Howard was far from perfect, but it's not a perfect world. There are rumours that gun control was mainly about disarming the hate groups and separatist ghettoes in Australia but it was a terrible decision and one that has to be reversed.
Other than that, Howard did a lot of good, and in an imperfect world he was far better than Rudd or Gillard. That is utterly beyond question.
Howard's gun control measures in the wake of Port Arthur were the one actual good thing he did implement during his regime. It's a legacy that has already paid large dividends and history will give him due credit for it.
ReplyDeleteAs for most of the rest, it doesn't shine anywhere near as brightly. Howard and Costello had the best opportunity in Australia's history to set this country up for a strong and sustainable future, and they threw it away for grubby vote-buying policies, headlined by those huge bribes masquerading as income tax cuts for so many years. He never made the hard decisions (apart from the guns), he made the ones that would keep him in power, his compromise on GST being an example, leaving it crioppled and overly complex. Howard was a populist, not a visionary, and history will judge him harshly for that.
He also badly tarnished Australia's international reputation. He was seen as the USA's toady, and it reflected on Australia as a whole. The global community (including the USA & Britain) knew he would always toe Dubya's line, so he was regarded as irrelevant.
Bottom line, John Howard wanted the job, he didn't want to DO the job. As a result, this country is far behind wwhere it should be today.
We should not spare the Opposition during all those years as well. If we'd had any sort of effective, viable alternative, this would not have continued for so long.
NSW Liberals are an all too painful example of what years of ineffective opposition leads to, leaving that state in such a dismal mess that it will take many, many years to recover from Labor's laziness, corruption and incompetence. Federal Labor also stands accused of the same level of ineffectiveness for an interminable dozen years. The other offshoot of this is that the competent people, the ones with plans and vision, have left these parties over time as they see them descend into the quagmire. We are now left with the two major parties being populated with inexperinced, or lazy and incompetent, members who either don't know how to run a country, or don't know how to hold those leaders properly to account.
Welcome to the future.