Howard - The Age 2006 - By Hugh Mackay

As he celebrates his 10th anniversary in the top job, John Howard's grip on the prime ministership appears firmer than ever.
Respect? For the man who misled us over the children overboard affair; the man who created the infamous distinction between core and non-core promises; the man who used $4 million of taxpayers' money to pay outstanding entitlements to the employees of a failed company of which his brother happened to be chairman?
For the man who created an admirable set of standards of ministerial propriety and then revised them downwards rather than sack a mate; the man who sent Australian troops to invade Iraq, based on false information about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction; the man who never seems to know anything about the kind of scandals (such as the corrupt wheat deals) that would once have had any responsible minister hanging his head in shame, if not actually resigning? Respect?
Yes, respect. The grounds for it have changed in the past decade, as earlier perceptions of a kind of gritty integrity have given way to a colder, more pragmatic view of Howard. Yet Howard's reputation with Australian voters still rests more on respect than any other single factor. We may not like him; we may find it hard to know when he is telling the truth; yet we respect him.
Even the many disillusioned voters who no longer trust Howard speak of their respect for the man's dogged persistence, his economic credentials, his political cleverness and his powerful instinct for survival.
Howard is widely perceived as the ultimate pragmatist, the arch politician, "the safe pair of hands", the man to weather a crisis, national or personal, without ever appearing to flinch. And in spite of all our disappointment and disillusionment - and, in extreme cases, our disgust and despair - we continue to respect him for those qualities.
The key to Howard's appeal lies in his very lack of charisma. His appearance of ordinariness is perhaps his greatest political asset: he looks and sounds like "an ordinary bloke" and that triggers the almost instinctive feeling that he must be "a decent bloke" as well.
Howard acts like one of us. His personal standards are no higher than ours. Although we might yearn for visionary and charismatic leaders, there's something peculiarly reassuring about a bloke in whom we recognise our own frailties, weaknesses and contradictions.
Some leaders inspire us with the noble idea that we might create a better society; Howard sets our sights on a lower, lesser target. Far from inspiring nobility of purpose, he encourages us to be comfortable with some of the baser aspects of our own ordinariness.
He reinforces our materialism. By conflating politics with economics and by placing emphasis on material prosperity, Howard has encouraged the idea that money is the key to happiness, that share-ownership is a symbol of success and that the rich should be praised and rewarded for being rich.
That, in turn, reinforces our moral laxity, partly because that's the usual result of an over-emphasis on material values. Howard's unwavering commitment to the strategy of "toughing it out" also encourages, by example, our thoroughly human tendency to be self-serving and, when it suits our purposes, dishonest.
He reinforces our prejudices. Under Howard, we have become less compassionate, less tolerant and more uninhibited in the expression of ethnic and religious prejudice. "Terrorist" has become a convenient new cloak for some very old prejudices.
Howard hasn't done any of this single-handedly, of course: we have been his partners in this entire enterprise. It is in his ability to reinforce what is already there - dark as it may be - that the true genius of Howard's prime ministership lies.

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