Is there ever a time in your life when you thought you were completely right, only to realise years – perhaps decades – later that your worldview and political understanding had been almost entirely inverted?
Well, the institution and the man that was John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, would be my biggest political turnaround.
I now consider him probably the greatest political figure of my lifetime – certainly the one I have come to admire most as I have grown older. With a bit of middle-aged hindsight, I can now better understand the legacy he left as Prime Minister.
Howard did some extraordinary things at a time when progressive and left-wing ideas were gaining an increasingly powerful hold over many institutions and workplaces. And I was one of their advocates.
To give you an idea of how caught up I was in politics at the time, I even exchanged emails with John Howard’s No. 1 nemesis during the 2004 election campaign, Australian Labor Party leader Mark Latham. I was genuinely humbled that he answered me, and I couldn’t help but get caught up in it all.
My father, whom I wrote about here, was a swing voter. When he began to sway towards Howard, I couldn’t believe my ears. At the time, I thought he had it completely wrong.
The video below is Part 1 of an extraordinary documentary in the years of Howard. I can’t tell you how much I’ve come back to it. And look, it has garnered just 31mil views, yet everything in it is the most amazing testament of few mostly men, doing the most extraordinary thing and everything counter reactionary to the Public.
Looking back on everything in my life, if I could somehow return to those years with the perspective and sobriety, I would love to have been among those people. Yes, they were politicians, and giving lollies to babies symbolically and all that! But I remain amazed by Howard’s ability, time and again, to convince his own Cabinet that they had to do what he believed was right – however unpopular it might be.
As I write this, I am watching John Anderson, Howard’s former deputy prime minister for much of the Howard government, still conducting enlightening interviews with people whose views often challenge the popular consensus. There is still hope.
And there is absolutely no way my twenty-something-year-old self would have given any of this the slightest bit of credence.
That’s how life goes, I suppose.
I hope you enjoy The Howard Years. It is one of the most fascinating political documentaries I have ever watched, and in my view, one of the most underrated accounts of modern Australian political history.
Golly, did Howard get a lot of things right. Not everything, of course. I believe he got it wrong when it came to not apologising to the Stolen Generations. But no one’s perfect, and that was a pretty big blunder.
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