As someone who has never liked JH, the only economic activities they have achieved that have assisted Oz are the GST, a necessary but hardly revolutionary reform, (poorly handled at the time), and keeping in check the budget position in the early years (but not the last 5 where they p***ed a small fortune up against the wall for political purposes. Some of their superannuation reforms will have to be undone in future years as our tax base dries up.

Further, the halving of CGT is a dreadful economic distortion, the elephant in the room that neither party will acknowledge. The complete stuffing up of telecommunications policy (mainly selling off Telstra without splitting retail from wholesale) will be a brake on Oz economy for a long time to come. The lack of investment in infrasturcture and education (trade and university) is a legacy which we will feel for the next 15 years.

Dismantling negative gearing, a blight on the economy, would have been a worthy reform, but you won’t get that from the party of business.

And that is just looking at the economic policy side of things, where they claim to have excelled. It is pathetic that the electorate views the Coalition as the party with the good economic record.

Suspicions. thoughts, assumptions, suggestions of mine. Nothing else concrete at this stage…

I cannot believe that he is simply acting off his own bat, so to speak… If he were doing so, I’m sure we would’ve seen “private” comments from within the ALP that he was damaging the parliamentary party’s election efforts; and also, he would not continue to pop up. Egotistical, he might have been/ might be, but I can’t believe he would allow his ego to reign over the overwhelming need for Labor to fight and beat Howard. (Er, I mean the Howard-led Coalition…)

PJK makes our current crop of pollies look like pygmies.

He was a leader – not a pleasant one but a leader nonetheless. All we have had for the last decade is Menzies-era deputy managers.

There’s a pattern here: when the right put a major policy up, the left sometimes engages in shrieking histrionics, only to tacitly admit, some time later, that it really ain’t so bad after all.

Fair go Paulus. You could also say ‘when the left put a major policy up, the right sometimes engages in shrieking histrionics, only to tacitly admit, some time later, that it really ain’t so bad after all.’

I am no shill for Howard, and my father confirms what you say that Howard was no hero, but he was certainly a maverick, willing to go way more out on a limb than any of his contemparies and even more than the current pansies wasting valuable media space!

LOL! I don’t think my father waited for the floating dollar to turn to the bottle!

I suspect the hiring of Epstein was done so that Rudd has a spoiler that he has to fight to get anything through. The mismanaging of the IR debate a few weeks back demonstrated that they needed more control on the message.

I would really like to know if Keating’s advice is being sought after privately. I suspect not, but I think Rudd could do well by bringing Keating into the fold as his policy advice is excellent.

Where are they today?”

Some went to the Greens, some went to One Nation, some stayed with the ALP and took to liquor or anti-depressants, some left the ALP and have found no other home.

I am still at a total loss at how you can trivialise the creation of an independent central bank!

I haven’t trivialised it, I’ve merely pointed out, as FXH also noted, that it significantly reduces the degree to which this government (or any future government) can claim credit for economic conditions.

It was also hardly something that was of the same order of magnitude as many of Keating’s reforms in terms of policy courage – the overseas precedents were already there and there was no opposition to it – as you correctly point out, much of what Keating did was vehemently opposed in many quarters.

As to this myth that Howard was a reforming Treasurer held in check by Fraser, it’s self-serving palaver. Howard, aside from his obsession with indirect taxation, was still firmly in the the groove of the then Treasury orthoxy represented by Stone (who was deeply suspicious of floating the dollar). In any case, if Howard had been the policy warrior he claims to have been, he could have always resigned to force Fraser’s hand. But of course that would have entailed taking a gamble and giving up office, which are hardly in character.

Where are they today?

I am still at a total loss at how you can trivialise the creation of an independent central bank!

As to the GST and micro-economic reform, I’m kinda inclined to go with Keating on the actual significance of the GST – which is that it’s worth doing, but not that important.

A GST was always Keating’s holy grail. His heaven was “Option C” which Hawke vetoed as politically unsaleab;e. Keating was merely following from when Howard was Treasurer. Malcolm Fraser vetoed Howard, a lot more than Hawke did Keating, including Howard’s longed-for GST.

By 1984, after the Fraser Razor Gangs, Australia had recovered a little more after the Whitlam disaster (which Australia has only finally shaken in the past two years), so Keating was allowed to implement a lot of what Howard dreamed of. Also, Keating was able, to some extent, to coast on the coat-tails of political risk and radical monetarism implemented by Thatcher.

Keating has never recovered from his most highly sought after policy aim – a GST – was implemented by Howard, and Howard won an election with GST as a promised reform!

Well, yes, but in the run up to its introduction, the GST was denounced as an end to civilisation as we know it. … Then we all woke up on July 1 2000 and nothing had changed. It was still the same country. Now, the GST is properly recognised as: meh.

Precisely, Spiros. I was personally in the line of fire on that issue when I was handing out how-to-vote cards for the Democrats in 2001. You wouldn’t believe the bitterness of the ALP and Green people who denounced the ADs for having permitted the shocking assault on the poor that was the GST (in their minds).

Now here we are 6 years later and the ALP — and sensible centre-left people like Mark — hardly have a problem with the GST and aren’t about to repeal it in a hurry.

There’s a pattern here: when the right put a major policy up, the left sometimes engages in shrieking histrionics, only to tacitly admit, some time later, that it really ain’t so bad after all. The anti-VSU campaign is the other classic example. As Spiros correctly notes, WorkChoices may well follow this same path.

he lost in ‘96, after whinging about fag ends and fighting with the secretariat and getting depressed and generally being self indulgent. he threw the election.

he let howard steal labor’s stellar economy. then he funked by not staying on to fight howard on the floor of the house as leader of opposition. he could have made howard’s life an absolute misery.

but no. and now more of the same.