John Howard

This is about John Winston Howard, Prime Minister of Australia. See also John Howard, Duke of Norfolk

John Winston Howard (born July 26, 1939) is the current (twenty-fifth) Prime Minister of Australia. He came to power on March 11, 1996. He is the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia.

John Howard is one of the longest serving members of Australia's lower house of Federal Parliament (the House of Representatives) with his Minister for Immigration Phillip Ruddock being the longest and current holder of the title "Father of the House".

John Howard was elected to the inner-suburban Sydney electoral seat of Bennelong in the election of 1974. He served as a minister throughout the entire term of the Fraser government. After the Liberal Party's defeat in 1983, he became Deputy Leader of the Opposition, but in 1985 successfully challenged Andrew Peacock for the leadership of the Liberal party (and thus the title of Opposition Leader). After leading the Liberals through two unsuccessful elections, he was replaced again by Peacock. Finally, Howard returned to the Liberal Party leadership in 1995 and won the subsequent 1996, 1998 and 2001 elections.

Howard as Prime Minister

Howard's 1996 win was in some ways a surprise, in that few political commentators ever expected him to return to the Liberal Party leadership after losing it a second time, but in others predictable given that the incumbent, Paul Keating, was perceived as lacking empathy with the broader public with his intellectualised "big-picture" approach to politics and combination of harsh political tactics and perceived elitist tastes. Howard's campaign contained little in the way of detailed policy and concentrated heavily on Keating's perceived failings. Once in office, his first term was cautious, his one major policy achievement occurring after the Port Arthur massacre of 1996, where he convinced and/or coerced state governments into heavily restricting the availability of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

His 1998 election campaign was based around reforms to the tax system, including a goods and services tax, a broad-based value-added tax. He managed to lead the party to an election win, a rare achievement in political history considering most parties around proposing new taxes have failed to win elections. Despite Howard's essentially domestic focus, external issues intruded significantly into Howard's second term. The first occurred in 1998 and 1999 with events in East Timor, where Australia led pressure on Indonesia to uphold their offer of a referendum on independence, and later contributed a significant peacekeeping/policing force to protect the inhabitants against pro-Indonesian militias. Most Australians and the rest of the Western world viewed this as a moral, principled stand, but it came at the cost of antagonising Indonesia and was probably the main factor in the fall of the Habibe government there. In doing so, Howard reversed a decades-old bi-partisan foreign policy of appeasement towards Indonesia which had been largely created by the Australian Labor Party and followed by goverments of both parties until Howard.

In late 2001, Howard made a bold move that stretched international law to its limit in a change of policy on illegal or semi-legal asylum-seekers attempting to reach Australia from staging points in Indonesia, in an incident involving the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa which rescued a group of alleged Afghan asylum seekers whose ship had sunk. After the asylum-seekers threatened the captain with violence, the captain headed for Australian waters. At the time the MV Tampa was in international waters, and closer to Indonesia than to Christmas Island. Later, Australian Special Air Service (SAS) officers (on Howard's orders) forcibly took control of the ship to prevent it entering Australian waters. The people on the MV Tampa were instead transferred on an Australian troop ship to the tiny Pacific Island of Nauru. This unprecedented military action was hugely popular in Australia, where distrust of asylum-seekers from Islamic countries was already high, and only increased with the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York (which occurred only days after the Tampa incident). However, it is viewed by a minority of Australians and some liberal writers around the world as immoral and legally dubious.

The Australian Labor Party, Howard's chief political opponent, found during the "Tampa Incident" that many of its working class voter core also backed the Howard line on illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers and the party was split between its left wing which supported the old policy and its right which favoured supporting the new one devised by Howard. This split contributed very strongly indeed to the Liberal Party's re-election in 2001.

Howard and his supporters, portray him as standing up for Australia's "battlers" - the lower-middle class small-business people of the outer suburbs and provincial towns, with similarly conservative social values - against the left-leaning unionised employees, the perceived tertiary-educated, inner-suburban elites, and fraudulent welfare recipients. Howard has demonstrated considerable instincts for identifying hot-button issues with the Australian people and using them to his own political advantage, backing his instincts against sometimes heavy criticism from the non-conservatives and moderates in academia, the media, and even from some within his own party.

Self-proclaimed as the "most conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had", Howard's political vision combines a lassiez-faire economic policy, with generally conservative social views. The Howard government has emphasised a tight rein on government spending and tight restrictions on welfare (including "work for the dole" schemes that require the unemployed to participate in make-work projects). His government cut funding to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It has dramatically increased university fees, tilted the welfare and taxation systems towards single-income families and away from childless and single people, as well as supporting the move to overrule the government of the Northern Territory when it introduced the world's first legislation providing for legal voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill. Later, Howard's Government was pressured to adopt but refused to do so, mandatory sentencing laws inspired by California's "three strikes" laws, despite heavy pressure to do so from outside his party and within it. The Howard government has used its customs powers to prevent state governments from trialling the prescription of heroin by doctors as a treatment for drug addicts.

Howard has expressed views that indicate he is opposed to an indepdendent Australian republic (Australia, although an independent nation, remains constitutionally subject to the British monarchy). He worked hard campaigning against the 1999 Australian republic referendum, a bizarre campaign many republicans believe Howard arranged to fail. He has been heavily criticised for his political positions with regard to Australia's indigenous people, and particularly for his refusals to formally apologise for the Stolen Generation or create a formal treaty with the indigenous population. (A landmark court case in 1992 entitled Mabo having ruled that the doctrine of Terra Nullius was not applicable in Australia. Along with the Wik ruling, this created "Native Title", where in some cases aborigines could attempt to reclaim their land).

Previous Australian Prime Minister: Paul Keating
Next Australian Prime Minister: not applicable (John Howard is the current office-holder)