John Howard

Australia’s 25th Prime Minister

Prime Minister John Howard

At the federal election on 2 March 1996 the Liberal–National Party coalition under Howard was swept into power with an enormous majority in the House of Representatives.

Soon after, and claiming the government had been left with a ‘black hole’ of debt by Labor, he promised to reduce government expenditure by $8 billion over the next three years. This pledge was to continue guiding his government’s economic policies.

Only three weeks after Howard took office, a gunman murdered 35 people at Port Arthur, Tasmania. The massacre provoked national debate about private gun ownership, especially automatic weapons. Within weeks, Australian Prime Minister John Howard implemented critical changes to gun safety legislation with bipartisan state, territory and Commonwealth support.

During his time as Prime Minister, Howard won the general elections on 3 October 1998, 10 November 2001 and 9 November 2004. After the 2004 election, the government parties gained a majority in the Senate for the first time since 1981.

During his time as Prime Minister, Howard implemented many government policies including:

• After the High Court’s 1996 ‘Wik’ decision on Indigenous people’s ability to enter leasehold land where they had customary usage rights, the government legislated to restrict their access and confirm the leaseholders’ title.
• Legislation to replace industry-wide industrial agreements on wages and work conditions with workplace agreements between individual workers and employers. The government’s determination to eliminate compulsory trade union membership and secure waterfront reform was severely tested in a long-running waterfront dispute during 1998, when a stevedoring company locked out unionists from its wharves and employed non-union labour instead.
• In 1998 the government introduced a ‘work for the dole’ scheme that linked unemployment relief to recipients’ willingness to work at assigned tasks.
• Establishment of a part-appointed, part-elected convention on the issue of Australia becoming a republic. This body met during February 1998 and the government put the convention’s proposals to the public in a referendum in November 1999. The referendum, along with a proposal sponsored by the Prime Minister to add a Preamble to the Australian Constitution, was rejected.
• Funding environmental protection by privatising partial ownership of its communications corporation, Telstra. One third of Telstra was sold in 1996 and the government then moved to sell all of Telstra in 1998. The Senate eventually accepted the bills permitting the partial (49.9 per cent) sale of Telstra in June 1999.
• Reform of the taxation system through introduction of a tax on consumption – the Goods and Services Tax, or GST. The government announced this new tax proposal prior to the 1998 election, and, supported by the Australian Democrats who had demanded modification of the GST bills, succeeded in persuading the Senate to accept GST legislation in June 1999.
• During the early years of Howard’s government, foreign affairs and immigration policies were influenced by events such as the arrival of immigrants and asylum seekers by boat, communal violence in Indonesia and Malaysia, the continuing warfare in the Balkans following the collapse of the former Communist state of Yugoslavia, the vote for independence in East Timor and attempts to find a peaceful solution to the troubles of Northern Ireland.
• A focus on domestic and regional security in response to the terrorist attack in the United States on 11 September 2001 and the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia in October 2002. This included increased funding for intelligence agencies, aviation, maritime and border security and regional counter-terrorism measures. As part of the ‘war on terror’, Howard committed troops to Afghanistan from 2002 and to Iraq from 2004.
• Abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in June 2004 and transfer of ATSIC programs to mainstream agencies. From 2005 shared responsibility agreements were introduced in which Indigenous communities defined the changes they would implement in return for government funding.
• Negotiation of a free trade agreement with the United States in 2004, and pursuit of closer economic agreements with countries in the Asia-Pacific region. A closer commitment to regional neighbours also led to Australia lending significant military and police assistance to East Timor, Solomon Islands and Tonga, and continued assistance to Papua New Guinea.
• Further changes to industrial relations in 2006 through the introduction of WorkChoices. This created a national workplace relations system, significant changes to unfair dismissal laws and introduction of the Australian Fair Pay Commission.
• Establishment of the National Water Commission in 2006 and, in 2007, the National Plan for Water Security in response to the severe and prolonged drought. Pressure to become a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol in order to achieve specified targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was resisted by the government, but it did commit funds to research on renewable energy (for example, the contribution of nuclear energy to Australia’s long-term energy needs) in the context of increased awareness of climate change.

At the general election on 24 November 2007, Howard’s Liberal-National coalition was defeated by the Labor Party led by Kevin Rudd. Howard was the second-longest-serving Prime Minister after Robert Menzies, and became only the second Prime Minister to lose his own seat.