Howard Grinds Out A Record

Editorial - Canberra Times

Prime Minister John Howard is no Don Bradman, nor an Adam Gilchrist. As batsmen go, his models might be Bill Lawry or Geoff Boycott. He's got the runs on the board and in the record books, but hardly anyone can recall an elegant stroke or a glorious innings - even anything much in the way of boundaries. But he's there. He stays in. He concentrates. He doesn't run many of his partners out. He has steadily grafted out runs in hard times; he does it as steadily, patiently, never flashily or fast scoring, when the bowling is, as now, of poor quality. The purists have never loved him, but he has, in his career, seen out the batsmen who won their plaudits, and hardly anyone has noticed that he has a better record.

And after 30 years in first-class politics, including 16 as a minister and more than eight as Prime Minister, he marks today a fresh record: overtaking Bob Hawke's record to become Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister. As Jeff Kennett, one-time enemy, now admirer, remarked on the weekend, he could, so far as his form is concerned, go on for another 10 years to overtake his hero, Robert Menzies, for length of service as prime minister. Next year, he will have been in Parliament for as long as Menzies had been when he retired.

Some of the more stylish batsmen say that when they reach a century, they stop, take a deep breath and set out again to get another as though they were starting again at nought. John Howard is not like that. He never relaxes, treats every ball very suspiciously and deals with it on its merits, never assumes anything about the state of the pitch or the keenness of his eye. Every fresh ball is a fresh start. There might be little passion, and little exhilaration, and not a great deal of sportsmanship: John Howard doesn't walk, full stop. But if he rolls his arm and is hit for a six, he doesn't complain either. He's been hit about a bit over the years, but everyone who has ever faced him treats him with a respect he has earned.

It is more than a milestone he has reached today. He is entitled to contemplate that he has undoubtedly been the most effective Australian politician of his generation - indeed since Menzies - and has done more than any other to transform Australian society from the sort of society in which he grew up. He might, in some respects, have mixed feelings about some of that, since he is notoriously comfortable with his memories of being an adolescent in suburban Sydney in the 1950s, and he has never had any particular desire to change society as such. It has been the economy - the setting in which the community lives - which has been his focus rather than any sort of social engineering. The old economic verities are now all gone.

John Howard, in government with Malcolm Fraser, became a convert to economic reforms. He was, perhaps, too timid then to achieve much other than putting them on the agenda, but he did that, and, up and down in often very lonely opposition, he kept and propagated the faith. By the time he returned to power, Labor itself accepted most of his ideas as orthodoxy, so that, in power, Howard's chief lasting achievements - in industrial relations and taxation reform - sometimes seem only a continuation of what had been going on before. But it is a measure of Howard and his doggedness that he has nonetheless succeeded in trashing any Labor record for economic rectitude, and that he remains as committed to continuing with his agenda now as ever. His capture of the Senate from the middle of next year gives him fresh opportunities, but that his plans go further than that can be seen from the way in which he is unfolding an agenda for further change in the tertiary education sector, in technical training and apprenticeships, and in Aboriginal affairs. Moreover, he has his options open on further changes to the health and hospitals system, is presiding over massive changes in roads infrastructure, and may be poised to take water and riverine reform on to a new plateau. Hardly the efforts of someone preparing to retire or having run out of ideas. Indeed, it is his opposition which seems flattened, exhausted, dispirited, bereft of an agenda, and with no obvious prospects of bowling him, or his team, out.

Even those who professionally hate John Howard will find it hard to forbear giving him the applause he deserves today. But it will not be a standing ovation by any means. Large sections of the crowd have come to respect him, and to acknowledge both his courage and his persistence, but he has never had an enormous personal fan club. His team knows how much it owes him, but few of the older players revere him, and not a few cannot wait until he is out of the way, even if, they acknowledge, there might be less safe, if more exciting, hands in charge. The most he has ever been able to achieve from the other side is respect, if a respect mixed with fury because he has so often frustrated their chances of victory, and sometimes, perhaps, diminished the game. John Howard's lack of lyricism, simple focus on the balls coming towards him, his dogged continuance with strategies even when the crowd is slow- clapping, and perhaps his old-fashioned lack of ostentation when he takes a wicket has often seemed to take some of the pleasure from the game. So too is his tendency to never give the other side an opportunity or a sporting chance. But that perhaps is what modern cricket and modern politics has come to. Perhaps he would be playing more gracefully if he had more worthy opponents.