Can John Howard ignore the siren song of power?
March 17, 2004
The Howard doubters are out again, and he's determined to prove them wrong again, writes Paul Strangio.
Patricidal leadership struggles are part of the stuff of politics - that point when the next generation decides their claims are superior to the previous, when the ambition of the young can no longer wait for the old who stubbornly "block up the hall".
History suggests these struggles are usually bitter and messy. In the 1960s Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam coexisted uneasily for seven years as leader and deputy leader of the federal ALP; in the final three years the relationship was poisonous, Calwell boiling over with resentment at Whitlam's open coveting of his job.
Then, during the late 1980s and early '90s, we witnessed the protracted Hawke-Keating duel. And now the Liberal Party is faced with the running sore of the Howard-Costello rivalry.
We ought not be surprised by any of this. It is not in the nature of politicians to go gently into the political good night, and certainly not those who by force of ambition and self-belief have scaled the greasy pole. In a domain so gladiatorial, where a masculine culture prevails, the old bull will never easily concede to the young.
Consider Bob Hawke. By the 1990s it was evident that his love affair with the people had lost its lustre, but the Don Juan of Australian politics refused to accept that his charms had waned or that the public was no longer infatuated.
It is telling, too, that the habit of Australian PMs has not been to leave office through dignified retirement, but instead to cling on until either defeated in the electorate or the party room, or death intervenes.
Robert Menzies is the obvious exception, going of his own volition in 1966. On closer inspection, however, even that relinquishment might have been a sleight of hand.
He had stayed for so long, stymieing potential successors, sidelining the talented and promoting the pedestrian. He surrounded himself, in Donald Horne's memorable phrase, "with a firebreak of mediocrity". It became almost inevitable that, when he finally exited, those who followed were doomed to be lost in his long shadow. The departed Menzies haunted his heirs; he hovered, reminding them of their unworthiness.
So, John Howard's checking of Peter Costello is faithful to a long-established tradition. But one suspects that it is equally shaped by Howard's personal political history.
In May he will celebrate three decades in Parliament - more than two-thirds spent waiting to be PM. As Mungo MacCallum writes in The Howard Years, despite precocious progress in the Fraser government, Howard has "had to struggle all the way" on that journey.
The 1980s and early '90s were largely barren, including humiliation by his colleagues as he vied for the leadership with Andrew Peacock and then was passed over for John Hewson and Alexander Downer.
Yet Howard persisted. MacCallum writes that he "hung on and hung on" until finally, in 1995, "the party completely ran out of alternatives. Howard was the least wanted of all possible leaders, but he was the only one left - the last man standing."
This persistence, this iron-like will to surmount setbacks that would have broken most, hardly equates with someone who will lightly surrender a prize so long cherished. It also suggests a politician who, despite trading on his ordinariness, has never conceived himself so. Rather, it betrays one who believes in himself utterly - even while others so often haven't.
In this mismatch between Howard's self-conception and the way the world long perceived him rests another clue to why he can be expected to rage against the dying of the political light. Howard's career can be read as one of endlessly proving himself, an uphill battle to confound his many doubters and, indeed, his mockers.
Unprepossessing and accused of harbouring an antediluvian world view, he was routinely sneered at on the journey to the top. He was dubbed "little Johnny" and ridiculed as a throwback to the '50s.
In this sense, ascending the political ladder has been a way of "showing" the doubters, as well as a means to exact revenge on the mockers. Indeed, the latter is possibly one key to unlocking the vindictive quality of Howard's prime ministership: the desire for retribution against those groups and institutions congregated by the cultural "elites" who so adored his chief tormentor, the flamboyant Paul Keating.
Even as Prime Minister, though, silencing the doubters and mockers initially eluded Howard. His early years in office were chequered. At best he seemed to have earned grudging respect and been rewarded as a trier. The public's enthusiasm for him was still muted, while his detractors muttered that he was not prime ministerial material. He appeared especially out of place on the world stage; the "elites" cringed, complaining he was not statesmanlike.
Not until 2001 did he lay the doubts to rest. With the political landscape disfigured by terrorism and asylum seekers, Howard assumed an aura of invincibility; he metamorphosed into the "man of steel". The years of scorn and ridicule were vanquished. True, his opponents loathed him more than ever, but they accepted his omnipotence, fuming at the spectre of him remaking Australia for the worse.
Admirers and critics acknowledged him as supreme. For Howard it must have seemed the world had at last grasped what he had always known.
Now, things are in flux again (even the politics of terrorism are unpredictable), and the Howard doubters have returned. Once more he is out to show them, to prove them wrong.
The problem is this urge, similar to ambition and power, is never likely to be fully sated, never satisfied. More likely it will be the siren song that lures him on to the folly of so many leaders before him: staying on when his time has passed.