A Cringing Aussie Left

Looking for Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years
By Donald Horne 296 pages, Melbourne: Viking, 2001

For Australia, the United States is not merely a military ally, trading partner, and long-term friend, it is a dominant provider of cultural content. Australia cannot possibly compete, but it can compensate by generating ample local cultural content: It may not be first class, but at least it’s indigenous. A recent case in point is Looking for Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years, the latest book from journalist Donald Horne, one of the biggest names in Australia’s postwar public debate. The book is a contemptuous review of the leadership of Australia’s conservative prime minister, John Howard, who has led the country since 1996.

Horne’s reputation was launched in 1964 with the publication of a book-length essay called The Lucky Country, which became the biggest selling political analysis ever published in Australia. The title was ironic; Horne’s premise was that Australia was a complacent, mediocre, inward-looking culture that had coasted for decades on its abundant natural resources. The Lucky Country was the first book to implore Australians to stop ignoring the adjacent enormity of Asia. The book struck a nerve, and it is still in print.

Now the 80-year-old Horne has penned another lament. In Looking for Leadership, he argues that the uninspiring, inarticulate quality of political leadership in Australia is stunting the nation’s potential: "We do not have one Australian political leader who can speak to us about our country in simple words. No one has translated difficult ideas into something that has a connection with human lives."

His general jeremiad has a particular target, hence the subtitle. He describes Howard as "a political freak, not emerging from the realities of his own party (in fact a disgrace to both its liberal and its pragmatic traditions) and not emerging from the political system as a whole or from dominant trends among fellow citizens, but dropping down on us like an apparition from the Dreamtime Fifties, dividing the country, perhaps to gain votes, but mainly because he had a compass that was set backwards."

The John Howard of this book is a simplistic, disembodied straw man — which is a shame, because Horne, a decent man who has led a full and productive life as a public intellectual and also as a professor of journalism and university chancellor, should have known better. Although this book deals with all of Australia’s national leaders of recent years, none are allowed to speak for themselves, and the source Horne quotes most often is Horne, extracting from his string of earlier books. Nor can he quite give up the thesis he expounded in The Lucky Country: "I don’t think any recent Australian prime minister has confidently (with such inner anxiety) asserted a national identity of such fairytale shallowness as John Howard in his attempts to romanticise a virile Australia."

Fortunately, the facts do not square with Horne’s pessimism. Virile is quite a good word to describe the Australia that Howard inherited and now leads. Of all the world’s developed countries, not one has managed to so comprehensively and seamlessly reinvent itself as Australia. Since 1945, Australia’s population has almost trebled from 7.2 million to 19.4 million, and it has gone from being 99 percent European to a nation with large and growing aboriginal and Asian populations and with an Anglo-Celtic majority that has shrunk to 80 percent. It has the highest percentage of foreign-born residents of any country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, including the United States, and it has achieved all this with an unbroken run of political stability, transparent democracy, rule of law, sustained economic growth, and sound management. Under Howard, Australia shrugged off the Asian economic crisis of 1997 while many of its major trading partners were in meltdown, it intervened militarily to help free East Timor from Indonesian oppression, and it continues to enjoy solid economic growth while many other parts of the world are in recession.

In this wistful book about leadership, Horne is right about one thing: Australia does not have an inspiring leader. Prime Minister Howard is as gray as former British Prime Minister John Major and Canada’s Jean Chretien. At a time when much of Australia’s intellectual elite was mobilized in support of a transition from constitutional monarchy to a republic (which they hoped would coincide with the centenary of Australia’s independence on January 1, 2001) and of a formal national apology to the aboriginal people for past abuses, John Howard stood as a barrier to all such symbolic change. The tractor wasn’t broke, so he didn’t want to fix it. He did champion a more prosaic reform: taxes. He introduced a (widely unpopular) consumption tax, which often spells political disaster. Horne, a republican and a supporter of indigenous land rights, deplores Howard’s absence of vision and verve. He hates Howard’s embrace of tradition and his mistrust of multiculturalism.

Horne’s views are also the dominant views of the Australian media, where the majority of political reporters and commentators (the distinction has become increasingly blurred) has kept up a drumbeat of negativity about Howard since the day he won office. Looking for Leadership was written during the lead-in to last November’s federal election. Horne’s allies in the media gave the book oxygen, but it did not sell, partly because current events conspired against it. In the run-up to the election, Howard earned enormous public support for taking a tough stand against an influx of illegal immigrants and refugees from Central and Southeast Asia. Then came September 11 and a consequent flight to solidity. The electorate perceived the veteran 62-year-old prime minister as the most steady, strong, and durable leader on offer. Clearly, Horne’s book was meant to undermine Howard’s reputation and assist in his defeat. But just as the book is not convincing as a political tract, it proved irrelevant as a political weapon. On November 10, 2001, John Howard became only the third leader in Australian history to win three consecutive national elections. And it was leadership, the quality Horne argued Howard so abjectly lacked, that got him home.