor. But
nine years since Howard defeated Paul
Keating, there is still not a great deal
of analysis.
Right-wing commentators are prone to see
this as the fault of the left, some sort
of conspiracy of inattention to rob Howard
and his governments of their place in
the history books; and they contrast it
with the much greater volume of writing
the Hawke–Keating period had generated
after the same length of time in government.
Here is a book to placate them.
It is on the second and third Howard governments,
and is eighth in a series on the history
of Australian Common-wealth Administration
produced by a group of Canberra-based
public administration scholars. The series
began with the first Hawke government
in 1983 and includes an earlier volume
on the first Howard government, edited
by Gwynneth Singleton (2000), and also
published by UNSW. Its distinc-tive aim
is to cover developments in public administration
and the structures of governance, as well
as some of the key policy areas. So it
includes chapters on public sector reform,
privatisation and outsourcing, and non-departmental
public bodies. Somewhat allaying fears
about the fate of the public service under
Howard, John Halligan argues that after
the rather heavy-handed reform of the
public service in the first term, by the
third a more reflective approach had developed
and the public service was being reinvigorated.
A chapter on federalism would have been
welcome here, as the Howard governments
have departed from the Liberal party’s
commitment to states rights and become
as centralising as any Labor government.
Harry Evans, Clerk of the Senate, contributes
an excellent chapter on the relations
between the government and the parliament.
In the first volume, he had noted that,
frustrated by their lack of control of
the Senate, the government seemed to be
exploring ways of drawing the Senate’s
teeth, either by altering the electoral
system or the conditions governing joint
sittings. In the third term, after the
2001 election, the Department of Prime
Minister and Cabinet produced a discussion
paper with drastic suggestions about altering
the constitutional balance between the
Senate and the House of Representatives.
Public reception was cool, and there was
no chance the recommendations would survive
a referendum, but it shows just how much
irritation was building in the government
about the Senate. Evans also notes that
as the governments have gone on they have
become less co-operative about the provision
of information for Senate enquiries. In
the 1996–98 term, there were forty-seven
orders for information and only four failures
to comply; in the 2001–04 parliament,
there were eighty-four orders and thirty-seven
failures.
The policies and issues covered are highly
selective, and the chapters very uneven.
There is nothing on health policy, the
media and telecommunications, or industrial
rela-tions reform. Instead of an overall
look at economic policy, there is a rather
narrow chapter on tax policy. The best
policy chapters are Will Sanders’s
on indigenous affairs, which he titles
‘Never Even Adequate’, and James
Jupp’s lucid and well-informed chapter
on immigration and multiculturalism. Philip
Mendes has a chapter on welfare reform
and mutual obligations, which argues that
the Howard government’s social welfare
policies have been dominated by two ideological
tendencies: a neo-liberal belief that
social security payments should be restricted
in the interests of the freedom of the
market; and the social conservative concern
to reinforce the traditional institutions
such as the family, albeit both moderated
by Howard’s electoral pragmatism.
This seems to me a somewhat ideological
reading of social security under Howard,
one that focuses on the rhetoric rather
than the outcomes of policy, and is perhaps
the result of discussing social policy
independent of tax and labour market policy.
Recent work by Anne Harding, from the
National Centre for Economic and Social
Modelling, has found that the Howard governments
have in fact overseen a generally progressive
transfer of income and services from the
rich to the poor.
David Adams completes the volume with
a very confused and unsatisfactory chapter
on John Howard’s leadership, subtitled
‘The Enigma Variations’. Adams
makes much of what a mysterious and difficult
man Howard is to know. He presents eight
variations, including, to my astonishment,
one that is called Judith Brett’s
John Howard. The chapter concludes: ‘[Howard]
has been many things as Prime Minister:
believer, pragmatist, conservative, reformer,
hard-case, a man of emotion. The one thing
he has not been is simple. To paint his
portrait we need a palette containing
a dazzling array of greys.’
A chapter that can’t do better than
that would have been better left out.
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