Paul Keating once claimed that Australia has never had a great political leader. He was right. And hopefully we'll never need one either.
It's ironic that Keating said his objective was to establish a national identity but he was constantly comparing Australia to everywhere else.
To Keating, Australia's prime ministers were inferior to America's presidents, while our cities were pale imitations of their overseas counterparts. No matter how much he might have wished it otherwise, Melbourne is not Paris, and Sydney is not New York.
Great leaders are products of great crises, and Australia has been lucky that because of the accident of our history and geography we haven't required a Washington, or a Lincoln, or a Churchill. We haven't experienced revolution, civil war, or foreign invasion.
Instead of pretending that the Eureka Stockade is somehow on par with the storming of the Bastille we should acknowledge our good fortune and be thankful. (The only problem with this approach is that if we recognise the obvious, which is that Australia's past has been overwhelmingly peaceful and has been the story of gradual improvement, it becomes quite difficult trying to make the teaching of our national history interesting).
Although there might be an absence of greatness in our history, nevertheless we have had some good leaders who have done some good things. And on any measure John Howard has been a good prime minister.
Managing a decade of economic prosperity is of itself enough to guarantee him a place among the first rank of the country's leaders. There are many domestic policy projects that remain to be completed, but they shouldn't detract from his overall achievement.
Ten years ago even his strongest supporters were suggesting that Howard might struggle with the international dimensions of his role, and his opponents predicted he would be an unmitigated failure. In fact, foreign and security policy are among the Prime Minister's greatest triumphs.
The five nations most important to Australia are (in order) the United States, Indonesia, China, Japan, and Britain. Our relations with each of these countries has never been better, and much of the credit for that must go to Howard personally. The ALP lauds its foreign policy tradition but no Labor leader has ever dealt with so complex an international environment as now. Howard's economic and foreign policy successes have him rate as one of the country's three or four most consequential prime ministers, along with Deakin, Menzies, and Hawke.
His prime ministership is significant not only because of the things he has done. What he has not done is no less crucial. First, Howard has refused to engage in symbolic politics. Second, he has resisted the temptation to impose his own vision on the nation. He knows that symbolic actions are nothing other than symbolic. They might make people feel better, but their practical effect is zero.
Whether the country is a republic has absolutely no bearing on how individuals live their lives, and for all intents and purposes Australia operates as a republic anyway.
Thousands of people walking across the Sydney Harbour bridge did nothing to increase the birthweight among indigenous Australians. When the Prime Minister talked about "practical reconciliation" he was widely condemned but the reality is that there is no other sort of reconciliation. Gestures won't help solve the problem of indigenous disadvantage, but education and employment will.
Despite his alleged discomfort over the symbolism of "multiculturalism", the reality is that Howard has presided over a non-discriminatory migration policy with a record number of arrivals to the country. One of the claims made by his critics is that he's "ordinary". Why precisely this is a cause for complaint is difficult to fathom.
The things with which we concern ourselves the most are ordinary -- our jobs, the health of our family, the education of our children. Howard understands that by improving the ordinary things, people's lives can be made better. He realises that governing is different from politics.
The media might enjoy reporting on a political highwire act a la Latham, but it is good government that the electorate expects. This is a distinction that after four election losses the Labor Party is yet to come to terms with.
The more the Prime Minister avoids the symbolic, the more enraged his opponents become. The result is that those opponents become even more obsessed with the symbols they feel he is neglecting, and so they drive themselves even further away from the issues that matter to ordinary Australians.
Over his entire career, Howard has been consistent in his commitment to some key ideological touchstones. One of those is a belief in a limited role for government in the economy. "Economic rationalist" is an easy term to apply to the Prime Minister, but it fails to capture the full dimension of his contribution to national politics.
At a more profound level, Howard has made respectable the everyday and ordinary desires of individuals and families. He has translated those desires into policies that acknowledge the limits of what politicians can do and should do. Exaggerated promises and grandiose visions are often unachievable and detract from the practical and mundane work of government.
Howard's vision for the nation isn't pretentious. His hope for a "relaxed and comfortable" nation is simple and clear. Implicit in that ambition is the belief that it is for individuals and families themselves, not government, to decide how they should live. This is a view of politics quite different to that of many of his predecessors. It is also a view of politics that is profoundly democratic.
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