John Howard marks 30 years since the Coalition’s 1996 victory with a familiar story of stability and economic management. But the deeper legacy is the set of political and economic defaults both major parties now treat as common sense.

“Today marks 30 years since we won the 1996 election.”

With that opening line, John Howard (or his office) offers Liberal supporters the familiar benediction: security, prosperity, opportunity. It’s not a memoir so much as a ledger – debt repaid, GST delivered, unions tamed, alliance re-hardened, East Timor invoked, guns controlled, jobs created, inflation halved. A neat account of national uplift.

But political legacies are never only what a government did. They are what it normalised, what it postponed, and what it made easier for the next wave of governments – of all stripes – to do. Thirty years on from the Coalition’s March 2, 1996 victory, the Howard years shape Australia less as a bundle of policies than as a set of defaults. And it is those defaults quietly inherited by both major parties that now matter most.

Howard’s letter is a skilled example of how to tell a story of government without telling a story of the country.

The letter’s governing moral claim is that competence equals virtue. “Responsible financial management” becomes an almost spiritual category of debt repaid, AAA restored, the Future Fund created, taxes reformed.

Yet the deeper truth of the Howard era is not that it worshipped the economy, but that it treated the economy as something to be administered not transformed. That approach worked during a long global expansion and an extraordinary commodities upswing. But it bred a fatal habit: the idea that Australia can live indefinitely on macro-prudence while dodging the harder work of building a more productive, more equitable, more resilient and sustainable national development model.

In other words: the Howard story is the story of a country that grew wealthier while narrowing its imagination.

Howard’s admirers present him as the great corrective to Hawke and Keating. But structurally he was also their inheritor – and, in important ways, their consolidator.

Hawke and Keating opened the economy, deregulated finance, embraced competition policy and global market discipline, and began the long shift away from collective wage-setting. They did it in the language of national modernisation.

Howard took much of that architecture as given – and translated it into something more culturally fluent and politically durable: aspiration, reward, “choice,” and the quiet moralisation of the market as common sense.

This is the Australian rhyme with Britain’s........

© Pearls and Irritations