JOHN HOWARD: Playing hard ball

No one should be surprised that the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has had the political courage – lacked by Tony Blair in 2004 – to show his disapproval of the Mugabe regime by banning his country’s cricket team from touring Zimbabwe.

Howard has never had difficulty in playing hard ball: as Finance Minister in his early career, he broke the power of the unions on centralised wage-fixing; as Prime Minister he failed to say sorry to the “stolen generation” of Aboriginal children; he was hardly welcoming to refugees left bobbing about on the ocean in leaky boats; kept asylum-seekers banged up in detention camps for years and has now signalled a ban on HIV-positive migrants.

Liberal sensibilities in Australia and around the world may be scandalised by such hardline policies but Howard doesn’t care because he knows he is in tune with what Middle Australia is thinking. “In Howard’s Australia,” observed the writer Kathy Marks, “prejudice lurks, intolerance thrives and sameness is celebrated.”

A short, grey man in his sixties with a whiny voice, Howard lacks any sort of contemporary charisma, yet in Returned & Services League clubs in country towns he can sit and talk sport and sheep and weather and, like his heroine Margaret Thatcher, he remembers people’s names. He has turned ordinariness into an art form. The Australian author Thomas Keneally likened him to Gradgrind, the schoolmaster in Dickens’s Hard Times– “A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations.” Born in 1939, he became a suburban solicitor and lived with his parents until he was 32 when he married Janette, whom he has credited as his most important political adviser.

He became a Liberal MP in 1974 and was rapidly promoted in the Fraser government, becoming Treasurer within three years. He became leader of his party for the first time in 1985 but was beaten four years later by Andrew Peacock, a Melbourne patrician of whom it was said that a soufflé never rises twice. Howard, it turned out, was made of sterner stuff. He bounced back as leader just in time to defeat the Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating in the 1996 election, pronouncing himself “Lazarus with a triple bypass”.

Howard has been in government for 11 years now, during which time many Australians have squirmed in embarrassment as their country appears to have turned in on itself, rejecting liberal reforms and social change, cosying up to America and volunteering troops for Iraq. His long run in power has been aided by a weak opposition, but a new centrist Labor leader has emerged in Kevin Rudd whom the polls indicate will win in forthcoming elections. Lazarus may be looking forward to retirement and a long summer of cricket.

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