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Survivor Howard in battle for his political career

By Kathy Marks

20 April 2007 - The Independent (UK) - An uncanny ability to tap into the hopes and fears of middle Australia has seen John Howard retain power for 11 years and become his country's second longest-serving prime minister.

Reviled by many for his social conservatism, Mr Howard is a wily political operator.

Climate change is the first significant policy area in which he has misread the public mood, failing to appreciate the extent of Australians' concern.

As he prepares to fight a fifth straight election later this year, he is now scrabbling to make up ground. And while the opposition Labour Party is well ahead in the polls, critics know better than to write him off. Mr Howard's remarkable survival skills are such that he once described himself as "Lazarus with a triple bypass".

The son of a petrol station operator, he was a Sydney solicitor before he entered politics with the conservative Liberal Party. He lived with his mother until he got married at 32. A minister in Malcolm Fraser's government in the 1970s, Mr Howard was dumped as party leader in 1989. He regained the leadership in 1995, winning an election in 1996.

He has presided over a strong economy, but has been critcised for unquestioning support of President George Bush, with Australian troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Domestically, he has alienated many Australians with hardline policies on refugees. He has also eroded Aboriginal land rights and refused to apologise to black Australians for past injustices. He helped engineer the defeat of a republican referendum, has refused to legalise same-sex marriages. He is lukewarm, at best, about multiculturalism.

Mr Howard considers his proudest achievements to be the introduction of gun-control laws after a massacre in Tasmania, and Australia's leadership of a multinational force that restored order in East Timor following independence in 1999.

He is now 67, but appears to have developed a Thatcher-like impulse to go on and on. He was supposed to hand the leadership to his Treasurer, Peter Costello, years ago. His hero is Robert Menzies, an Anglophile who governed for 17 years.

Source: The Independent

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