A LASTING IMPRESSION: The Howard Decade

Australians are grumpy about John Howard’s handling of health. They are unsure of education. They oppose the war on Iraq and are wary of IR changes. And yet … they like the Prime Minister. It seems that if the economy’s good, Australians are willing to forgive almost anything, writes Karen Kissane.
JOHN Howard has won some and lost some in the 10 years he has been prime minister.
He has won Robert Hancock, 44, a father of two from Wangaratta who did not vote for him in 1996 but has become a convert.”
He’s a pretty solid PM – pretty honest,” says Hancock. “The way he gets a handle on the economy is the best thing he does. You don’t have high inflation and rates going through the roof.”
Hancock, who manages a printing company, has been won over by the continued economic prosperity: “It all gets back to quality of life.”
But Bruce Denton has shifted in the opposite direction. He helped vote Howard into power in 1996 but now, “I hate him. I feel like throwing a shoe when I see him on TV.”
Denton has never forgiven the Prime Minister for reneging on his promise not to introduce the GST, and he blames the atmosphere created by the Government’s new industrial laws for his unemployment.
The contract sign fitter worked for the same employer for nine years.”
These industrial relations things – I threw my job in and I blame him because the place I worked for wanted to cut my rates by 10 per cent. And I’ve done a stupid thing because now I am out of work and I’m 63 years old and who’s going to employ me?” There is a political lesson in these stories. As former prime minister Paul Keating discovered when interest rates skyrocketed, voters are unforgiving of leaders who are seen to have damaged their economic position. Conversely, it seems that a prime minister who is seen as keeping the economy ticking over has little to fear, whatever his perceived failings.
Howard has turned into the man we love to be in two minds about.
Ten years into his reign, he is seen by most Australians as providing strong leadership in uncertain times and as “bringing home the bacon” – a glowing 83 per cent of voters who rated the economy as the main issue believe he has managed the economy well or quite well.
Hancock, who was polled by The Age, is one of the 46 per cent who believe they are better off under the Howard Government.
Many are not so happy with other areas of his stewardship. They think Australia is now a less fair society, they question the PM’s honesty, and they see him as a divisive leader who wrongly took Australia to war in Iraq. Howard is also seen to have done poorly on health and education.
For most voters, however, these misgivings do not translate into wanting to give him the boot.
Ed Hallett, of Elwood, is a 26-year-old who works in IT and studies part-time at university.
He admires Howard’s ability to take a tough stand in the face of opposition, as well as his economic management and the place he has carved out for himself on the world stage.”
The Australian dollar has gone up and the national debt has gone down and, overseas, people know who he is,” he says.”
I have travelled through Europe and Asia and the US and, before, most people didn’t even know where Australia was, but they now know who this short little prime minister is who runs around the world all the time.”
Social researcher Hugh Mackay says Howard “is the most complex politician I have ever studied. There are so many contradictions. He does not have a simple kind of profile – it runs the full spectrum from high respect to deep loathing.”
And most responses are mixed: voters who like him confess to reservations, and voters who dislike him acknowledge they also have a reluctant respect for him.”
According to his former chief of staff, Grahame Morris, Howard has a gift for divining the views of middle Australia, to the point where, when he holds to a view that is clearly unpopular, “voters think, `You’re wrong, tiger, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.’” Across a broad range of voters, Howard is seen as reassuringly solid and reliable, a known quantity. Says Mackay: “He enjoys increasing respect without much affection. A lot of the respect is almost grudging; people finally have to admit that he’s a stayer, that his big characteristic is a combination of persistence and political skill.”
Howard is a politician whose popularity has swung wildly over the years but whose tenure as prime minister has seen him grow in stature.”
In the mid-80s, you couldn’t give him away,” says Morris. But in March 1996, Australians decided that they preferred him to what they saw as an arrogant, out-of-touch Paul Keating.
Morris says polling then showed that voters “thought of him as `Uncle John’ and liked his values”.
In his decade as PM, Howard’s popularity has often spiked following tragedies of historic proportions.
In 1996, his tough stance on gun control following the Port Arthur massacre helped turn him, according to one poll, into the most popular leader in a decade.
He won an almost unwinnable election in 2001 with his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and his handling of the asylum seekers on the Tampa, which convinced many people who would otherwise have been Labor voters that he would protect the nation against “illegal immigrants”.
Australians also admired him for sending troops to East Timor in 1999, and for his tough and eloquent responses to the first Bali bombing in 2002, when he passed emergency laws to enable the arrest of al-Qaeda sympathisers and spoke of the need to “wrap our arms around not only our fellow Australians, but ¿ the people of Indonesia”.
Voters like him less when the statesman is seen as giving way to the politician. His personal standing crashed in February 2002 when more than half the electorate believed he had intentionally misled them over the “children overboard” affair.
They were more forgiving over Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction, with 70 per cent believing either that he told the truth about the reasons for going to war or unintentionally gave the wrong reasons.
His approval nosedived again last November, following unpopular changes to workplace laws.
Mackay says Howard is not seen as a charismatic leader. “A lot of people say he makes them cringe; there are aspects of his style that people find a bit (embarrassing). He’s so lacking in a visionary, inspirational style; he’s so pedestrian.”
But even that, as he himself says, is suited to the times, a time of fairly consistent anxiety and uncertainty.”
Some argue that Australians have never been big on “the vision thing” anyway. Grahame Morris scoffs at the term “visionary”.”
I hate that word. I have never met an Australian yet who got out of bed and said, `Oh dear, I’m going back into bed because no one gave me a vision.’ It’s crap,” he says.”
I just don’t think Australians work like that.
Most people live their lives around family and children and bills and mortgages and footy and mates, and politics comes in at number 12 – unless they’re angry. At the moment, through John Howard’s leadership, you rarely have an angry Australia.”
That’s possibly because of the Prime Minister’s management of potentially disgruntled voters. Wayne Errington, a politics lecturer at Charles Sturt University in NSW, is co-writing a biography of Howard. He says his continued popularity after so many years in office is remarkable.”
Usually, after you have been a prime minister for a while, you have managed to offend quite a few interest groups, so you have (what the pollsters call) `high negatives’,” he says.
He attributes the PM’s position to his ability to learn from his mistakes, such as unpopular proposed changes to aged care – “he’s famous now for being strong, but he was quite famous for his backflips” – and to his targeting of groups that might be disadvantaged by his policies.
Nancye Coulson, 76, has one of the benefits created by the Howard Government: a veteran’s gold card, “so I am looked after in a way I couldn’t afford otherwise”.
Coulson, who was interviewed for the Saulwick AgePoll, likes Howard and admires his ability to make strong decisions even when they are unpopular. But she worries for her friends with big health bills, and finds that increases in her pension are not keeping up with increases in the cost of living; her savings are dwindling.
None of these doubts, however, is likely to lead her to vote against Howard at the next election.”
There’s no one I can see who could take his place and do the job to the standard that he has done,” she says.
For those who dislike Howard, the feeling is intense. Zosia Romanowski, 25, an office manager from Reservoir, says “there have been a number of events with a certain scandal, such as the children overboard affair, and he’s just turned around and said, `I didn’t know about that.’ He’s the leader of the party and the leader of Australia, and he should know,” she says.
Romanowski fears that the industrial relations changes will leave workers vulnerable in an economic downturn, that the war on terror has set back multicultural tolerance by 20 or 30 years, and that Australia under Howard has become “a little meaner”.”
Nobody wants to pay for things they don’t use themselves. Wealthy people complain about propping up the state health and education systems because they don’t use them.”
Middle-class and aspirational voters are central to Howard’s support. Pollster Irving Saulwick says the PM’s backers include established middle-class people who dislike disorder and to whom a growing economy is important. “They value progress as material progress,” he says.
A second constituency is the Pauline Hanson-style battlers, including those who have found a foothold in the consumer society and are desperately trying to hold on to it, as well as people who are poor and jealous of what they see as “hand-outs” to other groups.”
They are the resentful battlers. I think he’s given indications to them that he doesn’t favour giving special treatment to other minority groups,” Saulwick says.
He says Howard is disliked by a “mix of lefties” who are influenced by a broad ideology rather than notions of class war. Some are so antagonistic to the Prime Minister that they dislike everything from his looks to his body language.
The unemployed Denton is one whose dislike of the Prime Minister is now all-embracing.”
The economy is in his favour but what worries me is manufacturing in Australia. Nylex closed its factory and another 120 people are out of business.”
Denton is resigned to the fact that many people he speaks to do not share his views.”
People who are well off don’t care, they don’t take an interest,” he says. “They are sort of, `I’m OK, Jack.’” He admits: “I probably would be there myself if I had done as well.”
Former US president Bill Clinton famously campaigned on how, “it’s the economy, stupid”.
According to this poll, John Howard survives by the same principle – at least for now.
TOMORROW Michelle Grattan on how John Howard has changed Australia
ONLINE Join a forum on John Howard’s prime ministership at theage.com.au
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
ZOSIA ROMANOWSKI 25, OFFICE MANAGER, RESERVOIR
BEST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: Standing up to Japan regarding whaling.
WORST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: Industrial relations changes.
ARE YOU BETTER OFF NOW THAN YOU WERE A DECADE AGO? Yes.
IS AUSTRALIA BETTER OFF? No.
QUOTE: “A lot of his policies seem to be driving us in the direction of America with things like industrial relations and the education system, and significant parts of our foreign policy seem to be dictated by White House policy. That’s something I very much resent.”
ED HALLETT 26, IT WORKER AND PART-TIME UNIVERSITY STUDENT, ELWOOD
BEST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: Management of the economy.
WORST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: Children overboard affair.
ARE YOU BETTER OFF? Yes.
IS AUSTRALIA BETTER OFF? Yes.
QUOTE: “I think he’s done a very good job. He stands by his convictions. The Iraq war, although I’m uneasy about it, is definitely something where he has stood by his decision in spite of a lot of pressure and that has earned my personal respect.”
ROBERT HANCOCK 44, MANAGER OF A PRINTING COMPANY IN WANGARATTA
BEST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: The economy.
WORST THING HOWARD HAS DONE: The GST.
ARE YOU BETTER OFF? Yes.
IS AUSTRALIA BETTER OFF? Yes.
QUOTE: “I think he’s done the right thing for the country in many ways in his long tenure.” Going to war in Iraq “is saying Australia is not going to just allow (atrocities) to happen” and the furore about children overboard “was blown out of all proportion”.
Interviews conducted as part of the Saulwick AgePoll on Howard’s decade as Prime Minister.
WHAT AUSTRALIANS THINK OF JOHN HOWARD
47% believe Howard has done a good or very good job
17% believe he has done a poor or very poor job
46% think they¿re better off under the Howard government
50%believe Australia has become a meaner society
35% believe health is the most important issue in their lives
20% say the worst thing Howard has done is go to war in Iraq
THE HIGHS AND LOWS
The highs and lows
1996
– APRIL 28: Port Arthur massacre
– AUGUST19: Protesters converge on Parliment over IR legislation
1997
– APRIL 11: One Nation party formed by Pauline Hanson
– May 26-28: Howard refuses to apologise to indigenous Australians at Reconciliation Convention
– NOVEMBER 3: First Telstra share float
1998
– FEBRUARY 2-13: Constitutional Convention at Old Parliament House
– Wharfies launch industrial action against Patrick Stevedores
1999
– SEPTEMBER 20: Australian troops arrive in East Timor
– NOVEMBER 6: Referendum on the republic
2000
– JULY 1: introduction of the GST
– SEPTEMBER 15: Start of the Sydney Olympic Games
2001
– AUGUST 27: Federal Government refuses to let Tampa, carrying rescued asylum seekers, into Australian waters
– SEPTEMBER 11: Terrorists attack World Trade Centre and Pentagon in New York and Washington
2002
– FEBRUARY 14: Release of report disproving Government claims asylum seekers threw children overboard
– OCTOBER 12: 202 people, including 88 Australians, killed in bombing of Kuta nightclub in Bali
2003
– MARCH 20:Invasion of Iraq
– OCTOBER 22: US President George Bush visits Australia
2004
– OCTOBER 25: Car bomb explodes outside Australian embassy in Iraq
– DECEMBER 9: Senate inquiry backs claims that Howard was told there was no evidence asylum seekers threw children overboard
– DECEMBER 26: Hundreds of thousands die in South Asian tsunami
2005
– FEBRUARY 3: Unlawful immigration detention of Cornelia Rau revealed
– JUNE: Union campaign against Government’s IR laws
2006
– MARCH 2: Howard to celebrate 10 years in office.

First published in The Age.

Daughter tells of attack on mother

ERIN Margach is 10 years old. Yesterday she sat and watched a videotape of herself in which she told a policewoman about what she had seen the night her father killed her mother.
In the tape made four days after her mother’s death, and played to the Supreme Court yesterday, Erin, then eight, was dressed in red tracksuit pants and a white top with her hair in an alice band. She folded her hands tightly in her lap as she told her story in one long narrative with few prompts.
She started her account with the night before the killing, when her mother, Tina, and father, Paul, argued over whether to end their marriage because of her mother’s brief flirtation with another man. Her father punched her mother in the face, she said. The following night, Erin heard her parents arguing in the kitchen and her mother saying: “I’m just going to pack my bags.”
Her father said: “No, I want you to stay here.”
Her mother replied: “You are just an idiot!”
Erin’s younger sister Bree, then four, wanted to go to her parents but Erin told her, “Don’t go out because it’s only adults.” Then she heard her mother call out “Erin!” from the kitchen.
“She was yelling and screaming ‘Ah help!’ and I rushed out because I thought it was an emergency. Dad was waving a knife around and he wanted to stab her but he was missing. He must have stabbed her once or twice because there was blood everywhere, like on her arms and legs and body.
“Bree was crying really badly and she just rushed in her room and I was the only one. I was yelling out ‘Don’t!’ in a really loud voice at the top of my lungs. I thought I could rush over and pull him away from her but I was too scared because he had this really scary face on.”
Her mother “started moving around and kicking him off her and saying, ‘Get away!’ She was laying down horizontal (on a couch) . . . She kicked him in the stomach to get off and she kicked him in the hands so the knife wouldn’t go near . . . Wherever she moved, he moved, just putting the knife near her.”
When her father moved away, her mother “put her her hand on her heart to see if it was still beating . . . and she started to close her eyes and she went all white. And Dad rushed over and said, ‘What’s happening? I have to call the ambulance’.”
Erin raced into her bedroom to call her grandmother to ask her to come “really, really quickly”, but had trouble getting through. “I heard my Dad saying hello to emergency and then I hanged up . . . (I was thinking) this is just a dream, this is not happening.”
She went back to her mother in the kitchen. “I felt her head and she was, like, cold or something. I got a glass of water and just put it on her face to cool her down . . . and then I put some water in her mouth and she took a breath and when I stopped she went (Erin sighs) like that.”
The operator on the emergency line told Erin to get a towel and press it down where her mother was bleeding. “Her whole body was bleeding and I pushed down on her arms and her heart but when I was putting it in all different places she was going like that (Erin exhales heavily again).”
Erin saw blood on her mother’s face as well but “I thought if I put it over her face she might suffocate and stop breathing . . . Dad was yelling ‘Where’s the ambulance?’ and walking around and stomping and said he was about to punch something . . . Then I said, ‘Could you help me?’ but he didn’t listen. He was yelling really loud.”
Erin was composed both in her police interview and when she was being examined by remote video link in court yesterday. But on the fateful night she swung between panic and practicality in the emergency call, an audio tape of which was also played to the court. The court heard Mr Margach sob as he begged for aid, and his children screamed in the background.
The operator called Erin to the phone when Mr Margach was too distraught to take in her instructions. Erin politely said “Pardon?” or “Excuse me?” whenever she had trouble understanding the emergency operator, but screamed at her father to get the towel and screamed at her mother, “Mum, Mum, oh please!”
Erin: “The ambulance are here, but she’s not waking.”
Operator: “Erin.”
Erin: “It’s never happened to me.”
Operator: “No, I know it’s never happened to you, darling.”
Erin later told a policewoman in her interview: “I felt a little prickly from seeing all that. I felt a little bit sick.” When Erin Margach was taken to a neighbour’s house after it was all over, she vomited.
Paul Jason Margach has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Tina Maree Margach in Hurtle Street, Ascot Vale on October 15, 2004.
The trial continues before Justice Betty King.

First published in The Age.

Husband ‘blew a fuse’ before killing, court told

WHEN Paul Margach suspected his wife Tina was having an affair, he searched her mobile phone for telephone numbers and called a man he had never met, Shane Breheny.
Pretending at first to be his wife’s brother, Margach asked Mr Breheny whether he had got along with Tina, “and if we had it off”, Mr Breheny told the Supreme Court yesterday.
“He was trying to put his (four-year-old) younger daughter on (the phone), and saying ‘This is your new Daddy’, ‘You have broken up my family’, all that sort of stuff.”
The following night, Margach stabbed his wife to death in a jealous rage. Firemen who arrived at the house in Hurtle Street, Ascot Vale, after he phoned for help on October 15, 2004, found him waving and crying with both his young daughters on the front veranda.
He told them he had stabbed his wife because he found out she was having an affair and begged them to save her life.
Margach, 38, has pleaded not guilty to his wife’s murder. His wife had not had an affair with Mr Breheny, a sign-writer, but had confessed to her husband that she had a couple of drinks and danced with him while on a weekend away in Swan Hill with her girlfriends.
She and Mr Breheny phoned and sent text messages to each other several times the following week, and she told Mr Breheny that she had feelings for him.
The night before she died, Mrs Margach told him that her husband “blew a fuse” over the news of her flirtation and hit her on the nose and that “the kids are all crying”. But she still wanted to stay with her husband and said, “I deserve everything I get at the moment.”
Mrs Margach spent much of that phone call debating with Mr Breheny about whether her husband could trace their conversation. In fact, Mr Margach had installed a listening device on the family telephone line. Her conversation was replayed in court yesterday.
Mrs Margach suggested to Mr Breheny that they both leave their partners. Mr Breheny told the court he was being light-hearted when he replied, “I would in a heartbeat.”
Mrs Margach told Mr Breheny that her husband had “this big jealousy problem” and that she did not show him the affection he wanted.
She said she had to remind herself that her husband was a good father and a good provider, “But is that everything? . . . If I didn’t have kids, it would be like, there’s my door.”
She told Mr Breheny that she felt differently about him to the way she felt about her husband: “If someone . . . wanted to touch you or something and I was there I’d want to knock them out.”
Mrs Margach told Mr Breheny that in the argument with her husband, he said, “I’m going to make it my goal just to destroy you.’ I said, ‘That’s good, that’s great . . . You forgot the acid. Do you want me just to lay down now and pour it on me?’ . . .
“But I don’t want to hurt him like that . . . He was really hurting tonight and that hurt me.”
The case continues.

First published in The Age.

‘Perceived’ affair provoked husband to kill, court told

ERIN Margach, 8, had promised to read a bedtime story to her little sister, Bree. When her mother called from the kitchen for help, Erin went to answer.
She found her father, Paul, with her mother, Tina, who was bleeding to death from multiple stab wounds. The moments that followed were captured on a taped 000 call that was played yesterday in the Supreme Court.
“Put that eight-year-old on the phone!” the operator barked at Paul Margach, who was begging for help for his wife but crying so hard he seemed unable to take in the operator’s instructions.
Erin, who had been screaming in the background, took the call. “You keep quiet. You listen to me if you want to help your mum,” the operator commanded. “Go and get a towel, quickly! Put the towel where your mum’s bleeding.”
The operator tried to keep Erin focused while the child swung between calm and hysteria. At one point Erin screamed, “Mum, Mum, oh please!”
“Come on, you have to hurry!” said the operator. “Are you doing the right thing?”
“Yes, I’m doing it,” the child said.
As the tape was played yesterday, Paul Jason Margach sat sobbing in court. An engineer formerly of Hurtle Street, Ascot Vale, he has pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife on October 15, 2004.
The Margachs had met when Tina was 16 and married when she was 21. The marriage had begun to unravel, the court was told.
Prosecutor Boris Kayser said Mrs Margach, 36, had gone to Swan Hill with girlfriends the weekend before her murder. There she had met a man with whom she danced and chatted, but there was no sexual contact.
Margach, 38, had been suspicious about his wife. He installed a recording device on their home telephone. He accused his wife of having an affair with the man. Mrs Margach denied this and said she did not want the marriage to end.
In a conversation taped from the home phone that was played in court yesterday – “a voice from the dead”, said the prosecutor – Mrs Margach said: “I can’t communicate with Paul. It’s like we have hit a stalemate . . . It’s just humdrum, boring, I can’t be bothered and he feels rejected.”
She said she was “a bit flirtatious” with the man in Swan Hill but it had gone no further. Of her husband, she said, “I love him to death.”
Mrs Margach said she was bewildered by the intensity of her husband’s anger.
According to the prosecutor, on the night of the killing, Mrs Margach had found her husband weeping in Erin’s bedroom and telling the child about the marriage break-up. Mrs Margach remonstrated with him “for talking like that to an eight-year-old”.
Margach followed her to the kitchen. He later told police that his wife had said the marriage was over, saying “I don’t want a baby, I want a man!”
He said his wife picked up a knife and they struggled over it, and that she told him, ‘I did f— him and I enjoyed it’.
He told police he stabbed her because he found out she was having an affair.
Margach’s lawyer, Christopher Dane, QC, said his client had not intended to kill his wife because only moments earlier he had told her she could stay in the house and that he would move out.
Mr Dane said there was no claim that Mrs Margach had actually had an affair in Swan Hill, but that the case centred on provocation and perceptions of infidelity: “Is there a difference, in a degenerating relationship, between actual and perceived (infidelity)? If you believe it, then that’s what’s driving you. If you have got it wrong, does it matter?”
Mr Dane said Margach was guilty of manslaughter, not murder.
The case continues.

First published in The Age.