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...on a new leader and changed tack. Mr Latham does not appear to care to be associated with much of the excitable polemic which circulates through the Manne collection. Mr Latham would like Labor to rejoin the mainstream in the community, and if he is successful, it makes much of what appears in The Howard Years as ideologically obsolescent as Gough Whitlam's speeches in the 1972 election.
This need not have been the case, had the essays really been about the Howard government's time in office, or even about John Howard, his political style, his basic ideological position, or the way his ideas developed. Unfortunately, with a few shining exceptions, such as an excellent piece by Judith Brett ("The New Liberalism"), we are enveloped by the lingering ambience of a wake, held after yet another political defeat.
Too much ink is wasted grizzling about the Tampa, how Labor was robbed of the 2001 election, how the Australian voters showed, yet again, their selfishness, their lack of sympathy for the downtrodden of the earth, and let slip their incipient racism. And the current Liberal government is "the cruellest, if not the worst, we have had since Federation", and Howard the most callous, and certainly the most odious, political leader we have ever had.
Now this kind of stuff is all right for a meeting of the faithful in a park, or as a way of gingering up a dispirited group of marchers, but, popping up again and again here, it makes for risible reading. In fact, having studied Judith Brett's skilful and dispassionate account of how Howard changed the Liberal Party, and transformed himself, so as to provide a successful response to "the social and economic changes Australia has experienced since Menzies' retirement and to a changed...
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