The change in style and content of the Australian Prime Minister John Howard from January 1999 and J

I wrote this essay for a unit I completed called 'Rhetoric, Logic and Knowledge' at the Catholic Institute of Sydney. I am republishing it here to assist my readers to better understand politics and people.

For this essay I have chosen two speeches from the former Prime Minister John Howard which are seven years apart delivered to two different audiences, but essentially the same audience, the Australian people. There are some fundamental differences between these two speeches that I will highlight in this essay and which will go some way into revealing what I see as the ‘real’ John Howard that emerges.

I have chosen the first speech from an address the Prime Minister gave to the Queensland Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 1999, titled “The Australian Way” in which he details his government’s priorities for 1999 and beyond. It is important to note that this speech was delivered only a few months after his second term re-election win in 1998. This point cannot be overlooked or understated as he is now speaking with authority and certainty as to what he sees as “His Australian Way”. The second speech was delivered on the day before Australia Day 2006 in Parliament’s Great Hall only a month after the notorious Cronulla riots, something which bitterly divided the nation as a whole. As both speeches allude to an “Australianness” that the Prime Minister seems to understand quite well, it is purely based on his opinion. As he is the Prime Minister of the nation, it is abundantly clear that indeed his opinion is contagious and does infect the rest of society. Politics is the business of opinions based sometimes on facts, but not always. John Howard knew this well and it is for this reason I submit that his ‘real’ intentions are contained in a systematic way in the first speech of 1999. The latter speech is a Prime Minister willing to appease the Australian society with much more softer and inclusive language, somehow seeking to build bridges with the help of others, whereas the 1999 speech is speaking down at people, still building bridges but undertaking the design and construction himself in the name of his government.

I will analyse each speech and compare them to highlight my thesis that the real John Howard is ever more evident in the 1999 speech than in the 2006 speech.

1999 speech

As mentioned it is to industry that he is speaking, he starts by emphasising that each Australian is “responsible for the life of the nation… accountable to ourselves, to those around us and to the future itself.” Accountability and mutual obligation are strong themes that resounds throughout the whole speech. In detailing his five broad goals over the next year he says “Economic growth and economic efficiency are never ends in themselves, rather they are a means by which we can deliver more fulfilling lives for our fellow Australians” not something I disagree with, but perhaps something that was not given enough priority during his whole tenure in office. As his primary audience is the business community, he is speaking to people who have invested their own resources, time and money, into creating an enterprise. These are not people who wait for a hand out by government. He boasts about his fiscal responsibility in retiring government debt (a legacy of the previous Labor government of Paul Keating and Bob Hawke) and steering Australia through unprecedented economic growth. He also boasts about privatization and the fact that private share ownership under his tenure has increased to record levels and advances this a good policy for the country. This may be true for those who can afford to purchase shares in companies, but for the millions of disadvantaged Australians who could never afford private share ownership, their defacto ownership as citizen who owned the government enterprise have been duded out of their ownership for a small bag of silver to “retire government debt”. In quoting a business leader Mr. Campbell Anderson, the President of the Business Council of Australia saying that Australia’s economic advantage is no act of luck, rather “we’ve proved the lesson that economic fortune favours those willing to drive through strong hearted reform” I do not agree with this position for a number of reasons not least of which the fact that Australia and the world during the Howard years experienced enormous growth with the Internet and money moving around the world with a now simple click of a button. John Howard was not responsible for the growth in the electronic banking, media and commerce, they happened almost organically in just about every country of the world, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. One need only look to the current global financial crisis engulfing just about every facet of life to see that poor Mr Rudd is himself now in the right place at the wrong time. It is evidence of the limitations of governments to deal with inflation and deflation and what is essentially a market driven economy.

Mr. Howard then pronounces his Resolutions for new millennium and details them as follows :

Economic Discipline

Further efforts to reduce unemployment

The Comalco Project

Creating a strong, social coalition

And Mutual Obligation

There is no doubt that John Howard was a very good orator and probably wrote a lot of his own speeches, but more that anything he knew how to work the electorate. In speaking to the business community about his resolutions the most contentious of all would have been the policy of mutual obligation, or as it was termed “work for the dole” this resonated very well with his audience on the day and was reported quite extensively in the media the same day and for several weeks afterwards. His belief that “it has ignited the work ethic fundamental to sustaining lasting work and broken forever the cycle of boredom and despair that was the bane of the young unemployed” has proven to be quite wrong and whilst that may have been the intention or the spirit of the policy, it was short lived and the policy of work for the dole was abandoned a couple of years later. To think that he was preparing to “commit my Government to requiring unemployed young people who fail basic literacy and numeracy tests to undertake appropriate remedial courses if they are to continue to receive their full dole” it is a relief that such a rigid policy was not adopted or enacted.

I suppose for me the 1999 speech is important for the things it does not say, to be titled “the Australian Way” and be void of any mention of the original owners of the land, the Aborigines and the migrant contribution to the building up of a prosperous Australia is both negligent and indicative of John Howard’s view of his “Australian way”

The 2006 Speech

Australia Day embodies a "profound truth and a simple irony", according to the Prime Minister, John Howard "the truth is that people come to this country because they want to be Australians. The irony is that no institution or code lays down a test of Australianness. Such is the nature of our free society." Addressing the National Press Club in the Great Hall of Canberra's Parliament House, Howard fielded many questions about his frontbench reshuffle the previous day and the position of the National Party, but his speech focussed on what he said was "the secret of Australia's greatness - our sense of balance".

In his view this balance can be seen in the balance between private and public economic activity, the balance in national identity between unity and diversity, the balance between history and geography in our global strategy, and the balance in our politics between rights and democratic responsibility. In a speech that called for a new approach to the teaching of history in schools and which argued against the need for a bill of rights, Howard also called for tolerance and respect in the light of the Cronulla riots a month before.

In this speech he says “There is much in American society which I admire, but I have long held the view that the absence of an effective safety net in that country means that too many needy citizens fall by the wayside. That is not the path that Australia will tread”. This seems a long way from the tough mutual obligation that the Prime Minister was advocating just seven years earlier. His main appeal to voters is always his strong economic management, a title that he may take some credit for, but running government and being the Prime Minister of the nation is a lot more than just fiscal responsibility. The fact that children of refugees in Australia were at the very same time in quasi concentration camps, when he and his ministers threw the “truth overboard” is evidence that a good majority of Australians knew that his stance, policy and actions of his government in the later years were now incompatible with the real Australian way of a fair go!

To possibly show how out of touch he was with the actual attitudes of ordinary Australians he says “…. has something to say about what ordinary Australians think of the Australian Achievement. It found that, compared with a decade ago, fewer Australians are ashamed of this nation’s past. I welcome this corrective in our national sense of self. It restores a better balance between pride in our past and recognition of past wrongs”. Taken that Mr. Rudd won on a platform of officially recognising and apologising for such past wrongs to our indigenous peoples it is clear from Mr. Howard’s statement that he was not in sync with the actual attitudes of the majority. In advocating his position he says “By sharing responsibility, governments and communities can help indigenous Australians build better lives, free from welfare dependency and based on solid economic foundations. If sometimes slow, progress is being made based on indigenous and non-indigenous Australians working side-by-side. With the 40th anniversary of the historic 1967 referendum approaching next year, our aim should be to deepen this legacy” somewhat empty rhetoric as he often attacked and refuted what he called was a “black armband” view of Australian history a theme he was consistently pushing thankfully to no avail.

It is here in this speech that he says “Australia’s ethnic diversity is one of the enduring strengths of our nation. Yet our celebration of diversity must not be at the expense of the common values that bind us together as one people – respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, a commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces tolerance, fair play and compassion for those in need”. Funny that he should be advocating the benefits of Australia’s ethnic diversity when in the 1999 speech there was not even a mention of them or their contribution to the building up of Australia. When this speech was given in 2006 he was well aware that an election was looming and it is indicative of a Prime Minister and Government that would say or do anything to hold on to power.

Conclusion

John Winston Howard was one of Australia’s longest serving Prime Ministers, he did steer Australia through what was unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. He was a fine orator who knew how to play on the emotions of his audience and his style and delivery of the various positions he was posturing gave credibility to what he was saying. For me the real John Howard emerged in the 1999 speech where he felt a sense of unfettered power, and the ability to strike and make changes. Sadly for him he will always be remembered as the Prime Minister who not only lost government but his own House of Representatives seat in Bennelong.

John Howard knew how to polarize the electorate in order to divide and rule rather than unite and rule.