John Howard turns 68 today. Anne Summers, who is six years younger than Howard and two years younger than Mick Jagger (who turns 64 today), thinks recent comment about his age has been “cruel“. I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, yet I also feel uneasy about the atmosphere of insinuation that people in their late 60s are somehow past it. Uneasy partly because, as a woman in my 50s who’s had a typically checkered employment history, including years of part-time work due to motherhood, I foresee having to work until I’m at least 70 to make ends meet. The Howard-Costello economic wonderland hasn’t sent the prospect of early retirement (or indeed any retirement) in my direction.
Of course, Howard’s not staying on purely for the money. And I couldn’t agree more with Summers that there are numerous good reasons to vote him out which have nothing to do with how old he is. Focusing on his age is a superficial distraction.
However, Summers doesn’t address the issue of longevity in the job, as distinct from age. Tony Blair stepped down as British prime minister this year at 54 after being in the job 10 years. Even if his exit was reluctant, Blair was at least finally capable of handing over and moving on. Howard, by contrast, has held onto his position with a steel grip. He’s a monodimensional man whose life is politics. I think there’s something about that which elicits hostility which gets misfired towards his age. Even if he’s not tired of power, it’s not unreasonable of an electorate to get tired of having the same person in power for more than a decade (and in another position of power over a decade before that), regardless of their age. Bored, too. All of the annual Howard birthday shots, with the birthday man cheered by shoppers or Australian troops in various domestic and global locations, begin to blend into one…
Good points, Suz. While my strategic side notes that ageism certainly can be used against our PM, my social-justice side decries ageism in general. There are certainly plenty of other avenues to criticise Howard that don’t mean being derogatory about age in general.
Criticise him for his policies, the practices of the Government he leads.
And criticise Mr Rudd for his policies, etc. And the dodgy way many Labor candidates are pre-selected.
“Age” shouldn’t be a criterion in assessing political candidates.
Just back from a brief overseas holiday: story 1 = “Mr Howard never invited me and my wife to dinner at The Lodge!”; story 2: PM falls over on his way into a building.
If this is political news in Australia, well I’m not impressed. Trivia, gossip, name-dropping, back-stabbing, media follies, etc. Meanwhile the nation faces real problems, important matters need careful thought and sober judgement.
****************
I still love that quip about the Canberra Press Gallery: “suffers from delusions of adequacy”.
Who said or wrote that? Top person.
Ambigulous
I would not talk about someones age, rather the age of their ideas and knowledge.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/prices-up–your-home-loan-is-next/2007/07/25/1185339081034.html?sssdmh=dm16.270795
I find it hard to not look at Howard without looking at similarities with Robert Mugabe. Reading Howards defence in the posted article sounds so strikingly similar to a speech Mugabe made in the past week. A speech in which he blamed the failure of his policies on every one but himself. Of course Australia is no Zimbabwe and Howard is the first person to take all of the credit for that. But on that score people are finally connecting the dots to form an economic picture in which the entire scene was painted by Paul Keating, much of the depth of colour was provided by international guest artists (global interest rates and commodity demand) and Howard has only contributed by painting in some of the detail. Sadly, though, more recently Howard has taken to over painting some of the original background, and the picture is taking on an artificial unnatural look. Clearly a case of knowing when to stop.
Howard in time will be seen as the lucky Prime Minister of the Lucky Country. His luck is about to run out.
Red herring or is that strawperson?
Who is stating his age is something that should tell against him?
As other posters have mentioned there are a gazillion reasons to vote this mob out, age is not one of them.
No, play the age as well.
We think judges are passed it at 70; in fact we wrote it in the Constitution. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for the Prime Minister, who has a much harder job, to be gone by 65.
The Japanese have been ruled by a gerontocracy since the war and it has served them extremely badly.
And there should be strict limits on how long anyone can be Prime Minister. If it’s good enough for the Americans to say 8 years max for the President, it’s good enough for us to say 9 years for the PM, and that is being generous.
It’s a day of bizarre hyperbole here at LP. Is it because John Howard:
* has members of the opposition ALP beaten in the street and jailed?
* presides over hyperinflation, majority unemployment and total economic collapse?
* is obsessed with economic nationalisation and redistribution?
* is black?
* used to be universally admired by the Left back in the seventies?
* despises everything British and often condemns the foreign policy of the UK?
* is not allowed to travel to the US or anywhere in the EU?
* has sent the Army to destroy the houses of his country’s lower-middle class small-business folk?
“Bored” gets close to it I think. The multi-tasking IT generation is hitting voting age in serious numbers and “I’m bored” is their motto … Howard might love test cricket but 20/20 is the game for the new generation.
The above is all fair enough, but I wonder for how much longer we’re going to be subjected to boomers upping the age at which one is to be considered old. My guess is the Boomer Mandated Age at which one can be considered old is permanently set to 40 years older than they are. I say we set the age at which one is considered old to 30; that would put paid fairly quickly to the silly “old = useless” thing.
It would also stop those perennial and self indulgent articles in which (40/50/60/70) is declared to be the new young.
But Colonel, old chap, there are some similarities:
1. Blames everybody else for his own failures;
2. Overdue for removal from office;
3. Rather removed from reality;
4. Not particularly partial to criticism;
5. Very good at crushing dissent within his own party, although the methods do vary quite considerably;
6. Doesn’t like homosexuals, but see 5 above;
7. Doesn’t have a great succession plan, also see 5 above;
8. Quite fond of the British monarchy.
Colonel N,
Howard has many of the same tendencies as Mugabe. He has the same regard for the truth and minorities as has Mugabe. He has the same obsession with personal control. He also has the same disdain for criticism and world opinion. What Howard hasn’t had that Mugabe has had, are 27 years in power to smash things apart with illconceived policies. Given another 16 years Howard has every chance of achieving a similar result as Mugabe. I doubt that any Zimbabwean of 1991 would have predicted the Zimbabwe of today. But feel free to be a Howard apologist.
Colonel N,
I should have added that Howard has a belief that his opinion is more correct than world scientific consesus and is showing a tendency for increasingly extreme off hand policies.
The media is to blame for the age thing. Think about the hectares of space devoted to the greatest non-story in 21st century politics, the Howard-Costello leadership tussle. There is no motivation behind this other than: “We’re booooooooooooored!!!! Bored bored bored bored bored!”. Journalists fight had to get into the press gallery, but once they get there they are so bored they have to make shit up.
Only once Howard got to a point where his capacity to reform was limited by his inability to admit that he was wrong, that’s when the public got bored with him. Once again, it does not do to conflate the opinions of the media with those of their readers/viewers/listeners.
Consider that when Malcolm Fraser was at the point where he had simply run out of ideas (and was being bagged by his Treasurer), he was 53.
I wonder for how much longer we’re going to be subjected to boomers upping the age at which one is to be considered old.
Certainly I wonder at what age someone stops being “older” and becomes “old” - which feels too blunt a word for an active 70 year old, for example. I reckon 80 is indubitably old, though.
I notice that younger people today seem to dread turning 30 and see that as “old” in a way that my age cohort didn’t. (I didn’t, anyway.)
Adrian, point by point:
So does Paris Hilton. Doesn’t make her similar to Mugabe.
So is Richie Benaud. Doesn’t make him similar to Mugabe.
How do you call that? If anything, John Howard has shown himself over the last 11 years to be peculiarly in touch with electoral reality.
So is Bono, but it doesn’t make him similar to Mugabe. Wait… no, no, he’s not.
I take it when you say “quite considerably” you mean “entirely”.
Neither does Lleyton Hewitt, but… etc.
Neither do Essendon, etc. etc. etc.
So do a majority of the United Kingdom, etc.
Those were pretty long bows stretched, but BilB’s mind-bender:
Is the most ludicrous statement I’ve read in a very long time. We are not worthy.
Most of the generationalism stuff we read is rubbish - but there are different aspects to “youth” and “old age” culturally now, and materially. For instance, youth culture now stretches far beyond adolescence, and the long sanctified path of secure full time job and home buying (along with marriage and kids) is now by no means predestined. Some of this is economic and some is a result of cultural change and increasing possibilities for identity formation. What seems to have disappeared as a category, largely, is “middle age”, which is currently being masked behind “boomer” talk.
Anyway, FWIW, I was quite pleased to turn 30!
Ken,
There are 1.4m voters aged under 24, compared with 2.6m over 65. Voters over 65 tend to be found in marginals, voters under 24 not so much.
For most of the postwar era funding was lavished on things that appeal to young families, and on infrastructure. Today, not so much: what we have is government by the sick and tired, for those whose most common refrain is: “I’m sick and tired of” …
I am around people in their sixties and also have sons and daughters carrying on the business, and I can tell you the young people have the fresh ideas and the energy to carry them out, the older are reluctant to change and just get damn tired.
Howard with his power walking, or what it is, that’s fine, if he was honest,hah, would admit that at his age, keeping up this charade, is just Howard being Howard, perception beats reality any time.
Just a thought Colonel N, who would you like to place Howard beside? George Bush?
Does our very own Colonel have any connection with fried chicken?
Regarding age: it brings problems but it also brings wisdom (at least to some of us)! When those with white hair were thrown on the scrapheap to make way for the hormone-driven twenty and thirty year olds our society went backwards bigtime.
Mark, I too was pleased to turn 30 — and 40, and 50. People who have any ego investment in their age are by definition dooming themselves to unhappiness.
I’m exactly the same age as Tony Blair, and he has clearly had enough and so would I have. Speaking from observation and experience, your early fifties seems to be the moment your body starts to tell you exactly how old you are, regardless of how fit you may have tried to stay. Anyone who knows anything about arthritis has only to watch footage of Howard coming down a flight of stairs to know that his hips and knees hurt him all the way down, and are going to give way any day now. I’m guessing the fall the other day was joint failure rather than just loss of footing.
But what one lacks in physical energy and stamina one can usually make up for in age-related experience, poise, and rat cunning. As your physical resilience lessens, your emotional and social resilience burgeons. And you become, if you are lucky, completely indifferent to what other people think of you. All excellent qualities for political survival.
That implies that “middle aged” has an objective reality not shared by whatever boomers are alleged to use as a substitute, i.e., middle aged is the reality, “boomer talk” the deception.
Is this correct?
Good point, Suz. Age shouldn’t matter.
Andrew E,
You make an extremely pertinent point. For anyone who is not familiar with the brilliant work of Hans Rosling I ask you to web search or google gapminder.org , and particularly to view the presentation of “dispelling myths about the world”. In this presentation Professor Rosling demonstrates the immense shift in world demographics that has saved the earth from massive over population. It involves a shift which started before 1960 but largely through the efforts of India and China to curb their population growth has led to a world with just 7 billion humans instead of the projected 20 billion. In this transition families have become smaller as life expectancy has been extended leaving us with a world top heavy with middle age and older people.
But the point is, that is it right for the world to be managed in the interests of the elderly, who have the numbers, in preference to the young who carry an overweighted responsibility but not the numbers?
Middle age is rather vague, if I said “well, I’m glad to have made middle age, lot later than my friend, who passed away twenty years ago, I can adjust my middle age as to as long as I live”.
Same as mid life crisis , I’ve had at least ten, I’m hopeful of at least another five or so.
No, I don’t think so. All those classifications are arbitrary and cultural. What’s significant is the difference in meaning of the cultural descriptor.
John Howard, is actually stating quite openly,many will find fault with his age,but hopes people will judge him on his performance,merit,and now ideas.The problem he really has is the problem that his self-image,and what people know of his decisions isnt quite the same as how he sees himself.This isnt unusual and is common across all ages,I am sure.That is testable,repeatable and acceptable.Where he is making his mistake is he couched it all in psuedo political economic speak…but he isnt comparing his performance as a psycho-intellectual problem, that separates the public person from the private person and his responses.The subject matter is tedious,and even the sharpest wits describing the problem,may no longer have a captive audience.I am not sure it is necessary to describe any year as the beginning of being aged.Arthritic complaints are solveable,and much research has taken place. But if you drink brandy regularly and indulge in wine without much thought to long term accumulations of alcohol the end result must be gawky type movement. Are stairs,shoes concrete suits clothing glasses all made with the exact requirements of human physiology of any age!? That last question of mine,shows a good enough set of reasons to say his time has come. Or does it!? I am wearing weights around my wrist as a type by single finger.A test for Howard could be to wear weights on his wrists and ankles for a regular day,and sees how he feels. John knows I dont vote for him anyway,but,you know, and I know he must decide out of self-respect,because what follows isnt tame.
At least we can say Howard’s bone density is not a problem after his fall the day.
I agree that it’s stupid to attack Howard on his age rather than his policies, but I do find it interesting that the media is running with it– it’s like they’ve finally turned on him. I just wish that it wasn’t stupid ploys like this that appeal to the masses.
Any conclusions to be drawn from changes in descriptor?
The boomers are a large component of the population. I imagine their opinions could be argued to carry some cultural weight.
If each generation stands on the shoulders of our antecedents, then Howard is the rational, logical, rightful heir of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. Don’t forget, the Hayden budget of 1975 was the first since 1945 to cut health and education expenditure, the post-war economic boom barely over.
Howard was the perfect, almost from central casting, government leader required for the times. Pity that so many people got so distracted for 11 years by him and his cohorts they plain forgot to pay attention to the string pullers. There have beeen a few notable exceptions who have annotated the history and traced out and joined the dots to explain where we stand today, shivering, facing a Ruddish Labor government.
Howard hopefully is headed for the coup de grace - an outcome devoutly to be wished . But the physical disability meme which will increasingly be applied to him now blood is scented, loathe him as I do, strips dignity not only from him, but more so those who delineate it.
Most of all it is completely, totally irrelevant and explains nothing important about why his government should be repudiated.
You’re right Suz about the age thing, if Howard could be considered remotely human. However Howard was old before he was born. He was a young fogey when he got into Parliament with a chicken-hawk penchant for the Vietnam war and a mind set in concrete by the end of the 1950s. And he hasn’t changed one iota in all those years, hasn’t grown, hasn’t developed, hasn’t changed his views but merely cloaked the more retrograde of them (such as Asian immigration) to suit the voting public. Indeed Howard must be the only man standing in the world today who still thinks the Americans were right to have invaded Vietnam. Of course Howard is old and out of it. And it’s because he always was and deserves every bit of drubbing he gets.
“Any conclusions to be drawn from changes in descriptor?”
I don’t think it is much more than the fact that the boomers have been the middle aged for a while.
They are a considerable influence, as they were in their 20s, and 30s and as they will be into old age.
Old will probably cease to be old as they age, they will be boomers.
Sounds better to be boomers rather than middle aged or old, however you want to define them.
Who cares what age the fusty old coot is.
Its his slow poisoning of Australian democratic institutions that warrants electoral retirement!
Wow, that’s pretty moronic. Surely that didnt make sense while you were writing?
Howard deserves to lose this election, but he is nothing like Robert Mugabe and anyone who claims he is is some sort of bizarro-Tim Blair-style-commenter.
Ambigulous - ‘delusions of adequacy’ was, I think, said of Calvin Coolidge by H L Mencken, or so Gore Vidal opined on LNL some time back.
If Howard wasn’t born old then why is he such a cramped,stunted spirit? What does it say about the Liberal party that the best they can come up with is this suburban conveyancing solicitor.
My favourite quote of his was on the 7.30 Report on the eve of the introduction of the GST,
“I want the Australian people to join men on this great tax adventure.”
Such soaring vision, such transcendant ordinariness. He promptly took off for the cricket in Britain the next day and didn’t come back for a couple of weeks.
Traumatic as it is, I have to defend Howard on two points. There is no way another 16 years of him would see a Mugabe-like situation. We will never know if this is because of personal differences between the two men, or because of Australia’s more robust democratic institutions, but it wouldn’t happen.
Furthermore, I think St Margaret is wrong saying “he hasn’t changed one iota in all those years, hasn’t grown, hasn’t developed, hasn’t changed his views but merely cloaked the more retrograde of them (such as Asian immigration) to suit the voting public.” I think Asian immigration is one area where Howard genuinely has changed his mind. He hates people who are not like himself. He used to think that included Asians. Then some of his friends convinced him that East Asians hold a lot of the values he does and he decided he liked them. He still hates Arabs etc, but not the Chinese and Vietnamese he was opposing in the 80s.
Re Age, I almost entirely agree with Suz. I’d take Nelson Mandela at 90 over any of the clowns on the government benches, and the way they’re moving the opposition too. But there is no doubt that most people do get less sharp at some point along the way, and that tends to be steeper after 65. I don’t think a fixed age rule makes sense, at least for a job like this, but maybe it is legitimate to at least watch a little harder for signs.
Here is an obvious piece of information I reckon John Winston Howard clutches to his bosom like a puppy to an old alcoholic’s lonely heart -
Churchill was 66 in 1940, and 71 when the war ended. He last held power in 1955, when he was 81.
Mind you, Howard is to Churchill as a cricket stump is to Stonehenge.
Yeah. picking on people ‘cos of their physiology is wrong. Unless of course it’s a direct requirement for how they do their job and/or publically sell themselves. (A parenthetical aside here: I reckon most of the CGI advances in recent years have been driven by Hollywood leading men worried about male pattern baldness on screen. Exhibit A. Bruce Willis’ everchanging hairline.)
Mind you, I’m sure we can recall how the Coalition and their media cheerleaders used to goad Beazely with lines like “policy lazy” and “hasn’t got the ticker” - which true were valid sentiments but deliberately couched in language to remind us he was a big fat bugger.
There’s alway’s gonna be a trade off between energy and wisdom (or enthusiasm and rat cunning if you like) in the leaders we hire - but it never hurts to make sure they’re actually physically fit enough to handle the workload.
For example a deaf pollie is a bit like a three-legged racehorse.
“What’s that?”
“I SAID PRIME MINISTER THAT A DEAF POLLIE IS A BIT LIKE A THREE-LEGGED RACEHORSE!”
I do agree though that Howard and Mugabe have some things in common. They both lead ex-Brit colonies, sport glasses and just don’t have the figure to wear a good suit. But John would never get out of control like Bob has. For starters, all the corporate donations would dry up and Janette wouldn’t get to hang at Buck House anymore.
Mick,
To suggest that Australia could turn into a Zimbabwe is of coarse a real stretch of the imagination. But to say that it is impossible is to delude oneself. I went to primary school in a sense of total security in Port Moresby in the fifties (1950’s). Soon after my family left there New Guinea became independent and things started to change. Some friends from new Zealand moved there 10 years ago and spent their time in Papua living in a compound for security. I remember the winter olympics in Sarejevo. Not long after that I was hearing about people in the streets being picked off by government snipers from the surrounding hills. I remember when Beirut was a jewel on the Mediterranean. I remember when Uganda was a western like country.
What I have noticed is that the time that it takes for a country to go from peaceful civility to chaos and anarchy is very short. Countries where one can expect to live in total security from the cradle to the grave are relatively few and there are at the moment more countries falling into chaos than there are countries arising from it. So the thing that we have here in Australia is very precious, should be protected, and should not be taken for granted.
Who is attacking Howard on the basis of his advanced age? No, really, who?
I saw Dolly Downer on telly last night raving and frothing about how Labor was doing it, followed by a clip of Rudd smiling and wishing Howard a happy birthday.
Seems to me the whole thing has been whipped up by government ministers as a defensive tactic. Rudd is far too smart to be wedged on ageism. And in any case why bother? Howard made his own news on the subject by tripping up the stairs.
And it was sad to watch this silly little man flying into the arms of the troops in Timor to celebrate his birthday. He feels so unloved that he has to order the army to give him three cheers (or at least, Angus did it for him). That’s the real Mugabe analogy.
Definition of old is ten to fifteen years older than you are. In my case JWH is old (but that won’t be the reason I make a political judgement about him come election day!). My Grandmother (who was in her late 90’s when she died a couple of years ago) however would have called him a spring chicken.
Its all relative - move on - there’s nothing to see here.
Suz, howard’s age matters not because he is past ‘it’, generic judgements based on age are stupid. Rather, his age matters because the ‘it’ within which he finds himself socially, culturally and politically should be past.
I think that you become truly old when you let go of the intellectual challenge of life. This, clearly, Howard has not done.
“I think Asian immigration is one area where Howard genuinely has changed his mind. He hates people who are not like himself. He used to think that included Asians. Then some of his friends convinced him that East Asians hold a lot of the values he does and he decided he liked them.”
Feral Sparrowhawk - I suspect the values that Howard likes about East Asians is that they don’t have a strong union tradition. That’s why he’s suddenly so keen on bringing Asian workers over on visas to fill the gaps in the skills shortage that his government has created out of its own neglect for education and training.
Although this looks like a change of attitude, I would strongly argue that this is just a case of one firmly held archaic prejudice (against unions) winning out over another firmly held archaic prejudice (against Asians) for the sake of political expediency - ie to achieve his great retrograde vision of an Australia without unions and a 19th century industrial-legal framework. Besides a lot of Asian immigrants have actually settled in his electorate so of course he is anxious to appear friendly and tolerant of them in order to attract their votes.
I think the Mugabe comparison has left BilB with a problem, because it is so open to straw-arguments (of which there have been many on this thread).
No, I do not think BilB meant that Howard was analogous to Mugabe in every respect including skin colour and mass murder. What he/she meant, I think, is that Howard and Mugabe both display the overweening sense of entitlement which gets in the way of proper thought and really useful policy directions.
Thank you for the source of that delicious barb, “suffering from delusions of adequacy”, Amphibious.
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I’m puzzled that some correspondents believe a direct comparison of Robert Mugabe and John Howard is valid.
I fear that many of us are sadly lacking in historical knowledge, understanding of other nations (e.g. Zimbabwe, USA, Cuba, New Zealand, Tasmania) - and hence we’re prone to poor political judgement, if not hyperventilating hysteria.
I really think many of us have been blinded by fury: “Howard-hating” is a crude but apt term. A drawback of this passion, I think, is that it can reduce a person’s ability to accurately delineate exactly what the Government is doing, and why ….. and thereby may hinder the development of an effective remedy.
Greed and hatred can play a large role in politics: is the average, placid voter inclined to shy away when she/he sees those in play??
Mark Latham was a “great hater”. So decades earlier was Clyde Cameron. Did their hatreds blind them to electoral fundamentals? Did the voters reject them because they were haters?
Kim Beazley, I feel, was basically lazy. Remember his lounging at the table in Question Time? Mocking the PM with that scholarship-boy superiority - then, later, utterly crestfallen when inexplicably rejected by the electorate….
By the way, while I think AGE of itself is no criterion for election; character and personality should certainly be factors that voters take into account ….. Thank the lord for single-member electorates. At least there, we the voters can pass judgement on party hacks.
Vote below the line in the Senate.
Don’t let parties dictate their list and their preferences to you.
cheerio,
Ambigulous
BilB,
In Western societies, there was a baby boom from the late 1940s-early 1960s. In most other societies the baby boom was in the 1980s and ’90s, or even now. It is a fact that politicians will seek to group voters and court their votes by promoting policies that resonate with them, and that as most politicians are middle-aged men they will tend to be a bit scared of large numbers of ambitious young people who aren’t necessarily ambitious for what said politicians had been at that age.
Well, ambigulous …and Andrew E, don’t underestimate the depth of public feeling that flows in a community overridden by an arrogant government with a free hand, a small glimpse of which we have seen with Howard in the last three years. In New Zealand this very situation caused a voter revolt which lead to a referendum and a whole new voting structure (mixed member proportional representation). Our politicians seem to have trouble remembering that they do the bidding of the public, not the party or the party leader. Our politicians give lipse service to serving their constituents then vote the party line, with a very small handful of exceptions.