I was living out of the country for all of John Howard's tenure in office, so, watching from afar, I'm unable to share the passion against him that some (quite a few, actually) display here. The fact (from where I stand, at least) that his government got it wrong on occasion is undisputed. The one area (and by no means the only) that immediately comes to mind is their failure to commit a lot of the money they had at their disposal in such good times to large, long term infrastructure projects, in particular a major water project along the lines of the almost century old Bradfield Scheme. (To back that sentiment up, I understand that after the recent heavy rains in North Queensland, the equivalent of
six Sydney Harbours a day were pouring over the spillway of the Burdekin Dam.)
Particularly towards the end of the Howard Government, I believe they were suffering from collective hubris, much as was the MacMahon Government that lost to Gough Whitlam in 1972. For someone old enough to recall that time, there are parallels between the Whitlam 'experiment' and what Rudd is doing now. In both cases, it was and is a bit like watching any one of the 'Lethal Weapon' series or an Eddie Murphy cop flic – great entertainment, with lots of great, immensely gratifying to the eye car crashes, but with little to no regard to the poor bastards who, if you took a moment from eating your popcorn, you knew
in the real world would have to come along behind Mal or Eddie and clean up –
and pay for - the wreckage.
Howard got the boot for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that Joe
(or should that be 'Bruce'?) Oz 'didn't like him'. (And if Joe/Bruce didn’t initially, 90% of the Australian print and television media and 100% of the ABC
told him he didn’t repeatedly until it became an almost religious mantra.)
With Howard, I’m reminded of the commercial management of the airline I work for. 95% of the pilots in the airline – (I don’t think this is too strong a word) – dislike them, some with a passion bordering upon hatred. However, you’d struggle to find 5% among that same group who wouldn’t accept that those same commercial managers do a rather good job raking the money in and keeping the company expanding and in the black, even (or should that be ‘particularly’?) in these troubled times.
Perhaps because of television, too many people these days seem to want a leader they can
like rather than one who can deliver the goods, (even if the delivery of said ‘goods’ sometimes involves pain for some,
a la Work Choices). Some of the most successful leaders of the last hundred years wouldn’t get a look into a political leadership role today because they couldn’t deliver their lines for television the way today’s leaders must. Sadly, that means we are now getting a succession of actors rather than leaders, and like too many actors, when these ‘leaders’ don’t have a script to follow, they have nothing to say. (I’m not sure if Kev fits into this ‘good actor class’, but Howard certainly didn’t.)
As I said in my opening paragraph, I don’t think Howard got it right on many occasions, but I’m really uncomfortable about the size of the debt Rudd is saddling the country with and can’t share the sentiments of those earlier in this thread who have (it would seem to me) blithely asked “what’s the big deal about operating under a deficit?”
I’d recommend anyone interested in what’s happening re our burgeoning deficit to read this article by Lenore Taylor in today’s ‘Weekend Australian’:
I dreamed I saw a truthful treasurer | The Australian