Featured image: Author Amy Remeikis
The author Amy Remeikis is chief political analyst at the Australia Institute. Her new book Where It All Went Wrong: The Case Against John Howard is welcome; it’s a book that’s long overdue. Remeikis argues that many of today’s societal problems can be traced back to Howard’s policies as PM for 11 years, 1996-2007. “He started the shift from the collective to the individual in Australia,” she writes, “and in doing so made us all the more vulnerable to the divisive messages of today.”
Let’s start with reconciliation. Shortly after becoming PM, Howard attended the 1997 Australian Reconciliation Conference. In his speech, he rejected an apology to the Stolen Generations and minimised past injustices, calling them merely a “blemish” in Australian history. He claimed that the current generation was not accountable for the actions of previous generations. He opposed a so-called “black armband” view of history, which began the “history wars” which still resonate today.
Howard was however highly selective as to which historical events should be celebrated. He admired for example the heroics of Gallipoli, which led to excessive veneration for Anzac Day throughout his term of office. Remeikis concludes, “In Howard’s history of Australia, we were the proud inheritors of past glories, and what we weren’t proud of needn’t be mentioned.”
Many contemporary crises originated with Howard. Take housing, for example. The untrammelled growth in the price of houses over the years has led to many young people effectively frozen out of the housing market. Remeikis says, “Howard turned housing from a place to live to a source of wealth. It went from a roof over your head to a way to build an investment portfolio.”
Howard combined two policies: firstly, negative gearing, which enables an investor to make a loss on property costs to deduct this loss from their tax, “in effect a government subsidy for their loan”, writes Remeikis; and secondly, a capital gains discount of 50 per cent for investments held for more than 12 months. In this way Howard was able to undercut the Hawke/Keating capital gains tax of 1985 – a tax on the profit one made from an investment.
In other words, Remeikis says, “Keep the property (or properties) to minimise your tax while owning it, and then when the market hits a sweet spot, sell, and half the profit is tax free”.
Remeikis’s conclusion on housing is telling: “A generation has been left completely screwed and largely at the mercy of the Bank of Mum and Dad”. Moreover, if you don’t own your own home when you retire, then your future will be bleak, as the age pension is not enough to cover the average rent, or mortgage payment. “Howard’s Australia firmly entrenched generational wealth”, writes Remeikis. “You’ve either got it, or you don’t”.
Now to Pauline Hanson. Howard’s opposition to multiculturalism was intensified by her emergence in 1996, when she said in her maiden speech to Federal Parliament that Australia was being “swamped with Asians”. Remeikis points to Howard’s failure to oppose Hanson, concluding, “The modern rise of the far right can be traced back to John Howard’s embrace of Hansonism within the Liberal Party. She is, and remains to be, a useful tool for those of Howard’s ilk to condone racist attitudes without ever having to speak the words themselves.” In 2026, is it not the case that the current leader of the opposition Angus Taylor is following the Howard playbook in relation to Pauline Hanson?
Following the dismantling of the White Australia Policy, the two major parties enjoyed a consensus regarding multiculturalism and asylum seekers. That’s until Howard came along. He was determined to put limits on migration and asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by boat. Even though it’s not illegal to seek asylum, asylum seekers were dubbed “illegal”. Howard benefited immensely from two events: the Tampa affair and the “children overboard” affair.
In August, 2001, the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa picked up 433 asylum seekers from a stranded Indonesian fishing boat in the Indian Ocean, some 140 kilometres from Christmas Island. Ever the opportunist, Howard refused to give permission for the freighter to enter Australian waters, and ignored the Norwegian captain’s requests for assistance. His eventual solution was to reach agreement with Nauru to take 302 asylum seekers, while New Zealand took 131. The “Tampa affair” led to the so-called Pacific Solution. Moreover Christmas Island and other offshore territories were omitted from Australia’s migration zone, so that asylum seekers reaching those territories were prevented from applying for asylum.
Now for the “children overboard” affair. A Federal election took place in November, 2001. In October, Howard and ministers Philip Ruddock and Peter Reith claimed that asylum seekers on a wooden boat known as SIEV 4, had thrown their children into the water in order to encourage their being rescued and taken into custody by Australian authorities. The government for its part wished to portray itself as “strong” on border protection, while its political opponents could be represented as “weak” on this issue. Howard excused this flagrant dishonesty by claiming he wasn’t told that the “children overboard” story was a fiction. Meanwhile, his strategy was successful. Despite being behind the Labor Party in polls during most of 2001, he won the 2001 election handsomely, winning the Senate for the first time. The Tampa and children overboard affairs, plus the 9/11 attacks in the USA, took their toll on the Labor vote, certainly affecting the election result.
By the time of the 1996 election, Howard had modified his long-time opposition to universal health care. Knowing that Medicare was too popular with the electorate for him to directly sabotage it, Howard sought to undermine Medicare through a number of peripheral initiatives. They included the Commonwealth’s 30% rebate for private health insurance (1999); and a Lifetime Health Cover policy (2000), so that one needed to purchase and maintain private health insurance by the age of 31, otherwise you’d be faced with higher premiums if you made that decision in later life.
In my view it’s convenient to combine the outcomes of Howard’s housing and health policies because, in both cases, structural minefields were built into the Commonwealth Budget which still resonate today. The figures provided by Remeikis are sobering. “In 2025, negative gearing cost the Budget $7.4 billion, and the capital gains discount for residential property accounted for $6 billion. That’s $13.4 billion in lost revenue…” In the case of health, the government now spends $8 billion a year on the private health rebate, and exempting the private health insurance rebate from income tax costs another $1.6 billion. “That’s almost $10 billion a year which could be spent on public health, which isn’t”, says Remeikis,“because it’s subsidising people who were forced into the private system. It’s privatisation by stealth”.
If, in 2026, we’re wondering why current Treasurer Jim Chalmers doesn’t have enough funds in his Budget to adequately cover much-needed expenditure – on, say, public housing, the NDIS, or aged care – then we should be aware of these figures, for which Howard is largely responsible.
According to Remeikis the truism that the conservatives are the supreme economic managers needs to be challenged. The fact is that Howard and his Treasurer Costello were immensely lucky to benefit from the mining boom and favourable global economic conditions while they were in office. Money flooded into the economy. But Howard was incapable of taking advantage of this economic success. “He basically pissed it all up against a (tax cut) wall,” Remeikis writes, “instead of investing in services or setting Australia up for the future.”
Remeikis bemoans the outcome. “Do we have a super-fast train? Free higher education? An actual universal health system? Dental? A strong social safety net or affordable housing, or anything else you would expect from such luck at having incredible revenue flows?” No, she concludes, instead we have “lower taxes for the wealthy, less protection for workers, privatisation of public services and, above all, delivering a surplus, no matter what”.
The problem with reviewing such a book is that a short review is inadequate to cover the full gamut of legitimate allegations against Howard, which illustrate what Remeikis describes as “the crudeness at the core of [his] political instincts.” One could rattle on about many other issues, such as climate change, where Howard helped to institutionalise doing little about the climate crisis. He refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement, intended to reduce emissions to 5% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012; when in 2006, the former US vice-president Al Gore visited Australia to promote his film An Inconvenient Truth, Howard refused to meet him; and he refused to entertain an emissions trading scheme until the eve of the 2007 election. By the end of Howard’s prime ministership little had been done to rise above petty politics and act in the interests of future generations, and at-risk communities, such as those in the Pacific. “What should have been a no-brainer (that also would have had economic benefits)”, writes Remeikis, “became an ideological culture war that is still raging today.”
As for foreign policy it’s coincidental that Howard was in Washington when 9/11 occurred. The destruction of the two World Trade Centre towers in New York deeply affected him. His response, without the benefit of any legal advice, was to invoke the ANZUS treaty. This parlous decision led to Australia’s longest war, a commitment to the American intervention in Afghanistan which lasted nearly 20 years, from 2001 to 2021. Remeikis quotes the Australia Institute’s Dr Emma Shortis: “That decision was the one that has kept us chained to the US for strategic, defence and foreign policy ever since.” Given Howard’s craven attitude towards the US then, it’s not far to Scott Morrison’s AUKUS policy, described by Paul Keating as “the most poorly conceived defence procurement program ever adopted by an Australian government.”
Dr Emma Shortis
As for industrial relations, Howard set about gutting the power of the trade unions by restricting the operations of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, the introduction of Australian workplace agreements, and the outlawing of closed shops. Union leaders became “union bosses”, while actual bosses in private enterprise became “business leaders”. He took on the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) in the 1998 waterfront dispute, effectively breaking the back of one of Australia’s most powerful unions. Howard continued to weaken unions by changing tax law to encourage tradespeople to become self-employed contractors rather than employees. Unions lost membership fees and members; and solidarity and sympathy strikes were banned. Remeikis stresses how Howard’s policies handed overwhelming power to employers: “Enterprise agreements are now entrenched in Australian workplaces, and it is the employer who controls how they are created, resulting in the stagnation of wages and conditions.”
Then, of course, consider the notorious WorkChoices of December, 2005. Howard’s legislation removed the “no disadvantage” test which had previously applied to individual workplace agreements (AWAs). This enabled employers to force a “take it or leave it” AWA on employees. WorkChoices superseded state powers over industrial relations, creating a single national system affecting 85% of workers. Penalties for unlawful industrial action were increased, and businesses with less than 100 employees were exempt from unfair dismissal laws. Howard had achieved his lifelong dream of handing power to employers and tearing down union power in the workplace.
Howard decimated the union movement. When he became PM in 1996, union membership was 2.19 million; it was down to 1.69 million when he left in 2007. Only 19% of the workforce was unionised. While the Rudd government, elected in 2007, tinkered with Howard’s policies, the ACTU had to wait until the Albanese government was elected in 2022 to see wages rise again. In 2024 only 13.1 % of the workforce were members of a union, down from 40% in 1992.
“Howard did lasting damage”, says Remeikis. “The Coalition’s deliberate policy of wage stagnation, combined with gutting union power between 2012 and 2022 has been estimated … to have lowered the average yearly wage by almost $12,000, compared to what it would have been if wage growth had kept up with the historical average over that period… Howard wanted to dismantle the entire labour movement. And in some ways, he succeeded, or at least permanently weakened its power…” The fact that WorkChoices was a major issue at the 2007 election, and that Howard lost, not only the election, but also his seat in Parliament, was a pyrrhic victory for progressive forces, as Howard had very much succeeded in modifying Australian society to his liking, leaving a lasting legacy, which is yet to be seriously reversed.
When Howard became PM in 1996 he was determined to expand neoliberal policy by restructuring our welfare system. Social security language shifted from “entitlements” for citizens to their “obligations” for receiving state support. Over three years Howard took $1 billion from social security and redirected it to the middle classes. In 1997 he established Centrelink to provide services which were previously provided by the Department of Social Security (DSS).
Remeikis’s conclusion on welfare policy is damning. “Over 11 years, Howard completely reshaped how we view welfare and made the lives of those needing to access the system so much harder than it needed to be”, she writes. Welfare advocacy groups such as the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition were defunded, and access to the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) was severely limited. “Labor’s activity test (how many hours someone spent looking for work) for unemployment was tightened, penalties for non-compliance with the rules increased, rent assistance for single people living in shared accommodation was reduced, youth allowances were means-rested…” The list is endless; Howard policies which many consider bad or unacceptable are simply too numerous to list. For those on welfare, the policy of “work for the dole” arrived in 1998, whereby people did menial labour for the dollar amount of their unemployment payment. Wikipedia tells us that studies have since shown that this policy has largely been ineffective in creating jobs for participants, and it has disproportionately disadvantaged Indigenous Australians, particularly in remote areas.
Amy Remeikis opens her final chapter “Conclusion” with the words “There is so much more which could be written”. I wholeheartedly agree; there are many more issues which could have been included in this review so extensive has been Howard’s doleful legacy.
Remeikis helpfully throws some light on what is puzzling many Labor supporters in 2026: why the Albanese government is so cautious, if not lacking in vision. “You could say John Howard’s greatest achievement is the modern Labor Party,” she writes. “Even with the historical majority it won in 2025, and the complete cratering of the Liberal Party vote, Labor seems afraid of making any sort of progressive change because of what could happen, of how someone could twist the debate and send them back into the political wilderness. Even with another term guaranteed following the next election… Labor is tiptoeing around the need for reform, still haunted by the ghost of Howard’s Australia.”
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