In which the pond sends many reptiles to the archives, but must pay the price for the folly with the Ughmann and a "Ned" Everest climb ...

 

Pakistan at war with Afghanistan?

Sorry, this is the navel-gazing, fluff-gathering lizard Oz, and whatever this was, which briefly flashed across the digital edition of the Australian Daily Zionist News last night ...

Also sorry, this is a day when much of the reptile output must be consigned to the intermittent archive.

Where others might have chosen to focus on the absurd spectacle of David Speirs deciding to run as an independent, the lizard Oz decided to stick their oar into the croweater water with a top of the page splash:

EXCLUSIVE
Secret tape and a $2.3m lawsuit: the blackmail sting that backfired on Peter Malinauskas
No James Bond: The blackmail sting that backfired on Peter Malinauskas
It was the sting that went wrong. The future SA Premier wore a wire to catch alleged blackmailers. But Peter Malinauskas’ James Bond fantasy has become a legal nightmare as the explosive recordings surface.
By Stephen Rice

That's the best the reptiles could do to muddy the waters for the man who helped them out with writers' festivals? Isn't this boiling Rice served with a side of Dame Slap?

Whatever. No doubt the great aunts on the verandah are agitated and distraught.

What's that about Pakistan at war with Afghanistan? With Hillary's snake now in overtime... (sorry, the pond now consigns the Graudian to the intermittent archive)

Forget it Jake, it's the Zionist hive mind, and this weekend it was the turn of the dog botherer to serve the faithful, even as the ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank continued at a deadly pace ...

The warnings we ignored: how unchecked hatred led to Bondi
Authorities’ failure to act fanned the flames of hate
For more than two years, authorities turned a blind eye to escalating extremism and rising antisemitism. We may never know if the December 14 terror attack could have been prevented, but the catastrophic failure to confront the ugliness leading up to it is undeniable.
By Chris Kenny

Associate Editor (National Affairs)

Frank's opening collage said it all ...

... so the pond left the hate mongering at that.

Ditto this, as Maley kept on banging the drum ...

11 ISIS brides, 23 kids: A nation’s diabolical mess
Australia grapples with ‘diabolic mess’ of ISIS brides’ and their children’s repatriation
Stranded Australian women in Syrian camps are using their children as a public relations tool for repatriation, forcing the nation to weigh ethical obligations against the hypocrisy of the crisis’s creators. Whatever else you say about the women, their timing has been terrible.
By Paul Maley

The pond felt the same fear it felt when confronted by a flock of nuns at St. Peters ...

The pond also left Dave howling into the King Donald wind ...

Andrew isn’t the main game, Iran is
Albanese government ‘missing in action’ as Iran crisis looms
The risk of a conflict in the Middle East is real and immediate, with consequences for Australia. The risk of King Andrew is ludicrously remote, yet this is what our Prime Minister chooses to prioritise.
By Dave Sharma

Apart from reminding the pond what it must be like to be in Ukraine or Gaza at the moment, what was Dave's idea of what we should be doing?

A serious government would be communicating to the Australian people about the heightened level of risk and reassuring them the government was assessing the situation closely and had contingencies in place.

Yep, a full blown word salad of the 'stay calm and carry on' kind.

What was that about Pakistan duking with the Taliban?

Only herpetology specialists will be interested in joining Dame Slap on planet Janet ...

Yet another Pyrrhic victory for Shane Drumgold
The Press Council’s ‘incomprehensible’ decision to back Shane Drumgold has delivered a ‘sham victory’ for the former prosecutor, forcing The Australian to republish the very misconduct findings he sought to bury.
By Janet Albrechtsen
Columnist

Frank was on fire,  and the Dame had a dictionary to hand - you never know about the word skills of the hive mind...

As well as personally ensuring Dame Slap made it into the intermittent archive, the pond, as always, is pleased to provide a link to the Press Council's wet lettuce verdict...

The pond is so over Dame Slap and the endless reverberations arising from her wretched behaviour in the Lehrmann matter...

Unfortunately all this chopping and machine gunning and archiving left the pond with few angles.

One was a now bog standard twist on climate science denialism.

Rather than feature the doom-laden future, or focus on the way that the quest for coal has ruined assorted landscapes, this is the new reptile way ...

Killing fields: ‘The general public has no idea of the enormity of what’s going on out there’
From flattened echidnas to koalas ‘finished off with a hard, sharp blow to the skull’, the inexorable rollout of colossal green energy projects in Queensland hides a dirty secret few are talking about.
By Greg Roberts

Yeah, it was more of terrifying windmills ...

The climate change challenge is urgent? 

Surely not, the pond long ago swallowed the reptile soma.

And that's how the pond ended up with the Ughmann, even though the unreformed seminarian was on a familiar path ...

The header: Treasurer urged to dismantle schemes and cut subsidies to find serious budget savings; From abolishing the Sex Discrimination Commissioner to halving tobacco taxes, a new blueprint emerges for government spending cuts.

The caption for the brilliant opening illustration, stunning in its depth and meaning, but unfortunately with the great creator going uncredited: ‘The government is not only living beyond its means, it is addicted to buying virtue and votes with other people’s money,’ says Chris Uhlmann.

The Ughmann chose to begin this 5 minute litany of whines - a useful summary of all that's currently tormenting the hive mind - by reminding reptile readers that lesbians could be bigoted and as intolerant as the hive mind is of them - and dammit, the Ughmann, being an unreformed seminarian, was at one with them.

The Treasurer is seeking serious budget savings; it is our duty to assist. Conveniently, this week the Sex Discrimination Commissioner was back in court, this time defending the agency’s decision to bludgeon the Victorian-based Lesbian Action Group into accepting transgender women at its events.
The lesbians argue that a trans‑woman lesbian is better described as a heterosexual man, a category that rationally excludes itself from polite lesbian society.
The Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody is seeking to beat this bigotry out of them and has argued in a separate case before the Federal Court that sex is not confined to being a biological concept.

The pond will note that the reptiles were generous with distracting illustrations, starting with this .. . Members of the Lesbian Action Group outside Federal Court in Melbourne on Monday. Picture: Elke Meitzel.

The Ughmann then displayed the sort of casuistry that is a hallmark of the Jesuit way ...

Casuistry dates from Aristotle (384–322 BC), and the peak of casuistry was from 1550 to 1650, when the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) used casuistic reasoning, particularly in administering the Sacrament of Penance (or "confession").

Sorry, the pond could have gone the Opus Dei angle, but that had to do as a way of evoking the fragrant nature of the unreformed seminarian's deeply witty logic ...

In case the commissioner has failed to notice, “sex” is on the lid of the tin her agency comes in. Ergo, if sex is unmoored from meaning, the office vanishes inside its own logic and abolishes itself.
Let’s bank the savings and thank the commissioner and her poly-pronouned staff for this national service. This is an unusually helpful intervention from bureaucrats, and there should be more of this kind of innovative self-cancelling. The Albanese government also can bank the cash from junking the annual Women’s Budget Statement, given female is now a dodo designation.
It is difficult to determine how much abolishing the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and related staff would save taxpayers because the budget is warehoused inside the Australian Human Rights Commission. According to its last annual report, the total cost of the whole shebang was about $42m.

The reptiles helped out with the Ughmann's fantasy life with the next snap ... Sex Discrimination Commissioner Anna Cody. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Time to put aside the small potatoes bigotry and get on to the real point of the litany, a snowflake whine about pretty much everything ...

This is small potatoes in the search for meaningful budget savings, so let’s just abolish the lot. The commission has become an activist grievance factory and there is already plenty of that in the private sector. In the real economy, government expansion crowds out private enterprise. Curiously, grievance production appears to be perfectly inelastic.
Which is why we can also punt the Environmental Defenders Office. This agency has received about $3m in federal grants in the past two years. In that time it has been comprehensively towelled up in two cases against Santos: one to block its Barossa gas project and another to challenge the company’s clean‑energy claims.
In the Barossa case, Justice Natalie Charlesworth was scathing about the office’s work, finding that a cultural mapping exercise undertaken by its expert witness was “so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them”.
Translation: file this evidence under fiction.

The pond had pretty much tuned out at this point, with the reptiles' worship of gas (and don't forget coal) coming to the fore yet again, The first gas cargo from Santos’ Barossa LNG project being loaded in January.

By now the Ughmann was on a roll ...

The costs order in the Barossa case was for more than $9m, and the office says it covered the bill using insurance, its own savings and an interest-free private loan.
That is also a very helpful insight. Jim Chalmers can cut its grants with a clear conscience, as the office has admitted that private donors are willing to bankroll its ideological jihads.
The only problem with these admittedly culturally priceless savings is that they do not begin to dent the Himalaya of debt this government has helped pile up. None of these cuts would materially alter the fiscal trajectory towards hell. To bank serious savings, the Treasurer must turn to the heavy machinery of government.
Economist Stephen Anthony, who chaired the Independent Pricing Committee into the National Disability Insurance Scheme, says big savings are hiding in plain sight.
The scheme flipped the model of supporting disability services through state grants to giving individuals a budget to “go shopping” in an invented disability marketplace. This is a market in name only, propped up by taxpayer funding, largely immune to price signals and bound by rules that blunt competition.
Anthony’s fix is simple: roll out the digital payments platform the agency built in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank, trialled with providers by mid-2023 and then inexplicably shelved. This system would screen 100 per cent of transactions in real time, pay only into verified provider accounts, automatically detect and block fraud, overpricing and scheme gaming, and generate savings he says run to billions.

Then came another visual distraction, as the Ughmann went all socialist and "tax the filthy rich", a new reptile angle: The Albanese government’s three-day childcare guarantee ‘should be tightly means‑tested, tapering out completely between household incomes of $150,000 and $200,000’. Picture: NewsWire/ John Appleyard

The Ughmann naturally had renewables in his sights.

At last a chance to restore public ownership of public resources! 

Billions more could be saved by dismantling the marketplace built for energy grifters.
Getting a handle on the money hosed at the energy transition is all but impossible, but Michael Wu of the Centre for Independent Studies has done the yeoman’s work in trying to track it down.
In a 2024 paper he estimates that federal subsidies to renewables across an acronym soup of programs have totalled about $29bn in the past decade, or roughly $2.6bn a year on average, and notes this is a conservative figure that leaves out big-ticket items such as Snowy 2.0, state schemes and the Capacity Investment Scheme.
Governments insist wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles are already the best value for money. Excellent. Then cut every subsidy. Nothing reveals the truth of a price claim faster than exposure to the market. Technologies that are genuinely cheaper will thrive; those that are not will stop gorging at the taxpayer trough.
There is also a matter of equity. Subsidies for rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles flow mainly to households with good incomes while the costs are spread across everyone else through taxes, network charges and higher system costs. Labor’s energy interventions expose the new progressive project: the old demand for power to the people has become power for the privileged.

Inevitably Jimbo incurred the former seminarian's ire ...Treasurer Jim Chalmer’s choice is to ‘keep building a perpetual‑motion money-munching machine or begin dismantling it’. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire

He always looks so puzzled and quizzical in the reptile world.

Now please, let's hear it for gas and coal, because we've never heard the reptiles say this before ...

Then admit gas and coal to the Capacity Investment Scheme and require NSW and Victoria to develop their gas reserves. More supply, lower prices. Energy markets behave like other markets when governments stop engineering scarcity. Cutting electricity prices, rather than subsidising them, would lift productivity, ease inflation and deliver relief no rebate can match.
The Albanese government’s three-day childcare guarantee removed the activity test for the first three days of subsidised care and extended support to families earning up to about $530,000 a year, under a program now costing about $16bn a year. Why give money to the rich? The subsidy should be tightly means‑tested, tapering out completely between household incomes of $150,000 and $200,000. On reasonable assumptions, that kind of cap would strip subsidies from high-income households and free up several billion dollars a year in savings.
Reverse the decision to cut Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme co-payments and freeze indexation. The indexed model at least asked people who used more medicines to share modestly in rising costs; locking co-payments in place simply shifts that burden on to taxpayers. What looks compassionate at the pharmacy counter is regressive in the budget.

Finally there came a desperate attempt by Frank to show that he was on fire ...Organised crime has fiery grip on Australia's illicit tobacco trade. Artwork: Frank Ling

That inspired the Ughmann to cry out for more deaths by way of smoking ...

On the flip side, cut the tobacco excise in half and freeze it. The architects of relentless twice-yearly excise hikes can take a bow. They pushed prices to the point where they spawned a thriving black market, enriched criminals, gutted tax revenue and herded ordinary Australians into the illicit market. Legal tobacco excise collections have more than halved from $16bn a year in 2020 to about $7.4bn in the past financial year. The government is now spending hundreds of millions policing a problem its own price signals created. Punitive taxation has not crushed demand; it has merely changed suppliers.
So, here is the Treasurer’s choice. He can keep building a perpetual‑motion money-munching machine or begin dismantling it. The first step is recognising the truth: the government is not only living beyond its means, it is addicted to buying virtue and votes with other people’s money.

So there you have it. The Ughmann pretty much summarised all that's malicious and nasty going down in the hive mind.

Speaking of getting rid of things, TT was on a similar sort of roll last week, and as the pond has an unendurable Everest to go, it's time for a break ...

You see, there was a dire price to pay for the pond's winnowing.

The pond had created room for a fifteen minute ramble by "Ned" through ancient times:

The header: Governing from the gut: 30 years on, John Howard spills the secret of his success; On the eve of the 30-year anniversary of becoming PM, John Howard talks the most dangerous moment of his time in office, his fear of failure, the keys to 11 years in the office, and the Howard-Costello double act.

The caption for Emilia's work joining the chortling clowns in a collage: Paul Costello, left and John Howard share a laugh. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.

Fifteen bloody minutes of "Ned" keeping company with the lying rodent!

It was too much for a possum to bear. It was like climbing Mars' biggest mountain, which definitely shades your average Everest.

But the pond gets it. The current prospects are dismal, what with the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way probably just a seat warmer, and not helped by Susssan's scarpering and setting up a byelection that will happen sooner rather than later.

What else can two old farts do than wander down golden-tinted memory lane, recalling triumphant times?

Memory, all alone in the moonlight
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then

I remember the time
I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

The pond saw no reason to interrupt this bout of talkaholism, of the kind that doddery old gents like to indulge in.

Let them have at it, and let correspondents nod off to sleep when the mood takes them ...

The pond has noted a certain fatigue in correspondents' comments of late, and this should pretty much wear them all out...

Next week hails the 30th anniversary of John Howard’s election as prime minister on March 2, 1996, a defining event for the Liberal Party. In a remarkably frank interview Howard reveals the most dangerous moment during his time in office, his fear of failure and the keys to his 11 years in office.
Three elements, above all, made Howard the nation’s second longest prime minister after Sir Robert Menzies. They were his intuitive grasp of the character of the Australian people, his ceaseless efforts to maintain the uncontested support of the party room for the entire time and his unique executive power troika involving Peter Costello as treasurer and Alexander Downer as foreign minister.
Success over 11 years, however, was delivered by another element, too easily forgotten and barely mentioned in polite company – Howard was driven by a relentless, almost unquenchable personal ambition to become prime minister and, once in the job, was tenacious in his repeated refusal to stand aside. Howard was as ambitious as Bob Hawke in his seeking the highest office and more successful than Hawke in keeping it.
Over four election victories Howard’s success with the public and his support within the parliamentary party became self-reinforcing factors.
This circle, for a long time, was unbreakable until the public broke it at the 2007 election in favour of Kevin Rudd, an opponent whom Howard had misread.
It started with gun laws
Howard was a ruthless pragmatist but a conviction politician. He absorbed advice but on every big decision he relied on something else – his instinct. He governed from his brain but also from his stomach. Surveying every big decision – on gun reform, the GST, halting the Tampa, labour market reform and going to war in Iraq – Howard reacted instinctively. For better or worse, he knew what he was going to do.
When the author put this to Howard, he confirmed it. “You’ve explained it well,” he said. “I mean, I governed, on big issues, largely by instinct.” It started with the gun laws: “My instinct after Port Arthur was, ‘Gosh, what’s the point of having this huge majority if you don’t do something?’ I did and it worked.”

Cue the first of many triumphant interruptions: Then-PM John Howard, with outline of what appears to be bullet proof vest visible under his suit jacket, tries to placate hostile pro-gun rally in Sale, Victoria. Following the Port Arthur massacre, two federally funded gun buyback and voluntary surrenders resulted in more than a million firearms being collected or destroyed. Picture: Ray Strange

From that time, Howard’s instinct drove the critical decisions – often they took weeks or months to finalise, but Howard knew his instinct from the start. It was a successful but risky way to run the nation – it led to the Iraq war decision and the supra-danger of the GST that nearly finished him.
Yet Howard’s leadership is conspicuous for its long era of political stability. The contrast with its bookends is stunning. For the 15 years before Howard became prime minister and in the nearly 20 years since his departure politics has been rived by leadership turbulence and chronic challenges, an affliction more prevalent in the Liberals than the Labor Party.
Few people see much parallel between Howard and Anthony Albanese, but there is a singular parallel – their fixation on stability. Consider the Liberal leadership rollcall after Howard left the stage: Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Turnbull again, Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Sussan Ley, Angus Taylor. That’s eight changes of leadership in 19 years. Howard, by contrast, never faced a ballot between 1995 and 2007. A remarkable record.
He governed by command through consultation. Since Howard’s departure in 2007 the Liberals have pretended to follow his model but have never remotely duplicated his success.
Howard and Costello: the double act
In extensive interviews with Howard and Costello for this three-part anniversary series, the two principal figures have revealed the flashpoints that nearly brought them undone, the reasons for their success and the nature of the extraordinary Howard-Costello partnership, highly effective but loaded for an explosion that never came.
Asked to rate the Howard government, former Liberal MP and Howard minister Abbott told the author: “I believe this was our most recent best government. It was the last truly successful government that we have had because it wasn’t just a political success – winning four elections – it was a policy success with tax reform, workplace relations reform, welfare reform, improvements in living standards and a major boost to our global standing with examples like the East Timor intervention.”

At this point the reptiles inserted an embedded item which eluded the pond and which also didn't turn up in the archived version of "Ned's" Everest climb.

With a sigh of relief - sometimes failure can provide a tremendous sense of relief - the pond refused to offer a cartoon as an alternative and instead moved on, if only to brood about the man who lacked the ticker...

Asked to rate Howard, Abbott said: “Plainly he’s right up there with (Robert) Menzies and he surpasses (Malcolm) Fraser. I am tempted to say he is at least as good as and arguably better than Menzies because I think political leadership is getting harder all the time and it was tougher in Howard’s time than in Menzies’ time.
“Costello, as treasurer, was critically important and, to be honest, he doesn’t get enough credit for the role he played and the economic reforms he delivered.
“I’ve got to say, had Costello been of a different character he could easily have undermined Howard and made Howard’s position impossible, but he didn’t, he chose not to do that.”
Contemporary government in Australia is anchored in a rare but proven model – an outstanding prime minister and an outstanding treasurer, and a capacity for them to work together. Hawke and Paul Keating were the Labor model from 1983 to 1991; Howard and Costello the Liberal model for 11 years.
But longevity takes its toll. Howard stayed beyond his natural time. Asked if he should have stood down for Costello, Howard said: “I don’t have any regrets. I mean I regret the fact that we lost the 2007 election. But there was an overwhelming feeling in the parliamentary party that I had a better chance of winning than anybody else.”
Why Costello didn’t challenge
In 2006 Costello told Howard he should resign to allow a smooth transition – Costello felt that was in the interests of the Liberal Party, Australia and Howard himself. Costello, unlike Keating, declined to challenge.
“Am I upset Howard didn’t go?” Costello asked. “Well, I think the country would be better off if he had gone.” Reflecting on his decision, Costello said: “You had to be prepared to tear down the leader. I didn’t think that would be good for the Liberal Party or for the country. I think you know I was probably the most reformist treasurer in Australian history. There’s only two candidates for that, there’s Keating and there’s me, so even if you take another view, you’d have to say the second most reformist treasurer in Australian history.”
There was nothing inevitable about the Howard prime ministership – it was built by Howard, brick by brick. Despite his impressive 1996 victory over Keating no observers at that time believed Howard would win four elections and come second to Menzies on longevity. Even today, people are still confused about how he did it.

Again the pond failed to record the reptile embed, and again the pond moved on with a sense of relief ...

The answer is to see Howard in a prime ministerial journey of growing confidence and daily learning, with a deeply astute reading of Australian sentiment. Ultimately, the answer resides in judgment. Howard’s success is based on a remarkable ability to discern when to stay cautious and when to strike with political aggression. When he was cautious he was very cautious; and when he was aggressive he was very aggressive.
Howard as prime minister was shaped by two competing compulsions – he championed social stability yet he drove economic and cultural change. Howard said he wanted Australians to be “relaxed and comfortable” while he pioneered a series of initiatives that changed the country. For a decade, Labor struggled and never got a precise fix on him. Howard was an unusual conservative – more conspicuous for what he changed than for what he maintained, much more of a change agent than Menzies, yet looking like a reassuring friendly uncle.
Consider the contrast. While Howard championed the monarchy, the flag, patriotism, family values, the US alliance, Christian norms, social conservatism, the Anzac ethos, rejection of an apology to the Indigenous people, rejection of gay marriage, respect for institutions, distrust of the multicultural ethos and upheld every conservative tradition, he also promoted with varying success a long series of decisive changes – witness the GST, the showdown on the waterfront, border protection, war commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, reformed gun laws, labour market deregulation and then Work Choices, family tax benefits, mutual obligation in welfare reform, the Northern Territory intervention – while his government secured, through Costello, repeated budget surpluses, the elimination of federal debt, privatisations and Reserve Bank independence.
Howard made the Liberals a party of social and economic attack, yet this was confounding to many of his opponents.

For some reason, the pond also couldn't score the AV distraction described as Paul Kelly joins Claire Harvey to discuss the 30th anniversary of John Howard's election

Nor could the archived version capture anything but the caption. 

But these were just droplets of mercy for the pond, too busy drowning in the deep end of the pool

The month before his election, Howard said: “I give you this pledge: I want to do everything in my power to preserve the social fabric of this nation.” He wanted people to be proud of their history and their Western civilisational heritage. He said: “I believed very strongly in the doctrine that an attack was the best form of defence when it came to something we believed in.”
The year he took office Howard said: “I think I am fairly mainstream. I can’t be, in any way, typecast as an establishment figure.” He was the conservative as populist, the champion of middle-class self-improvement, and created an opportunistic cultural code for his prime ministership – he embodied the “mainstream” mob and felt sure that “mainstream” conveyed both strength and popularity. This was a different brand of conservatism to Menzies, suited to a different time.
Howard’s battlers
Howard recruited the “mainstream” mob against the pro-Labor sectional and progressive interests and proved, to their shock, the appeal of social conservatism and the extent to which the public believed in the traditions of family, nation, responsibility and sovereignty.
Howard was ruthless in delivering for his voting constituencies: small business, the lower middle-income legions known as the Howard battlers, the over-55-year-olds and traditional families. He offered them benefits, bribes and ideological assurance.
He became a hate figure among progressives because he specialised in exposing the flaws in their ideology. Over the years a progressive minority launched a furious moralistic campaign against him, accusing him of waging a culture war, essentially over three issues: his ineptitude on Indigenous policy and inability to come to terms with the apology; his brutal exploitation of the Tampa affair to elevate border protection over asylum-seeker demands; and his Iraq war commitment aligned with US president George W. Bush and the subsequent revelation Iraq did not possess a WMD capability. The origin of Australia’s contemporary cultural split dates back to the political fragmentation over Howard’s agenda.

Then the reptiles decided to rub it in, with another triumph ... John Howard claims victory for the Coalition, and become Prime Minister, in 1996. Picture: Michael Jones

The dangerous GST moment
Yet Howard’s golden run almost never happened. Herein lies the sheer knife-edged nature of political life. It is not for the faint-hearted.
Howard revealed that his most dangerous moment as prime minister came with the 1998 re-election on the GST after a single term as PM. The advice from Liberal Party federal director Lynton Crosby on election night was that his exit poll was 53-47 against Howard and pointed to the government’s defeat. Howard immediately broke the bad news to his wife, Janette, and their three children at Kirribilli House.
He told the author: “I thought if that poll were borne out, I would lose the election and I would be seen as having failed – that having got there, people would say, ‘Oh, he travelled over a lot of bodies to get there, and he gets this huge majority (in 1996) which is largely an anti-Keating vote.’ That’s what they would have said. I’d have been seen as failed.
“Richard, my youngest son and youngest child, engaged in a bit of gallows humour, like ‘we can play more golf, Dad.’ It was tough on the family. I felt a bit that I might have let them down and also my colleagues.
“I had thought in the lead-up to the poll that I could well go down as a one-term prime minister. I was thinking: What will I be remembered for, except squandering this huge majority, maybe for guns reform, but guns would grow in retrospect. Tax reform, yeah, but they’d say, you were stupid because you tried to win on tax.”
‘Amazed we got away with it’
Asked about the high-risk GST campaign, Costello said: “I was very worried. The thing about the GST is, it’s not normal tax reform. A GST taxes all goods, all services, all people, every day. Keating in the ’93 campaign said it was a life-changing tax. You get up in the morning, you use your toothbrush, it’s got GST, your toothpaste has GST; you turn on your light, it’s got GST; you turn on the toaster, it’s been paid with GST; you get in your car, it’s got GST, your petrol’s got a GST, your car insurance has GST. Every person, every day. When you look back, I’m amazed we got away with it.”
There is one reason the government got away with it – in hundreds of interviews, Costello never made a single mistake – not one. No other politician could have delivered that performance. He was haunted daily by John Hewson’s blunder in the 1993 campaign trying to explain how the GST would affect the cost of a birthday cake, knowing another blunder would be fatal.
“Every day on talkback radio they’d invite people to call in,” Costello said. “Tell me how the GST will apply to racehorse winnings. I remember that one. What will it do to your TAB bets? What will it do to timeshare, I mean timeshare holiday apartments? Of course, the Labor Party’s ringing in and getting their people to ring in. One error and it’s gone.”

At last Petey boy made the pictorial cut ...Peter Costello was acutely aware of the dangers of the GST debate: ‘One error and it’s gone’. Picture: Getty Images 

Brave lad, though perhaps not so brave, perhaps lacking a little ticker ...

The stakes for Howard were highly personal because the July 1997 decision to run on tax reform spearheaded by the GST was his personal decision, though strongly backed by Costello who took responsibility for designing the package. Howard won with his majority reduced from 45 to 12 seats with the Labor opposition under Kim Beazley taking 18 seats from the Coalition and winning the two-party-preferred vote 51-49 per cent. Howard survived – and probably attempted the GST reform – only because of his big initial 1996 majority.
The 1998 election was the pivotal point in the Howard prime ministership. Taking a huge risk, Howard had avoided a one-term debacle. Defeat would have condemned his political gamble and destroyed Liberal Party self-belief. Instead of being the nation’s second longest serving prime minister, Howard would have been dismissed as a “oncer” and a failure, a PM not fit for the job. Labor, having ruled for five terms under Hawke and Keating, would have been back in power after just three years. The Liberals would have sunk into crisis.
But something else happened: Howard and Liberals had the genius to turn this narrow win into a triumph. Crosby said: “We used the GST and the victory to build the idea of Howard as the political strongman.” No other Western world leader had been re-elected on such ambitious tax reform. Howard had a new status – a re-elected conviction PM, astute at politics and brave on reform. He cultivated and rode this identity for years.
Labor could never stomach this depiction yet it gained traction. It gave the Liberals a powerful credo and it invested Howard with enhanced authority and a pathway to the future.
The Liberals vest a special status in their leader. Howard understood this and realised its full potential. After all, his first leadership from 1985 to 1989 finished in his humiliating party room removal. This loss was seared in his consciousness.
Explaining his over-arching priority as prime minister, he told Inquirer: “I invested a lot of time and effort in building personal relations with everybody in the party room. I held very strongly to the view that the most important relationship of a political leader is between him and the people he immediately leads, and the people you immediately lead are the members of the parliamentary party.”
On leadership consultation, he made a criticism of his successors: “I think the key to a lot of the turbulence that followed my time was the failure of leaders on both sides to understand that. You can never delegate that job to somebody else.”

Then came the dynamic duo in a pose reminding the pond of all the snaps it got of assorted Tamworth High School reunions which the pond never attended,  John Howard and Peter Costello at thhis (sic, because even the sub-editor nodded off) week’s Aspire conference in Sydney. Picture: Jane Dempster/The Australian

Howard prioritised the reinterpretation of the party for a new generation. While he constantly invoked Menzies, he offered a significant shift from Menzies in Liberal philosophical meaning, casting the Liberals as embodying two traditions – conservative values and classical liberalism. This was his personal conviction but designed to expand the voting base of the party, something many Liberals in recent years seemed clueless to grasp.
Having been converted in the 1980s to the so-called dries, Howard became an exponent of market forces and deregulation, and summarised his classical liberalism as “economic discipline, balancing budgets, opting for expenditure control, reforming the industrial relations system and the tax system where possible, and we went very strongly on privatisation.”
In the interview Howard said what struck him about the Australian people was “the consistency and ageless character of our identity”.
He said: “I’ve often reflected on this whole thing. The externalities have changed and the language has changed, but the essence of the Australian identity hasn’t changed. I operated on the assumption that when it came to social values we were always going to be a conservative government.” He said this was strongly supported by the senior figures – John Anderson, Costello and Downer.
Howard’s inner sanctum
These were the ministers who formed the inner sanctum. “There were four people I regularly trusted on a regular basis because I had to,” Howard said, and named them – Anderson, Costello, Downer and Peter Reith, who stayed for only the first half of the government. Anderson and Howard were close personally and politically. Anderson was the longest serving Nationals leader, following Tim Fischer and succeeded by Mark Vaile. “With all three, their word was their bond,” Howard said. Each was a dedicated coalitionist in a National Party different to that of today. Howard’s passion for Coalition arrangements derives from the immense stability the Coalition delivered his government.

There came a brief respite from the relentless scribbled hagiography with a different kind of hagiography, a hagiographic snap, meeemooories (sung in the Streisdand style) of lost power and glory days, Howard’s key men: Alexander Downer, left, John Anderson, third from left, Peter Costello, on Anderson’s right, and Peter Reith, far right. Picture: Michael Jones

While Howard and Costello had some significant policy disagreements, the big story was their concord on the economy. Costello said: “People say, oh you didn’t get on with Howard. Let me tell you, every Monday morning I sat next to him in cabinet. For 11½ years, every sitting morning I sat next to him in the PM’s office. I don’t think we ever had a fight.
“We had policy disagreements. I don’t think we ever had a policy fight. In terms of working together, it was very successful until we got to the end.
“The big overall economic policy was set by me, with more support in the early days from Howard. The big calls were: let’s balance the budget, pay off debt and ultimately let’s set up a sovereign fund to build assets, let’s broaden the indirect tax base, reduce income tax, cut capital gains tax, let’s have an ambitious micro-economic reform program. These are the things I really believed in.”
Howard is praiseworthy of Costello but careful: “I rate him very highly, I always have and I still do,” he said. “His first budget was terrific. It laid the foundation. Of course, he did a great job in construction the detail of the GST.”

And so at last to the final visual distraction, Prime Minister John Howard congratulates Federal Treasurer Peter Costello after his 1996 Budget speech.

And that was followed by "Ned's" last extended gobbet ...

Downer was the minister closest to Howard in a personal sense, a legacy of his decision to surrender the leadership to Howard in 1995. The trust between Howard and Downer ran deep. They had similar views and instincts on nearly every critical foreign policy decision from the East Timor intervention, to invoking the ANZUS Treaty, to deepening the US alliance under Bush and the Iraq war commitment.
Howard is sensitive about the forces that delivered his third election win in 2001, coming after two epic events – the stopping of the Tampa and the Al-Qa’ida attack on 9/11 when Howard was in Washington. He makes a brave call that many would contest. Howard said: “My conviction is that we would have won the 2001 election without the impact either of 9/11 or the Tampa, but it would have been a much smaller majority. It could have been a near thing.”
This assessment is critical. Howard’s critics argue he survived into a third term only because of good fortune – Tampa and 9/11. But this largely avoids the point – prime ministers must deal with emergencies on their watch and there is never any guarantee they will get it right. Tampa is the obvious example.
Howard reveals that the Norwegian government was the indirect agent that made the Tampa event happen. The Tampa was a Norwegian container ship en route to Indonesia when it rescued more than 400 asylum-seekers who intimidated the captain and forced him to alter course for Christmas Island. The government was outraged. Downer had a futile call with Norway’s foreign minister. No result.
Howard said: “The ignition point was the final refusal of the Norwegians to tell their captain to turn around and go back to Indonesia. Our understanding under the law was that it had to return to the port from whence it came. But the Norwegians were determined to do otherwise. There was a fair amount of European disdain for the way we were handling this, particularly coming out of Scandinavia – ‘you don’t understand, you wild colonials’.
“They’re very good at lecturing others. I had no doubt then, I have no doubt now, that if the Norwegian government had changed its tune, things would have stopped there.”
When the Tampa entered Australian waters, Special Air Service troops boarded and took control of the ship. Howard’s point is obvious: he didn’t create the Tampa issue and he didn’t respond for domestic political purposes – he responded as a prime minister facing a direct challenge to the nation’s borders. The issue that infuriated his critics only enhanced Howard’s authority and cast him as a champion of sovereignty, the ultimate conservative branding.

You see, Dave?

Nothing to worry about here. No need to worry about King Donald's desire to bermb, bermb, bermb Iran, even though he'd obliterated the program earlier in the year, and even though the bermbing was simply designed to restore a treaty he'd torn up,  because .... Obama ...

All you have to do is wander down memory lane with "Ned" and soon enough you'll be as snug as a bug, deep in the hive mind, lost somewhere in the 1950s ... with not a care in the world.