{"id":506967,"date":"2026-02-27T06:20:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T06:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/506967\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T06:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T06:20:11","slug":"blame-john-howard-for-our-housing-and-migration-woes-says-amy-remeikis-but-is-he-due-some-credit-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/506967\/","title":{"rendered":"Blame John Howard for our housing and migration woes, says Amy Remeikis \u2013 but is he due some credit\u00a0too?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost exactly 30 years ago, John Howard ended Labor\u2019s 13 years of federal government. He sent then prime minister Paul Keating packing \u2013 along with his vision of a culturally renovated Australia that reconciled with Indigenous Australians, became a republic, and learned to live comfortably and productively with Asia. <\/p>\n

In a new book, former Guardian political reporter Amy Remeikis, now chief political analyst at The Australia Institute, argues many of today\u2019s intractable social problems \u2013 housing, failure to Close the Gap<\/a>, increasingly privatised education \u2013 were caused (or made worse) by the Howard government\u2019s policies. <\/p>\n

Review: Where it all went wrong: The case against John Howard by Amy Remeikis (Scribner)<\/p>\n

His promotion of One Australia<\/a>, which rejected multiculturalism and opposed a treaty with Aboriginal Australians, laid the foundations for Pauline Hanson\u2019s One Nation Party, and the Liberal Party\u2019s pull to the right on immigration and multiculturalism.<\/p>\n

She believes<\/a> Howard changed this country more in the last three decades than almost any other modern politician. <\/p>\n

\"Book<\/a><\/p>\n

The achievements of the Hawke\u2013Keating Labor government that preceded Howard in deregulating the economy, and the churn of Liberal leaders during those years, are the book\u2019s back story. But Remeikis is chiefly interested in how, in 2026, we should judge Howard\u2019s 11 years of government (1996\u20132007). <\/p>\n

As her book\u2019s title, Where it All Went Wrong: The Case Against John Howard<\/a>, indicates, she judges it harshly. The dominant narrative of his political success and policy acumen is wrong, she argues. And worsening Howard\u2019s impact, subsequent Liberal leaders have essentially taken their direction from his government \u2013 with no new policy thinking in the past dismal decade and no sign of any to come. <\/p>\n

Housing, culture wars and \u2018America\u2019s bitch\u2019<\/p>\n

Take housing. House prices started departing from wages in 2000, after Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, halved the capital gains tax and subsequently allowed superannuation funds to invest in housing, Remeikis reminds us. This turned housing from shelter to an investment asset. It created a landlord class and priced young people without access to family capital out of home ownership. <\/p>\n

It is now impossible for a sole earner on the average national wage<\/a> to buy a house in any of Australia\u2019s capital cities without help. This is a national crisis and people are angry \u2013 but not everyone, and there\u2019s the rub. People who already own a house are richer. <\/p>\n

As Howard is oft-reported saying<\/a>, no one complained to him about the value of their house increasing. The Liberal Party is girding its loins to oppose the reduction in the capital gains tax discount Jim Chalmers is considering<\/a> for the May budget. And now Treasury is also considering limiting negative gearing, to just two investment properties.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/a><\/p>\n

Jim Chalmers\u2019 treasury is considering limiting negative gearing, to just two investment properties.
\n Lukas Coch\/AAP<\/p>\n

Remeikis builds her case that Howard\u2019s mean and sneaky policies have made Australia a worse place than it might have been by sweeping through a vast range of policy areas. Culture wars, race, Indigenous rights, asylum seekers and migration, housing, privatisation, revenue and managing the economy, industrial relations and wages, welfare and unemployment. <\/p>\n

And of course, foreign policy, under the heading \u201cAmerica\u2019s Bitch\u201d, as Keating\u2019s vision of a more independent Australia was replaced by Howard\u2019s commitment to being America\u2019s best friend, and following it into war in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

John Howard failed to \u2018slap down\u2019 Pauline Hanson after her 1996 maiden speech.
\n Bluey Thompson\/AAP<\/p>\n

There\u2019s plenty of detail. Much of it will be new to today\u2019s readers, who were children when Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech<\/a> attacking Asian migration and the special treatment of Aboriginal people \u2013 and Howard failed to slap her down.<\/p>\n

When Howard stubbornly refused to apologise<\/a> to the Stolen Generations for the terrible suffering inflicted on them by government policies of child removal. When he denied<\/a> the captain of Norwegian freighter MV Tampa permission to land 433 asylum seekers he had rescued from a sinking vessel according to the law of the sea. <\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s harsh and often cruel treatment of refugees begins with Howard, and has cast a long shadow. So has his on-again, off-again support for multiculturalism. Even as he was shoving refugees onto offshore islands, he was ramping up migration. Numbers in 2007 were double what they were in 1996, Remeikis writes. <\/p>\n

There\u2019s an irony here. As diaspora communities from around the world grew, they challenged the usefulness of Howard\u2019s vernacular nationalism. At the turn of the century, Howard\u2019s praise for Australians\u2019 practical mateship and appeals to the Anzac legend and the Great Don Bradman spoke to many more people than it does now, when 31.5% of our population was born overseas<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The collapse of the Liberal party\u2019s metropolitan vote at the last election can partly be explained by its failure to win enough support<\/a> from the overseas-born, especially Chinese and Indian Australians.<\/p>\n

Fails to give credit<\/p>\n

I do think Remeikis fails to give Howard credit where it is due: namely, the introduction of our consumption tax, the GST<\/a>. This was not as comprehensive as it might have been, had the Australian Democrats not insisted on various exemptions to pass the bill in the senate \u2013 but it was nevertheless a major reform that lessened the tax system\u2019s reliance on taxing income. <\/p>\n

She also gives Howard more agency than I think is warranted, sometimes writing as if he were calling all the shots, rather than leading a government with other effective players in it. She is right, though, that he knew how to use power. She is also right to wish our current government were a little more like him in this respect.<\/p>\n

Remeikis argues Howard\u2019s commitment to One Australia constructed a \u201cthem\u201d and \u201cus\u201d, with Indigenous Australians and people of colour firmly in the \u201cthem\u201d camp and older Anglo Australians smugly \u201cus\u201d, held together by unacknowledged racism. <\/p>\n

I felt, at times, she was mirroring this, with people like her \u2013 tertiary educated, younger city dwellers \u2013 as \u201cus\u201d, and people who responded to Howard\u2019s version of nationalism very firmly positioned as \u201cthem\u201d. <\/p>\n

If we are to build a less rancorous, less polarised society, empathy has to go both ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Almost exactly 30 years ago, John Howard ended Labor\u2019s 13 years of federal government. He sent then prime…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-506967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}