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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
People consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they
confer as by those they receive.
Machiavelli
Part one—my brother Jack
1.
‘Under us, the views of all particular interests will be assessed against the national interest
and the sentiments of all Australians’: John Howard, 6th June 1995.1One of the greatest things
about living in Australia is that we’re essentially the same’: John Howard, 28th October 1995.2
‘Our society is underpinned by those uniquely Australian concepts of a fair go and practical
mateship’: John Howard, 20th November 1998.3It is on the basis of quotes like these that
Judith Brett has sought to answer the question that has left Australian intellectuals flounder-
ing for most of the last decade: ‘How are we to understand the contribution of John Howard
himself to the success of his governments?’4
Brett’s thesis is that Howard’s success arises from the way he has managed to associate two
long-standing Australian traditions. The first is the traditional Liberal claim to represent the
interests of the nation as a whole—as opposed to the interests of the class or the section, the
latter role being attributed, of course, to Labor, with its origins in the labour movement of
the 1890s, and its ongoing links to the unions. The Liberals govern for all of us. The second
is the tradition of ‘vernacular egalitarianism,’ those notions of ‘fair go,’ ‘practical mateship’
and all being ‘essentially the same’ with which Howard dots his speech.5Brett argues that
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PAUL MAGEE
the Liberals, prior to Howard, had a real rhetorical problem: ‘they had no plausible way of
talking about anything other than economics’.6Howard found that way. By merging a tra-
ditional Liberal commitment to the level playing field that is meant to make equals of all of
us, with ‘the symbolic repertoire of Australia’s radical nationalist past,’ Howard managed,
Brett argues, ‘ to reconnect Australian Liberalism with ordinary Australian experience.’7He
made it convincing.
Where Keating spoke to the nation, Howard spoke from it—straight from the heart of its
shared beliefs and commonsense understandings of itself. This is revealed in the images
which surround the two men. Keating’s are of foreignness. […] Howard’s are of suburban
ordinariness—barbeques, cricket, the annual holiday at the same beachside resort, jogging
in a shiny tracksuit festooned with logos.8
The most interesting and challenging aspect of Brett’s argument is in her insistence that
Howard’s is indeed the people’s language. She cites a focus-group study published in the
Australian Journal of Political Science in 2000 which found ‘remarkable agreement across
the groups’ studied as to just what Australian identity, events, values and beliefs are.9The
study included a group of non-English speaking women and found among them too ‘refer-
ences to mateship, owning a house, sport, having a go’.10 Here’s some more examples, this
time in direct quotes from Howard: our ‘sense of fair play,’ our ‘strong egalitarian streak,’ our
‘openness and unpretentious character,’ our ‘creed of practical mateship’.11 For Brett, these
admittedly banal phrases are indices to Howard’s creative genius; he’s managed to make
the Liberals a party with working-class appeal! What’s more, people actually speak and
feel this way. He’s tapped into it. That’s her thesis.
2.
‘Like many Protestant women of the time, she was a bigot.’12 I’m citing the journalist Milton
Cockburn who wrote an article on Howard’s background in 1989. The Prime Minister’s
mother hated Catholics. She was born one. Mona Howard (nee Kell) was born in 1899, and
instructed in the Catholic religion until the age of eight. At that time, her mother died of
cancer, and her care was transferred to her father’s Protestant family. She grew to hate Catholics
in the process. Her four sons were made to know about it. Mona Howard discouraged her
sons from forming friendships with Catholics of either sex, and she was particularly opposed
to any romantic attachments. Gerard Henderson cites Cockburn’s article, and adds some
research of his own to it in the short, but extraordinarily revealing biography he published
in his 1995 book A Howard Government? Inside the Coalition. Henderson adds that the young
John Howard did not like his mother’s bigotry. Henderson goes on to suggest that this dis-
like inspired much of Howard’s subsequent politics. According to Henderson, the ‘subliminal
78 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
attitude which formed the basis of Howard’s early opposition to multiculturalism’ was the
desire to repudiate the world of Protestant exclusionism in which he had grown up: ‘unity,
however artificial, was preferable to plurality if the latter led to emphasis on difference’.13
Hence the thoroughly artificial, and typically Howard, vision of ‘a common Australian culture’.14
It’s a curious thought: that Howard’s lifelong campaign against difference might harken back
to his mother’s bigoted assertion of it.
But if that’s the case, doesn’t one then have to conclude that the real person Howard is
attacking—in railing against all these ‘special interests’, these people who see themselves
as different from the rest of us, the elites, the ‘Aboriginal industry’, the feminists—is in fact
his own mother? Who in turn resented her origins. That’s another implication of Henderson’s
argument. It’s not a pretty picture. Mind, it probably won’t surprise anyone who’s lived under
the Howard government. Attacking mothers seems comparatively mild. Howard’s most endur-
ing images concern the abuse of children: the Stolen Generations, Governor-General Peter
Hollingworth, Children Overboard, Children in Detention. Above all, Children in Deten-
tion. You might want to add to that list, handing the Bali 9 over to their likely death in 2005.
As I said, the biography won’t surprise anyone who’s lived under Howard, not even those
who vote for him. The real question is why they continue to do so.
3.
Brett is not unaware of this, which is why it’s worth reading her. She quotes well-known
Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson’s reaction to ‘For All of Us,’ the slogan which heralded
Howard’s first, 1996, election victory:
when he first heard ‘For All of Us’, he thought ‘but not for them’ and knew that indigenous
Australians were being positioned as one of the noisy minorities.15
The key point for Brett is that she’s not convinced that Howard’s scapegoating of vulner-
able members of the community explains why people keep voting for him. She disagrees,
and she completely rejects the corollary assumption, which is indeed huge: that Howard’s
four terms in office, up to and including the landslide 2004 election, which won him control
of both houses, demonstrates that ‘the Australian people’ are ‘racist, uncaring, reactionary’.16
She doesn’t buy it, and she doesn’t accept that it shows them to be ‘opportunists, hypocrites
or liars’ either.17
Brett acknowledges the exclusions which Howard invariably structures into his language
of national unity. Where she disagrees with critics like Carol Johnson and Guy Rundle—and
this, as I said, is the most challenging part of her argument—is in the implication that the
bigotry is what people are voting for. She puts forward an alternate view: people vote for
Howard because he speaks to them, as one of them, in their language, about the nation they
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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
know and love: ‘as prime minister he talks to them about Australia in the language they
share’.18 To underline this point, Brett concludes her recent essay, which is entitled Relaxed
and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia, with the case studies of four ‘ordinary people
who vote Liberal.’ None of them articulates overtly racist ideas, or seems particularly bigoted.
In fact, they are all quite disinterested in politics. The main interest in Lois’s life, for instance,
is sport. ‘Sport is the centre of her life and she places it at the centre of the nation’; she might
‘have no time for migrants who complain about Australia’, but she’s generally positive about
multiculturalism and basically votes Howard because of his ‘nationalism—his recognition
of the deep pleasures people draw from being Australian.’19 For Brett, Howard’s critics
can’t hear voices like Lois’s. They can’t even hear him, nor his language, with its capacity to
‘strike chords with aspects of Australian experience’.20
4.
Brett’s concern is for the reputation of ‘the Australian people’, though I’d like to suggest that
there is an intellectual agenda here too. After all, there are significant intellectual implications
to her argument. Brett’s desire to defend ‘the Australian people’, by understanding the
non-pathological motives driving a majority of them to vote Howard, leads her to take issue
with one of the key currents of twentieth-century thought. ‘Many intellectuals are suspicious
of nationalism’, automatically assuming it to be a ruse for bigotry.21 For Brett, this assump-
tion is not merely an intellectual failure, it’s a strategic failure as well:
Because whenever he has evoked a national ‘us’ he has been accused of really demonising
a non-national ‘them’, Howard’s critics have been unable to develop any effective or plausible
counter-strategies for talking to their fellow Australians. If you regard any talk of ‘us’ as
illegitimate, it is not clear to me whom you are going to talk to.
Whereas:
Nations are not simply formed and defined by their opposition to or difference from some
Other; they are also formed and defined by shared experiences and collective memories.
They have centres as well as borders. As I have been arguing, Howard speaks persuasively
from that centre.22
This is clearly an attack upon post-structuralism, which does not have the will of the people
behind it.
5.
Let’s look at some of Jack’s language. It’s easy to forget, reading Brett—and perhaps feeling
guilty at not being a man of the people like Howard—to actually test whether what she’s
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saying is correct, or not. Consider ‘practical mateship’, one of the phrases Jack loves to use
when he talks to voters ‘about Australia in the language they share’.23 What the #$@! is ‘prac-
tical mateship’? Whatever it means, when have you ever heard anyone actually say it? Just
whose language is this? Turn to another great Howardism, a phrase from the 1996 Four
Corners interview during which he gave his famous vision of a ‘comfortable and relaxed’
Australia, under him. Asked by Liz Jackson to describe himself, Jack responded ‘I’m a quint-
essential Australian, an average Australian bloke’.24 Where do you hear the word ‘quint-
essential’ spoken? By what conceivable measure do you pass that off as the ‘average’ language?
Now being ‘average’ is of course an act, and a difficult one at that, because no one really
knows just what is average at any given moment. You perform your normality, and it always
involves an element of improvisation. My point is that Howard is no good at it. Take that
curious word ‘bloke’, which is not always so easy to use. Here is Howard trying to cover over
a fight—a ‘near physical fight’ according to The Age—between senators Bill Heffernan and
Barnaby Joyce in August 2005. Probed on the altercation, Howard replied: ‘Bill is a good
bloke and Barnaby’s a good bloke. They’re both good blokes and they’re both my blokes as
far as I’m concerned.’25 They’re both my blokes? How does that one work? It’s like he’s trying
to say ‘They’re both my homies’.
The more you actually test Brett’s thesis as to Howard’s command of the tradition of
‘vernacular egalitarianism’ (‘Because it is the language he speaks naturally, it never fails him’
26),
the more you realise how untenable it is. Another example: ‘the great Australian capacity
to work together in adversity—I call it mateship’.27 ‘I call it mateship.’ That’s hilarious. He
sounds like Moses. In another life, Howard might have been a comedian. The other thing
you realise, reading the few commentators who address the question of Howard’s style, is
that most of them say exactly the opposite to Brett. Here’s journalist Mungo MacCallum:
Howard has never had the common touch; he doesn’t like the public bar scenes in which
Hawke revelled, and invariably shows his awkwardness when his minders propel him
into them.28
The awkwardness is not just over beers. Here’s Donald Horne on Howard’s way with words:
Howard talks and talks, in speeches, on radio and television and on doorstep interviews—
his mouth opens and shuts but he hasn’t found a way of making us want to listen. He can
seem cranky or at least bothered when he speaks. His eyes are troubled, as if we’re going
to have a go at him. His voice is thin: sometimes he is almost boyish, but with a wrinkled
brow. He doesn’t seem to want to open out to us. He plays the man of the people but he
hasn’t got Menzies’ feeling for the people. When Howard talks to us it is as if he doesn’t really
want to engage.29
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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
For Horne, ‘Howard’s most credible media appearance as a common man is when he laughs’.
Howard may be unable to ‘convincingly express generosity […] compassion’ or even ‘laconicism’
(all of this strikes Horne as most ‘un-Australian’) but he can laugh: ‘Not the smile, which is
usually uncertain or cocky, but the full-frontal laugh’.30 If you keep in mind the links psycho-
analysis has established between laughter, aggression and repression, this ‘full-frontal laugh’
will probably seem less out of character. But I’m jumping ahead of myself. Just what do people
take Howard’s character to be?
6.
I’ll remind you of the question with which I began this article. It’s Judith Brett’s question:
‘How are we to understand the contribution of John Howard himself to the success of his
governments?’31 In fact, it’s not just Brett’s question. His opponents, she reminds us, are
asking the same thing, albeit in a different tone:
How has he gotten away with it? Why can’t people see the contradictions and the dis-
semblings? Why hasn’t he been held to account for his broken promises, or the way he
has played upon baseless fears?32
I’ve begun to undermine Brett’s response, insofar as it concerns Howard’s capacity to pass as
normal. To the contrary, I am going to argue that Howard’s electoral success is a function
of his capacity to present himself as thoroughly abnormal. Howard may well say that ‘we’re
essentially the same’, but a crucial source of his power is the fact that he himself is not. That’s
the real conclusion to draw from Brett’s essay. Howard does not stand in for anyone. In his
language, his body and his behaviour, he is the exception.
It was Horne’s book with its extraordinary portraits of Howard’s bodily style that set me
upon this thesis, which is supported by the archive I have been collecting of images of Howard’s
body. Horne led me to realise that in representations of Howard’s body, he is invariably
presented as someone who does not fit in. My preliminary research has borne this out.
Horne gives the ridiculous image of Howard reviewing the troops, ‘swinging his arms and
quick-marching like an eager rookie’, trying just a bit too hard,
like someone who didn’t fit in. It was the same when he assumed what he seemed to see
as the ethnic dress of rural areas—grey flannel trousers, sports jacket, sports shirt and tie,
and on top of his head, a mini-Akubra. Despite this disguise he looked like a suburbanite
dressed for a North Shore Sunday morning Liberal Party sausage sizzle. Again, there was a
sense of parody.33
In similar fashion, Guy Rundle describes Howard on his morning walks, ‘the short-trousered
boy-man striding through a series of foreign capitals like Tintin’.34 I’ve cited Horne, MacCallum
82 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
and Rundle on Howard’s failure to fit in. These are all people who dislike him. Take MacCallum.
MacCallum opens his book Run, Johnny, Run: The Story of the 2004 Election with a list of
Howard’s nicknames, and settles upon ‘the unflushable turd’ as the one most true to Howard’s
electoral successes.35 You don’t say that about someone you like. One might conclude that
all these references to Howard’s bodily inadequacy—up to and including the photo of him
jogging on the front cover of Run, Johnny, Run—are simply jibes from his enemies. Nor does
MacCallum draw back from reminding us of the days when Howard’s fellow Liberal politicians
‘openly referred to him as the little cunt’.36
But Howard’s body is a broader phenomenon than that. The thing is that Howard sup-
porters also discuss the Prime Minister’s physical drawbacks. Take those four case studies
Brett presents in Relaxed and Comfortable, which for her serve to demonstrate the non-
pathological dimensions of the public’s support for Howard. I’ve already mentioned Lois,
who is from the country and loves sport. Marc, on the other hand, is a 25-year-old in occasional
employment. The son of Croatian immigrants, Marc’s main interest in life is going to the
same nightclub every week. He votes Howard:
I really think he’s a good leader. He takes the hard decisions. He’s not much of an attrac-
tive guy, in fact the main thing I’ve got against him is his looks. But people look past that
and say well it doesn’t matter if he’s attractive, or if he’s sucking up to all the big people
around the world, we’re still voting for him because he’s a true Australian, no matter what.37
Marc ignores Howard’s unattractive body, because Howard takes the hard decisions. Caroline
is another of Brett’s case studies. She runs the office in her husband’s small business, and
refers to Howard, whom she votes for, as ‘little Johnny Howard’. In doing so, she repeats the
widespread myth (recall MacCallum’s ‘the little cunt’) that Howard is actually small.38 He’s
a little under average height, about 5”5’. Compared to Bob Hawke, he’s a giant. As for Lois,
who loves sport, her comment, when first interviewed in 1988, was ‘And Howard just thinks
he’s so fantastic and so does his wife. I mean he’s an embarrassment’.39
Part two—the real contradiction
7.
I’ve cited a number of references now as to how Howard stands out, in his language and in
his body. In both domains, he stands out as one who doesn’t fit in. According to MacCallum,
‘He comes across as a nerd and a dag, but as a mildly defiant one. It appears the electorate
gives him marks for at least trying’.40 A familiar left-wing argument suggests itself here, in
this image of Howard as a ‘defiant’ nerd. Could this be the secret of his success, the way any-
one who has ever felt themselves excluded from the prevailing systems of judgement can
identify with his plight, and the revenge into which he channels it?
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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
—
Carol Johnson offers a powerful version of this sort of argument in her analysis of the 1996
election—the ‘Revenge of the Mainstream’ as she characterises it—that first brought Howard
to power.41 Johnson argues that Howard asked the electorate to identify with him in 1996
by appealing to his ‘somewhat negative past image’. The identity he offered was
that of a long-term loser and political battler asking the electorate to embrace a political
leader that it had rejected so decisively nearly a decade before.42
Johnson is referring to Howard’s 1987 election loss, his widely ridiculed policy document
Future Directions, from the following year (in Malcolm Farr’s words ‘its cover was something
of an embarrassment. It featured a couple who would not have been out of place in a soap
commercial, with their two soap-commercial children, beaming before a charming house
with a white picket fence’),43 his disastrous refusal to rule out race-based restrictions upon
immigration, which gave Bob Hawke such mileage that year, and then his loss of the Liberal
leadership in 1989. By 1996, these losses were all points of potential identification.
His apparent vulnerability was part of his appeal to a vulnerable nation. Howard asked
the electorate to resurrect him just as it was to resurrect Australian self-respect.44
The possibility this argument raises is that we think of Howard’s physical drawbacks as
features with which voters in fact identify.
It is certainly the case that Howard has appealed, again and again, to people who feel that
they have missed out. In 1995, he was attacking ‘particular interests’, those supposedly trendy
social movements which had achieved political representation over the previous thirty years:
‘Many Australians in the mainstream feel utterly powerless to compete with such groups who
seem to have the ear completely of the government on major issues’.45 Anyone who believed
they had failed the test of trendiness could feel at one with Howard on this. Given that the
groups supposedly rendering the rest ‘utterly powerless’ included ‘feminists, gays and lesbians,
multicultural groups and Aboriginal organizations’, there’s an aptness to Johnson’s suggestion
that ‘the ultimate revenge of the mainstream is to steal the identity of victim’.46 ‘I wonder
how many people’, Donald Horne asks, incredulously, ‘remember the first positive act of the
Howard government?’ Horne describes Senator Herron, the newly appointed Minister for
Aboriginal Affairs, announcing that Cabinet had decided, at its first meeting, to run an audit
through ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission. Horne is incredulous:
‘All those issues confronting Australia, and they picked this as number one?’47 But of course.
Aboriginal people had been making whites feel ‘utterly powerless’ for years. Because of the
colour of their skins.
Ten years later and the theme of resentment at missing out is still playing into Howard’s
hands. Writing in to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 4 April 2006, the day after the launching of
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the government’s new industrial relations laws, which saw a massive shift in the balance of
power in favour of employers, Maxine Wade was all in favour: ‘I “temped” for years and
we were never paid for public holidays or sick leave’. She survived: ‘You had to manage your
money carefully and save hard for holidays and time without work’. So why should any-
one else get off lightly?
It appears some public servants can’t even work a 10-day fortnight—it’s just too hard. Many
of these people would not survive in the private sector, where you stay until the job is done
and quite often have lunch at your desk. Why do we need a Queen’s Birthday holiday, or
Labor Day, or bank holidays, or picnic days?48
‘Equality for all—isn’t that what democracy is all about?’ Ken Hood wrote on that same day,
in praise of the legislation.49 ‘Good on you, John Howard’, ran W.R. O’Reilly’s letter, ‘for finally
taking power away from these thugs’.50 He meant trade unionists. Again, the appeal is to
anyone who has ever felt unfairly treated, or made, like Howard himself, to feel small.
Keeping in mind that Aboriginal people have the worst health and economic profile of
any group in Australia, the idea that whites are their victims, with a legitimate right of redress,
seems pretty extraordinary. In fact, the Howard government has offered its supporters the
chance to feel victimised by an astonishing array of people. ‘[T]hat kind of emotional black-
mail is very distressing’, Howard said, in the lead up to the 2001 election, of the Afghani
asylum seekers his government had fallaciously accused of throwing their own children over-
board.51 ‘We are a humane people’ he claimed, in reference to his deployment of the SAS
to prevent the Tampa, a Norwegian boat carrying 438 asylum seekers who had been rescued
at sea, from docking on Australian land. ‘We are a humane people. Others know that and
they sometimes try to intimidate us with our own decency.’52 He was insinuating that the
refugees were trying to make us feel guilty, and small, so that they could get more than their
fair share of Australian asylum. Scholars have written at length of the manifest inaccuracy
and unfairness of the ‘queue jumper’ label, coined by Bob Hawke and used with ever increas-
ing frequency since.53 The thing to note here is the way such abuse serves to collapse that
issue too into a ‘level playing field’ divided between those who try to get more than their due,
and those mainstream bodies who suffer as a result, and so have the right of revenge.54
8.
The preceding paragraphs offer one way to answer Brett’s question as to Howard’s personal
contribution to his electoral successes. They are still, I believe, insufficient. They are insuf-
ficient because of one simple fact. However often Howard hammers the table with demands
for equality and fairness, however often ‘special interests’ are put in their place, however
much he insists that ‘everyone must want the same and have the same’,55 he himself doesn’t
submit to these demands.
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In writing this, I am, in part, agreeing with Brett’s critique of arguments like the one I have
just rehearsed. You can’t explain Howardism simply in terms of its ‘opposition to or difference
from some Other’.56 Mind, none of the commentators I’ve read try to. Take Johnson, who
reads the 1996 election in terms of a ‘revenge of the mainstream’. In her analysis of the 1998
victory, she argues that such a strategy was no longer very pertinent to Howard’s campaign
for a second term. Howard may have argued that ‘special interests’ were benefiting under
Keating while he was campaigning in opposition, but a similar argument against govern-
mental favouritism could hardly be run after two years in office; he had to offer something
more ‘positive’.57 Hence his announcement, in June 1998, that his government, if re-elected,
would introduce a Goods and Services Tax. Malcolm Farr comments: ‘in 1998 there was a
sense of daring in the Government as it asked the electorate to endorse a new tax without
knowing its detail’.58 Part of the reason for this daring was that such a policy involved Howard
breaking his promise that he would ‘never ever’ introduce such a tax, a promise he made on
reassuming the Liberal party leadership in 1995. Robert Manne is sardonic: ‘never ever
was redefined to mean not in the government’s first term’.59 In effect, Howard was asking
voters to sanction him as a prime minister who didn’t have to keep his word. Given that the
previous two years had seen him break his 1996 pre-election promises to maintain univer-
sity (which lost 5%), ABC (over 10%) and public service (some 26 000 jobs over 1996 and
1997) funding at current levels, this was quite an ask, and one the government almost lost.60
Brett is right. You can’t explain Howard’s four election victories simply in terms of a revenge
of the nerds. But she’s wrong in imagining that any of Howard’s academic critics try to.
We’re left with a contradiction. In 1998, Howard was openly breaking faith with the ‘main-
stream’ he’d led, and challenging them not to vote him out for doing so. They didn’t. You
can’t explain that by claiming that Howard works through eliciting a popular resentment
against elites/minorities. But nor can you explain it by presenting him as a mouthpiece for
the spirit of the people. To the contrary, in insisting on this ‘modernisation of Australia’s sup-
posedly antiquated tax system’ in 1998, Howard was acting like one of the ‘self-appointed
cultural elite’; he, and his educated advisors, knew what was best for us.61 He was acting just
like the people he’d attacked to win the previous election!
Now in fairness to Brett, whose argument I’ve been following to this point, it needs to
be added that she’s aware of this contradiction.62 I also want to add that I have singled out a
specific strand from her work on the topic of Howard’s success: that which concerns his ability
to ‘speak persuasively from the centre’. For the overall tenor of her analysis is in fact to down-
play Howard’s exceptionality, his difference to prior Australian and Liberal traditions, and
to this end she invokes a whole range of other factors, including Labour’s current inadequacy,
that have contributed to his success. The reason I’m holding so tightly to this strand, and
focusing on it to the exclusion of all others, is because I think that in it Brett has diagnosed
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the overwhelming source of Howard’s power: his personal relation to a putative centre. Only
it’s a thoroughly eccentric relation.
It’s not so much that Howard gets away with claiming special privileges for himself, all
the time attacking others for their supposed privileges, but rather that such hypocrisy is inte-
gral to his appeal. The man who enforces the law of the level playing field simultaneously
requests special privileges for himself, and this contradiction in itself binds people to him.
Ultimately, I read his exceptional body as a symbol of just this dynamic. It’s a body with
the right to be different. This argument will take some time to unfold. I’ll start with the small
matter of his birthday.
Helen Irving describes John Howard as a ‘politician with a limited faith in government’.63
In a 2004 essay testing his claim to be a constitutional conservative, she precedes her survey
of his negligent relation to the principles of that document with a mention of his 64th birth-
day, in 2003. Howard had promised to announce whether he wished to continue in the leader-
ship on that date. Irving’s disquiet is salutary:
There is something disturbing in a prime minister’s assumption, mid-term, that he alone may
decide whether or not to remain, that his personal anniversary is an appropriate occasion
for announcing that decision, and that he can, with impunity, keep his electors and the rest
of the nation waiting, and speculating, while he decides. This might seem a small matter,
but it symbolises how the Prime Minister is altering Australia’s constitutional landscape.64
In the rest of her essay, Irving suggests that part of that alteration has concerned the con-
tempt Howard and his ministers have shown for the constitutionally enshrined principle of
the separation of powers. Just as Howard’s birthday took on the significance of a national
political occasion, there has been a bloating of the powers of the legislature and the execu-
tive, at the expense of that third arm of government, the judiciary. I could rehearse the various
ways in which Howard and his ministers have shown contempt for the judiciary. For instance,
one of the traditions associated with the separation of powers, and indeed the rule of law
more generally, is that governments do not undermine public faith in the courts. As the Chief
Justice of the High Court Sir Gerard Brennan put it, in a 1997 letter of rebuke to Howard’s
deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer: ‘You will appreciate that public confidence in the
constitutional institutions of government is critical to the stability of our society’.65 Fischer
had been criticising what he saw as the court’s delays in giving judgement in the Wik native
title case. ‘It’s curious’, Peter Charlton comments, in relation to radio announcer Alan Jones,
‘how people who like to describe themselves as conservative often hold such cavalier
views on the rule of law’.66 Howard’s decision to appoint Philip Ruddock Attorney-General
in 2003, after Ruddock had launched a string of similar attacks, could not have been more
cavalier. Tradition holds that the Attorney-General is the courts’ guardian.67
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But it’s not enough, if we are to understand Howard’s success with the electorate, simply
to list his various violations of legal convention and principle. There is also the question of
personal principle. If Howard is cavalier in relation to the rule of law, his relation to personal
probity has been little short of contemptuous. What stops it from assuming that character-
istic is the fact that it’s democratically mandated. Rather than try to hide his various
transgressions of trust and principle, Howard campaigns on them. The main problem in the
critical literature on Howard is the failure to come to terms with this fact, which is indeed
quite shocking. Howard’s hypocrisy—his tendency to break the laws of rightness and fair
play which he otherwise imposes so brutally—is democratically mandated. He campaigns
on it.
The idea that Howard should be indulged as a special case is something he’s asked people
to vote on three times now. In fact, it’s been his key electoral strategy over the ten years. In
1998, Howard asked to be validated as the man who would bring in a GST he’d promised
‘never, ever’ to introduce. Then again, in 2004, he asked to be validated as the man with the
right to lie to the electorate, both in relation to the past, and the future. The past lie con-
cerned the false ‘Children Overboard’ claims that gave the government such mileage (‘that
kind of emotional blackmail is very distressing’) in the previous election. A Morgan poll con-
ducted in the fortnight before the 2004 campaign began found that 60% of those polled
believed Howard had lied during the previous election. Asked which candidate was ‘more
honest and trustworthy’, 40% named Latham, 28% Howard. A headline in the tabloid
Herald Sun ran: ‘Credibility and truth have emerged as the Prime Minister’s Achilles Heel’.68
With the spotlight squarely on his lack of credibility, Howard chose to campaign on just that
Achilles Heel. As he announced, on the 29th of August,
This election, Ladies and Gentleman, will be about trust. Who do you trust to keep the
economy strong and protect family living standards? Who do you trust to keep interest rates
low? Who do you trust […]69
Effectively, Howard was asking the electorate to validate his right to lie to them. That this is the
case was further underlined by Howard’s lie for the future, his claim (‘which’ MacCallum com-
ments on the side, ‘Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald christened almost admiringly
“The Big Lie”’)70 that interest rates are always higher under Labour, because they spend more.
That the claim had no factual basis was widely reported soon after. Howard persisted in
the lie regardless, or perhaps for this very reason, and to the extent of having ‘keeping interest
rates low’ embossed on the front of the rostrum from which he delivered his campaign press
conferences. Again, and as in 1998, Howard was asking voters to sanction him as the prime
minister who didn’t have to keep his word. He was asking to be treated as an exception.
88 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
The man who imposes the law of the level playing field brutally on others himself expects
to be exempt from its operations. Peter Charlton illustrates this paradox well, in his con-
sideration of the Tampa affair that was so instrumental in Howard’s 2001 victory:
‘That boat will never land in our waters—never’, he emphatically told a small group of
reporters. As the newspaper reported later, ‘The politician—whose career is a testament to
his stubbornness—appeared to be operating on pure adrenalin at the end of one of the most
dramatic days of his prime ministership. Howard’s eyes bulged, his face reddened and he
shifted restlessly as he spoke’.
Clearly that ‘never’ was different from the ‘Never, ever’ promise not to introduce a GST.71
I quote this extended description of Howard’s bodily performance of the law because it strikes
me as more than simply caricature, however much it fits within the images of exceptionality
and hypocrisy that I’ve been considering. I hear a degree of awe in these lines too. They
describe a body whose passions demand to have their way. As it stands, the 2001 cam-
paign was yet another, in fact the most outrageous of all, instance where Howard asked the
electorate to validate his right to personal indulgence. In 2001, he asked to be validated as
the man who brought out the Navy (‘three warships, ten patrol boats, a supply ship, one
transport vessel, Seahawk helicopters and P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft’) to defend our
shores from some 3 000 ‘victims of some of the most brutally repressive regimes on earth’.72
This crazy ‘show of force’ had no real motive at all other than Howard’s own personal re-
election. It was an extraordinarily indulgent use of public funds—some 500 million dollars,
by Marr and Wilkinson’s calculations (a billion according to Waterford’s more recent esti-
mate).73 This was Howard’s real birthday present to himself. In 2001, as before in 1998, and
again in 2004, Howard, the enforcer of sameness, requested a democratic mandate to be dif-
ferent, in fact, to indulge the most extraordinary egoism. He received it.
How does one make sense of that?
Part three—what attracts people to it?
9.
‘If one cannot be the favourite oneself, at all events no body else shall be the favourite’.74 For
Sigmund Freud, these resentful strains are first heard in the nursery, in the response of an
elder child to the arrival of a newborn sibling. They actually constitute a form of resignation,
for what the elder child would really like to do is to ‘put his successor jealously aside, to keep
it away from the parents, and to rob it of all its privileges’.75 He soon realises his impotence
in this regard. Unable to rid the world of his rival, the elder decides that it will be best just
to identify with him as an equal. Traces of the initial resentment remain, however, in the
89
PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
—
vehemence with which a child will clamour ‘for justice, for equal treatment for all’ if the other
seems to have received more than his or her fair share. This, for Freud, is more than
just nursery, or schoolyard politics (‘that nerdie kid from 6A with the funny eyebrows’—
that’s how Howard appears to his fellow schoolmates in Christopher Milne’s Little
Johnny and the Naughty Boat People, which was written for children76); it’s the origin of demo-
cracy itself:
What appears later on in society in the shape of Gemeingeist, esprit de corps, ‘group spirit’,
etc., does not belie its derivation from what was originally envy. No one must want to put
himself forward, every one must want the same and have the same. Social justice means that
we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to do without them as well.77
Recall Ken Hood, of Mayfield, celebrating the new industrial relations legislation which
would drastically diminish union power and worker’s rights: ‘Equality for all—isn’t that what
democracy is all about?’ Yes, would be the Freudian answer, it’s about resentment. Howard’s
a perfect channel for it. He appeals to voters as a victim, a victim who takes it out on others.
He offers a channel for sibling resentment.
This Freudian reading of the ‘demand for equality’, that compromise formation where-
by sibling resentment is channelled into democratic feeling, may well explain some of the
features of Howardism. But insofar as it does, it renders the contradiction I have just out-
lined even more stark. If Howard taps into this primal core of sibling resentment—‘everyone
must want the same and have the same’—and wields it against others with such violence, how
does he himself escape the net? He doesn’t just escape the net; he campaigns on his freedom
from it!
To understand Howard in terms of Freud’s theory one needs to turn to the object of sibling
resentment, which is of course the love of the parent. This is in fact vital to Freud’s theory.
There are three terms to sibling resentment: child, sibling, and parent. Freud argues that we
cannot understand the democratic feeling to which sibling resentment later gives rise unless
we take account of the persistence of this hierarchical structure: ‘it is impossible to grasp the
nature of a group if the leader is disregarded’.78 Freud insists that there is always an authority
figure lurking in the background—or prominent in the foreground—of any group. In effect,
Freud does not believe in the empirical reality of democracy, that is, rule by the mass. It’s
always the mass plus one. It’s instructive to note that electoral democracies always have single
individuals to lead them.79 Nor would Freud accept that racism is simply a matter of the sub-
ject and his other. He’s no post-structuralist. There’s always a third term, a personification
of authority (Pauline Hanson, John Howard, Slobodan Milosevic, whoever) in there as well.
In sum, both democracy and racism are modes of patriarchy. The ‘demand for equality’ innate
90 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
to both is predicated upon the presence of a leader, for he or she serves to reproduce the
familial structure in which such ‘demands for equality’ originate.80
What makes this theory pertinent to our analysis of Howard’s appeal is Freud’s observa-
tion that the leader is exempt from the law binding all the others. As Freud puts it, demo-
cratic formations may well be characterised by the ‘demand that equalization shall be
consistently carried through’, but we should never forget that ‘the demand for equality in a
group applies only to its members and not to the leader’.81 The leader, John Howard him-
self, is exempt. Freud is quite blunt about the reason why. They love him.
But what could Freud mean by love, in the context of political leadership? He means
exactly the same thing as romantic love:
[W]e have always been struck by the phenomenon of sexual overvaluation—the fact that
the loved object enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism, and that all its charac-
teristics are valued more highly than those of people who are not loved, or than its own were
at a time when it itself was not loved.82
That such comments are relevant to political figures too will make more sense if we turn to
the phenomenon I’ve discussed above: the attention Howard repeatedly draws to the holes
in his own credibility. Let’s put this in a broader social context too, the drama surrounding
the 2001 election. Part of the way you know that you are one of the people is that you find
yourself being swayed, without logical foundation, by one of its stories, as when you find
yourself and your nation’s borders under threat from asylum seekers, a threat sufficient to
bear comparisons with September 11, and to necessitate a naval blockade of the Indian
Ocean. The crazily counter-factual nature of this, and the ‘Children Overboard’ myth, may
well, I am suggesting, have added to their interpellative power in constituting the group.
The opportunity to express violent sibling resentment against a human target would be another
such factor. The main factor, however (‘if these reports are true’, added Howard, clarifying
that they weren’t)83 would be the presence of a voice offering to hold it all together regard-
less. How? By acting as if there was no way people wouldn’t love him. In presenting himself
as one who is clearly exempt from the brutality of the law (of truth, of morality, of fairness,
of ordinary appearance even), Howard was giving the group a foundation stronger than any
logic. That made the unreality of the rest of the show easier to swallow. It was cushioned by
love. Understood in this light, Howard’s repeated act of highlighting, and yet refusing to
apologise for, his shortcomings, is tantamount to a seduction routine. If we want to experience
the delusion of overvaluing another human being, which is to say, if we want to fall in
love, what better candidate than one who makes clear not only his faults, but also the pos-
sibility of ignoring them? You’re free to love.
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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
A curious, and quite general question arises at this conjuncture. If love really involves this
sort of generosity of spirit, this ability to overlook another’s faults, why does anyone even
bother? Since when have humans felt the need to think nicely of another? Aren’t we the
people who invented mandatory detention centres?
Freud argues that the lover’s indulgence has a directly narcissistic cause. The lover is treat-
ing the object in the same way as himself. It literally is himself, an externalised version of his
ego. That’s why it gives the lover such pleasure to bestow kindness upon it. He’s really loving
himself.
We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego,
and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying
our narcissism.84
Only, Freud adds, it’s not quite the ego whose role the loved one assumes, as rather what
he calls the ego ideal. The reason the two are so assimilable, yet separable, is that the ego
ideal is an archaic residue of an earlier ego. It’s the memory, or rather fantasy, that we
retain of that ‘original narcissism in which the childish ego enjoyed self-sufficiency’.85
Freud argues that children, as they grow up, come gradually to learn that they are not the
centre of the universe, nor even their parents’ desires. We lose that certainty. But we can-
not help but preserve, somewhere in the psyche, a figuring of that ideal and perfect self. This
is the figure the loved one really comes to assume, that of the loved child one once was. The
fact the lovers frequently resort to infantile forms of address to express their affection is an
illustration of this. In loving one another in this fashion, lovers are really resurrecting their
own majestic and long lost selves:
it seems very evident that another person’s narcissism has a great attraction for those who
have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love. The charm of
a child lies a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment and inaccessibility, just as
does the charm of certain animals […] Indeed, even great criminals, and humorists, as they
are represented in literature, compel our interest by the narcissistic consistency with which
they manage to keep away from their ego anything that would diminish it.86
If Freud’s reference to humorists reminds us of that ludicrous element that pertains to images
of Howard’s body the overall context should lead us to see this as far from innocent laughter.
For the other function of the ego ideal, which Freud later termed the super-ego, is self-
criticism. We are all familiar with the ‘cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relent-
less self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches,’ that is to say, we’re all familiar with shame and
guilt. Freud argues that such self-hatred originates in the ego-ideal. More specifically, it’s a
form of grief. Our anger at the loss of the parental gaze that looked upon in all our perfection
92 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
is transformed into a parent-like gaze that is always angry at us. The ego-ideal is, then, both
an idealised version of the self, and a vicious internal agency that attacks the ego for failing
to live up to it. No wonder love often goes so wrong.
This picture of ‘the ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against
the second’ is, according to Freud, our common lot.87 Given this picture, the attractions of
love, which Hegel once described as ‘mind’s feeling of its own unity’, are probably clear.88
We carry an uneasy patriarchy within us, and the chance to shoulder parental responsibility
for that onto another (another narcissistic enough to merit love) is hard to resist. Freud him-
self talks of the ‘cure by love’, and mentions that people invariably prefer to tackle their
neuroses that way, rather than through the hard path of analysis.89 It’s worth adding that a
substratum of envy pertains to romantic love too, as literature has long attested (‘Why me
of all people, Werther? I belong to another, so why me?’).90 Those under Howard’s sway take
the cure by love too.91 That’s not to say that they identify with him on any ego–ego level,
whereby they might act as egotistically as him, or even with as much cruelty or violence.
Brett is quite right to question the idea that ‘the Australian people’ vote for Howard simply
because they are ‘racist, uncaring, reactionary’ and so forth.92 It’d be more accurate to say,
of those swayed by Howard, that their conflict is elsewhere. That’s probably why they are so
comfortable and relaxed. Mind, to get this sort of dynamic functioning, to place Howard
in the parent/child position (the one whose sins we forgive, and who might just love us in
return) it’s not enough just to find an adult/child to adore and treat with indulgence and
be afraid of. The picture’s not complete till you have a rival.
‘But people look past that and say well it doesn’t matter if he’s attractive […]’. In section
five above, I left uncommented the strange phrasing Brett’s informant Marc uses to express
the fact that he appreciates Howard in spite of his appearance. Obviously Marc means ‘it
doesn’t matter that he’s not attractive’. I find the ambiguity in his phrasing revealing all the
same, and that’s because I think Freud is right. Howard’s supporters love him, with all the
force of an erotic tie. It is an erotic tie. But for that you need a rival.
10.
All of the children witnessed the same act of self-harm by an adult detainee who repeatedly
mutilated himself with a razor in the main compound of the detention centre. Children also
described having witnessed detainees who had slashed their wrists, jumped from buildings,
resulting in broken legs, and detainees attempting to strangle themselves with electric cords.
At times, children witnessed their parents’ suicide attempts, or saw their parents hit with
batons by officers. A number also witnessed their friends and siblings harming themselves.93
That’s from Zachary Steel’s 2003 report on the psychological impact of the long-term man-
datory detention of asylum seekers. Howard was unapologetic. Asked by ABC reporters, in
93
PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
1. J. Howard in J. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable: The
Liberal Party’s Australia, Quarterly Essay 19, Black
Inc., Melbourne, 2005, p. 23.
2. J. Howard in G. Rundle, The Opportunist: John
Howard and the Triumph of Reaction, Quarterly
Essay 3, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2001, p. 26.
3. J. Howard in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 33.
4. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. III.
5. J. Howard in J. Brett, ‘The New Liberalism’ in R.
Manne, The Howard Years, Black Inc. Agenda,
Melbourne, 2004, p. 86.
6. Brett, ‘The New Liberalism,’ p. 87.
7. Brett, ‘The New Liberalism,’ p. 86.
8. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 32.
9. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 35.
10. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 36.
11. J. Howard, in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable,
p. 34.
12. M. Cockburn, in G. Henderson, A Howard
Government?: Inside the Coalition, HarperCollins,
Pymble, 1995, p. 16.
13. Henderson, p. 26.
14. J. Howard in Henderson, p. 27.
15. N. Pearson in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable,
p. 31.
16. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. IV.
17. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. III, p. IV.
18. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 36.
19. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 72.
20. Brett, ‘The New Liberalism,’ p. 86.
21. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 39.
22. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 40.
23. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 36.
24. J. Howard in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 30.
25. ‘Barnaby’s a Good Bloke, Declares Howard’, The
Age, 10 August 2005.
2005, at the inauguration of the government’s new ‘soft stance’ on immigration, about whether
he was concerned about the damage children had suffered in his detention centres, he replied
‘perhaps their parents should have stopped to ask themselves whether they should have tried
to come to this country in an unauthorised way in the first place’.94 Children are abused
by way of their parents. Nor were those parents to be shown any mercy.
Ahmed Alzalimi was an Iraqi refugee living in a flat in Sydney, so devastated by the news of
the death of his three beloved daughters that he had ceased to eat and drink. Sondos Ismael,
his wife, who had seen her daughters drown, was now in a guesthouse on the outskirts of
Jakarta, in the grip of a grief inexpressibly profound. In Australia a political question arose:
should Ahmed be permitted to visit his wife. To the government the answer was clear.95
It was the Howard government’s innovation of denying bona fide refugees like Ahmed the
right to bring their families over to join them that led to their presence on the boat now
known as SIEV-X, and thus their drowning. Howard refused to waive that other stipulation
of Ahmed’s Temporary Protection Visa, the one stipulating that a holder who travelled out-
side Australia had no right of return. He refused on national television, just prior to the 2001
election, and with images of the three children across the papers.
——————————
PA U L MAGEE teaches creative reading at the University of Canberra. His Cube Root of Book was
published in 2006 by John Leonard Press. Paul has published on questions of ideology, cynicism,
boredom and revolutionary upheaval. He is President of the Cultural Studies Association of
Australasia. <paul.magee@canberra.edu.au>
——————————
94 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
26. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 36.
27. Brett, ‘The New Liberalism’, p. 86.
28. M. MacCallum, ‘Howard’s Politics’ in R. Manne
(ed.), The Howard Years, Black Inc., Melbourne,
2004, p. 61.
29. D. Horne, Looking for Leadership: Australia in the
Howard Years, Viking/Penguin, Ringwood, 2001,
p. 65.
30. Horne, p. 66.
31. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. iii.
32. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 49.
33. Horne, p. 8.
34. Rundle, p. 6.
35. M. MacCallum, Run, Johnny, Run, The Story of the
2004 Election, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 2004,
p. 4.
36. MacCallum, Run, Johnny, Run, p. 9.
37. M. Dorovic in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 70.
38. C. Walker in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 58.
39. L. McGuiness in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable,
p. 63.
40. MacCallum, ‘Howard’s Politics’, p. 61.
41. C. Johnson, Governing Change, Keating to Howard,
UQP, St Lucia, 2000, p. 38.
42. Johnson, p. 7.
43. M. Farr, ‘Howard’s Agenda’ in D. Solomon (ed.),
Howard’s Race, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2002, p. 13.
44. Johnson, p. 7.
45. J. Howard, cited in Henderson, A Howard
Government?, pp. 29–30.
46. Johnson, pp. 40, 42.
47. Horne, p. 210.
48. M. Wade, ‘We’ve Had it Easy for Too Long’, Daily
Telegraph, 4 May 2006.
49. K. Hood, ‘People Talk About Unfair Dismissal but
They Do Not Mean the Same Thing’, Daily
Telegraph, 4 May 2006.
50. W.R. O’Reilly, ‘Employers Have Finally Got Some
Rights Back,’ Daily Telegraph, 4 May 2006.
51. J. Howard in P. Charlton, ‘The Terror Campaign’,
in D. Solomon (ed.), Howard’s Race: Winning the
Unwinnable Election, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2002,
p. 129.
52. J. Howard in D. Marr and M. Wilkinson, Dark
Victory, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2003, p. 63.
53. See R. Manne with D. Corlett, Sending them Home:
Refugees and the New Politics of Indifference,
Quarterly Essay 13, Black Inc,. Melbourne, 2004;
M. Leach and F. Mansouri, Lives in Limbo: Voices of
Refugees under Temporary Protection, UNSW Press,
Sydney, 2004; W. Maley, ‘Refugees’ in Manne, The
Howard Years, pp. 144–69.
54. It certainly worked for Howard. Indeed, this
strategy marked the decisive consolidation of his
power—as Robert Manne puts it, Howard ‘solved
the riddle of Australian politics with his
conservative populist solution, in the period
between Tampa and the election of 10 November
2001’ (R. Manne, ‘The Howard Years: A Political
Interpretation,’ in Manne, The Howard Years,
p. 50). He solved it with a massive display of
resentment, and revenge.
55. S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego, in Penguin Freud Library no. 12, Penguin,
London, 1991, p. 152.
56. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 40.
57. C. Johnson, ‘John Howard and the Mainstream’,
in M. Simms and J. Warhurst, Howard’s Agenda:
The 1998 Australian Election, UQP in association
with API-Network, St Lucia, 2000, p. 20.
58. Farr,‘Howard’s Agenda’, p.17.
59. Manne, ‘The Howard Years’, p. 21.
60. Figures from Manne, ‘The Howard Years’, p. 9.
61. Manne, ‘The Howard Years’, p. 21; J. Howard,
cited in Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. 32.
62. In fact she sees a link between Howard’s tendency
to break promises and conventions to suit his
purpose and earlier moments in his party’s history,
such as Fraser’s dubious withholding of supply in
1975. The Liberals, she adds, ‘seem more easily
able to convince themselves of their own
righteousness […] bending if not breaking the
rules’ to serve their ends (Relaxed and Comfortable,
p. 45). And she makes clear that Howard’s relation
to the GST was hardly populist (p. 43). It’s just
that these factors don’t seem all that important, in
her analysis, when compared to Howard’s ability
to tell a convincing ‘national story’ (p. 72).
Whereas I’m going to argue that the privilege
Howard claimed for himself in relation to the GST
was an outrightly populist manoeuvre; as I shall
seek to show, populism is predicated upon the
special privilege of the leader who calls it forth.
63. H. Irving, ‘A True Conservative?’ in Manne, The
Howard Years, p. 114.
64. Irving, ‘A True Conservative?’, p. 97.
65. G. Brennan, cited in Irving, ‘A True
Conservative?’, p. 105.
66. P. Charlton, ‘Tampa: The Triumph of Politics’, in
Solomon, Howard’s Race, p. 102.
67. Irving, ‘A True Conservative?’, p. 106. For a more
recent analysis of Howard’s ‘limited faith in
Government’, from the editor-at-large of the
Canberra Times, see J. Waterford
‘ACCOUNTABILITY, By all accounts, this is a
government that can get away with anything’,
posted on 5 July 2006 at <http://www.apo.org.au/
webboard/results.chtml?filename_num=88560>.
68. Figures and headline cited in P. Browne,
‘Introduction’, P. Browne and J. Thomas (eds),
A Win and a Prayer, Scenes from the 2004 Election,
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 8.
69. J. Howard, cited in Browne, ‘Introduction’, p. 9.
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PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
70. P. Hartcher, in MacCallum, Run Johnny, Run,
p. 199.
71. Charlton, ‘Tampa: The Triumph of Politics’, p. 96.
72. Marr and Wilkinson, p. 129.
73. Marr and Wilkinson, p. 287; Waterford,
‘ACCOUNTABILITY’, n.p.
74. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 151.
75. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 151.
76. C. Milne, Little Johnny and the Naughty Boat People,
Milne Books, St Kilda, 2001, n.p.
77. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 152.
78. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 150.
79. It is instructive to note that Howard’s 2004
election victory over Latham can be analysed as a
battle over competing images of masculinity,
specifically fatherhood. In the course of ‘Political
Cares: Gendered Reporting of Work and Family
Issues in Relation to Australian Politicians’,
Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 20, no. 46, March
2005, Kathie Muir analyses opposition leader
Mark Latham’s ‘use of his role as an actively
engaged father of two young sons to construct a
political identity that sharply contrasts with that
of the Prime Minister’ (p. 78). Commenting that
‘images and performances of specific masculinities
are rarely investigated’ when it comes to
politicians (p. 78), Muir shows how Latham used
family photo opportunities and public statements
(‘fatherhood for me has been the great experience
that you can have to really know the love of a
parent’ (p. 80) to project a particular image of
paternal appeal, which she glosses as ‘The “New
Father” as a Leader for New Times’. Muir proceeds
to contrast the positive valency of media images of
male politicians as fathers, with the decidedly
negative images that pertain to female politicians
as mothers; e.g. the questions Cheryl Kernot faced
from the press in 1998 as to whether she was
neglecting her family by flying to Hobart to speak
at the ALP National Conference, while they were
back home in Brisbane packing up to move house
(p. 85). Muir backs up her archive of such cases
with research from Holland, which shows ‘the
continuing deployment of traditional signifiers of
femininity in political reporting of women’s
performance in politics’ (p. 78). Parliamentary
politics is quite literally patriarchal in Australia, as
in many other countries. (Of course none of this is
eternal. Or rather, what really counts is the
triadic/Oedipal structure of love that democratic
politics relies upon, not the gender of the bodies
that might be placed there in any given epoch, in
response, or even challenge, to contemporary
mores. We do seem to be in the midst of some,
albeit slow, change in this latter respect. A case
study of the reporting qua gender of One Nation
leader Pauline Hanson would be interesting, in
this regard. By my reading, she’s the first
Australian female politician with openly prime
ministerial ambitions.)
80. Needless to say this is not a common position.
I have been citing from Freud’s 1921 text Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. This text of
Freud’s was key to Adorno’s analysis of Nazism in
the 1940s and 1950s (See T.W. Adorno, ‘Freudian
Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, in
A. Arato and E. Gebhart (eds), The Essential
Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, New York,
1994, pp. 118–38), but has otherwise had
surprisingly little impact on post-war political
theory. Maybe it’s too disturbing. After all, Freud
identifies envy and patriarchy as the structural
bases to all egalitarian group formations, from the
group of friends right up to the massive modern
state. That’s disturbing, on both counts. It doesn’t,
for all that, mean that every egalitarian formation
is fascist. Clearly there’s degrees here. In fact, the
politics for post-structuralism involves asserting
the existence, and thereby validity, of these very
degrees. Let me put it this way: anyone who takes
the idea of democracy too seriously will end up a
fascist. In a 1998 speech to the Canberra Press
Club, Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock
attacked the Australian judiciary for overturning
the decisions of his department’s refugee
tribunals: ‘The courts have reinterpreted and
rewritten Australian law, ignoring the sovereignty
of Parliament and the will of the Australian
people’. (P. Ruddock in Marr and Wilkinson,
p. 32). What does this democratic assertion
amount to, if not a repudiation of the
constitutional separation of powers (elsewhere
regarded as the bedrock of democracy)? The only
way to satisfy the democratic demand that one
single political apparatus unite us, is to
undermine the validity of those other democratic
systems and agencies that also do. A similarly
democratic program—that we be united by one
single set of laws, which render us all equal—
underlay Howard’s 1996 campaign against the
rights of minority interests. ‘In fact’, as Donald
Horne archly reminds, ‘any government has
hundreds, if not thousands, of policies for
minority interests’. (Horne, p. 87.) That’s basically
what a government is there to provide. That’s why
democratic extremism, such as Howard’s in 1996,
or Ruddock’s in 1998, is so perversely anti-
democratic, such a vehicle for authoritarianism
and bigotry. It’s really just an advertisement for
your new family, with Howard or Ruddock at its
head. To put this argument into perspective,
I would say that the reason democracy is not
thoroughly awful is that people tend not to
believe in it. They accept that there are many
96 VOLUME13 NUMBER2 SEP2007
different groups in their world, with many
different competing claims upon them, and so are
less at the risk of succumbing to the autocratic
appeal of any particular one of them. At the very
least, there’s an executive, a legislature and a
judiciary. The problem, on the other hand, with
our supposed national character of
‘egalitarianism, practical improvisation,
scepticism toward authority, larrikinism, loyalty to
mates, generosity’ (Brett, ‘The New Liberalism.’
p. 82) is that it can so easily take on cultish forms,
and that’s because it, just like any other reaction-
formation to sibling resentment, is predicated
upon love for a leader.
81. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 153.
82. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 142.
83. J. Howard in Charlton, ‘The Terror Campaign’,
p. 129.
84. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 143.
85. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 139.
86. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, pp. 82–3.
87. Freud, Group Psychology, p. 139.
88. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1942, p. 110 (paragraph
158).
89. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, p. 96.
90. J.W. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
Penguin, London, p. 115.
91. ‘Those under Howard’s sway’: I leave this
formulation deliberately vague, because I’m not
convinced I know how to specify this group more
exactly. I basically mean Howard’s voters, but to
say so already raises all sorts of psephological
questions about whether the last decade’s Liberal
voters have been voting for Howard himself, or
just his party, and which of the range of various
reasons have been driving each different one of
them. Research into such questions is obviously
valuable. By the same token, I’m not sure how
much credence you can place in anyone’s self-
report on these matters, which is what the
statistics by and large rely upon. Brett and Moran’s
method of in-depth interview and authorial
interpretation strikes me as much more
convincing (J. Brett, and A. Moran, Ordinary
People’s Politics, Australians Talk about Life, Politics
and the Future of the Country, Pluto Press, North
Melbourne, 2006). The question which for me
both crystallises the methodological problems
involved in psephological research, and suggests
some alternate modes of approach, actually
concerns the group of people who detest Howard.
Though I’m not referring to them as the people
‘under Howard’s sway’ in the writing above, it
strikes me that a consideration of the situation of
people who despise Howard will cast some
strange light on the question of how significant a
democratically elected leader’s role as leader in
fact is. Freud does not address the issue of
democratic political opposition in his theorisation
of leadership, which in itself is an interesting
omission. Or rather, he addresses it only insofar as
he argues that the leader’s followers themselves
detest the leader. They want to dethrone him,
indeed to murder him, and these parricidal
desires provide the true source of the violence
which is then acted upon designated rivals, like
boat people. They’re stand-ins for Howard (see
further Freud’s comments on the ‘sacrificial meal’
in S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, in Penguin Freud
Library no. 13, Penguin, London, 1985,
pp. 193–208). But here it gets tricky. For, if this is
the case, should we conclude that an oppositional
voter’s express hatred for Howard is simply an
inverse mode of love/allegiance? I’m not sure, and
I don’t think we should reach that conclusion
until a great deal more research is done on the
topic. Nor should one ever forget that politics is
always possible. One thing we can say, however, is
that contemporary parliamentary politics is
incredibly intimate. A disturbing but revealing
experiment for Australian readers involves
tracking how often you hear Howard’s voice,
whether through television or radio, each week,
and seeing whether you hear your friends’, or
perhaps your parents’, voices, as often. Add to
that your encounters with his quoted voice in
print. Particularly during a Tampa crisis. It is
really quite hard not to form a relationship, that
is, a libidinal link, of some sort to someone whose
words and style pass through your cerebral cortex
with that degree of frequency. After all, they’re
right up close. It’s the same with popular actors.
But these ideas need to be read alongside Brett’s
Relaxed and Comfortable, which as I say in the
writing above, tends as a whole to minimise
Howard’s personal role in his party’s victories,
and marshals persuasive arguments to
this effect.
92. Brett, Relaxed and Comfortable, p. iv.
93. Z. Steel, cited in Manne, Sending them Home,
p. 24.
94. The Age, 22 June 2005.
95. Manne, Sending them Home, p. 36.
97
PAUL MAGEE—JOHN HOWARD’S BODY
