Thirty years ago (2 March, 1996), the defeated Prime Minister Paul Keating said: “When you change the government, you change the nation.” It was one of the most profound and prophetic statements in Australia’s political history.
As what remains of the Liberal Party celebrates the anniversary of the ascension of John Howard as its second-longest-serving Prime Minister, it is worth pointing out that longevity in office is not worth celebrating in Howard’s case. Indeed, the longer he was in office, the more damage he did.
Virtually every social and economic ill in Australia today has it genesis in the policies of the Howard Government. Let’s itemise them.
Population, housing, and employment. Howard ramped up immigration at the behest of business which wanted cheap labour. Howard was ideologically obsessed by reducing the power of unions. That policy had some merit in moderation, but the wholesale destruction of secure employment with decent conditions (which Howard’s Work Choices did) had no merit.
The side effect of disempowering unions through mass cheap immigrant labour was manifold. It spawned the gig economy, job insecurity, stagnant wages, and lower productivity. It caused huge pressure on infrastructure, health, and education. It gave fodder to the racism of Pauline Hanson and One Nation.
To make the high-immigration policy palatable, Howard had to be seen to be harsh on refugees to politically counter the Hanson slogan of Australian “being swamped by Asians”.
Yes, the massive boat arrivals had to be controlled, but it was at the expense of humanity and taxpayers through the bribing of Nauru to take refugees and the wasteful funding of contractors to keep them imprisoned. It made vilification of refugees acceptable.
The 2002 $3000 baby bonus added fuel to population fire. Immigration has never since been ramped back down to a level that helps rather than burdens the nation.
Tax and housing. High immigration put enough pressure on housing, but the 50 percent capital gains tax concession in 1999 made it worse. In effect, higher income investors could buy housing, deduct the outgoings including the interest on the loan against existing income, sell later, and pay tax on only half the capital gain.
In short, income that attracted high tax could be converted to income attracting lower tax.
People flocked to invest in housing to take advantages of the concessions. Howard turned a housing market where people bought a house in which to live into a vehicle for tax-minimisation. The capital-gains concession turbo-charged the use of negative gearing. And Howard’s big first-home-buyer grants just added fuel to the flames.
Superannuation. Howard was so obsessed with union power that he and his successors were determined to undermine Keating’s universal superannuation scheme which was designed to provide a decent retirement income for working Australians (which had been denied them for decades). Unions had representation on the boards of many industry funds.
In 1999, Howard legislated for self-managed superannuation funds. They turned into tax-minimisation and estate-management vehicles rather than provisioning for retirement. They also became targets for scammers.
Tax. The 11 years of the Howard Government saw a shift of the tax burden towards younger salary and wage earners and away from older wealthier Australians. Giving cash tax rebates on franked share dividends to people who had little or no taxable income ballooned from about $500 million to about $7 billion today.
Negative gearing, superannuation, capital gains, and cash rebates on franked dividends now cost the Budget about $115 billion a year. That amount could easily be halved.
In mid 2003, after meeting industry lobbyists, Howard abandoned the Liberal Party’s proposal for a cardon tax. Combined with a failure to effectively tax resource extraction, it led to decades of bumper freebies for share-owners (mostly foreign) and upper managers to the detriment of middle- and lower-income Australians and people who rely on government services.
Howard’s policies made for great inequality and intergenerational unfairness.
Privatisations and out-sourcing – ramped up by Howard – had a similar effect: wealth transfers to the already-wealthy.
On the other side of the coin, was Howard’s contraction of government help to those who needed it most – the aged (kerosene baths in privatised nursing homes), toddlers (privatised, poorly regulated childcare), the sick (trashed Medicare), the unemployed (frozen benefits), students (huge funding boosts for elite private schools and higher HECS debts), and consumers (regulators defanged).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Australians had free, quality and timely health care. Howard measures such as the Medicare surcharge, freezing of benefits, and the private-insurance premium penalties for those who have not been insured from age 30 led to an unnecessary shift of money to the more inefficient private sector with virtually no control over rampant gap fees.
The Australian health system is looking more and more like the profit-obsessed American system under a process put in train in the Howard years.
Under Howard, federal education funding was skewed to elite private schools who did not need it for education. It was a gift to the already wealthy. It resulted in the starving of public schools who needed money for basic education. And Australia’s international education ranking plummeted.
Yes, gun control and the GST were worthwhile reforms, but were never followed up in subsequent years and are now not working well.
Overall, the Howard Government did not make the lives of the broad mass of Australians better. The policies were not even aimed at that. They were aimed at helping business supporters and well-off older voters.
Howard was the worst Prime Minister in Australia’s history. At least Billy McMahon had the ineptitude to do nothing, rather than using astute political artistry to dress up policies as favouring “battlers”, but in reality, making life easier for the wealthy by imposing on the broad mass of the Australian people the rotten fruits of a malignant ideology.
Wherever and whenever you go in Australia today, the individual stories tell the national story. Gap fees. Wait times. Inequality. Can’t get a house. Big student debt. Poorer public schools. Stagnant wages. Growing inequality. These things were not the case before March 1996. Since then, the nation’s total wealth has certainly gone up, but that is because of the much greater wealth of a few. Whereas because of the policies Howard set in train, the majority are relatively much poorer, more divided, more unequal, and more resentful.
The nation changed.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 24 February 2026.
Thank you Crispin for a terrific summary of Howard’s lasting legacy. I believe Jim Chalmers, if given his head by Albanese, would be more than willing to address these ongoing problems.
fabulous article Crispin. All of that needed to be said and needs to be repeated.
Well that’s a one eyed view. I can’t see any references to how Labor have addressed any of this when they had a chance. They are in government now of course and have the chance. Of course more immigration improves their electoral chances. Labor obviously disagree with you otherwise they would be following your claims. Howard wasn’t perfect of course but neither have any Prime Ministers before or after.
I have always been on the left – but John Howard was not the PM who did the most damage to Australia.
That would be Bob Hawke (with the help of his treasurer Paul Keating). “How so?”, you might splutter…
Within 3 days of coming into power in 1983, the neoliberal Hawke government floated the Australian dollar. THAT is the single most disastrous decision that an Australian government has made in my time on this planet. Almost all of our other economic problems started from there. It put us at the mercy of the international currency traders.
The end.
Thank you for cataloguing all the things John Howard did, or set in train, to the detriment of the majority of Australians. I have always believed he’s the worst Prime Minister Aust has had (though a couple of his successors followed ‘in his shoes’ in terms of their cruelty towards those less well off in Australia).
Sadly there are far too many ‘rusted on’ Liberal voters still alive & voting. The tide is turning against them, but alas, Mr Albanese lacks the courage or ‘vision’ of Mr Whitlam & Mr Keating & I fear he will waste this golden ‘window of opportunity ‘ to set Australia on a better, fairer course.
The Howard government’s shocking treatment of refugees as a cover for the big business agenda of unsustainably high levels of immigration is something that I, as a small ‘l’ liberal, have tried to tell my fellow small ‘l’ liberals; only to be branded ‘racist’. This is the 1st article I have EVER read that echoes precisely what I tried to tell people well over ten years ago, only for them to try and shut me down. Australia’s small ‘l’ liberals should hang their heads in shame for their insincere denigration of anyone who exposes Australia’s immigration program for the neoliberal rort that it is.
The irony being, that small ‘l’ liberal support of supercharged, mass immigration plays directly into the hands of their arch-enemy; namely big business, aka the right wing, aka the neoliberals.
Thank you for spelling out the Howard legacy that society is paying for. Such wasted largess from the mining boom spent on handouts to win votes. So why does the media pay such homage to the ” lying rodent ” as Brandis called him?
You have summarised and expressed clearly what I have tried to explain to my family and friends over many years.
Well, you’ve certainly made the case for Howard as Australia’s worst ever PM, particularly when you consider that he actually had policies (unlike the current LNP) and he had 11 years in office to establish himself as the architect of so many of the miseries of today. However, I think special mention still needs to go to the single terms of Abbott and Morrison as being the most incompetent and chaotic governments in Australian history. Although, perhaps Abbott and Morrison wouldn’t have made it to PM if Howard hadn’t kept purging moderates and steering the LNP ever rightwards. I wonder if Howard understands the role he played in the demise of today’s LNP?
Good summary but I don’t agree with it all.
For example, at the time Iwas horrified as were so many others to learn of the kerosene baths. However since then I have read that such baths had been a recognised treatment for some skin afflictions such as psoriosis. Similar treatments are still being used but I think with different additives to the bath water.
And on school funding , for a rational analysis, as opposed to the partisan stuff usually teotted out, it is necessary to separate the funding receivedn by schools into funds from parents and funding from the state. I reckon ALL Australian kids deserve the same standard level of state funding , adjusted for socio-economic, disability, etc issues, as everyone else regardlesss of whether they attend pulic or private schols.
I first started taking an interest in politics during the 1955 federal election campaign, listing to one of my school mates on the verandah outside our classroom holding forth about the pros of Labor and the cons of Liberal. (I reminded him of that at our class 50th reunion and he told me he was actually sprouting his father’s opinions.) My interest has continued, never glued on to one party, and even after Morrison I still say John Howard did more damage to the body politic of Australia than any other person in all that time. Thanks for writing many of the reasons.
Spot on Crispin. You did not however mention the disservice to eyebrow trimmers.
And the sham contracting: get an ABN and leave the job as an employee Friday, start in the same job Monday as a contractor probably through a “labour hire” company. At the end of the financial year quite often find you have a tax bill, superannuation and insurance premiums not paid. Of course you now have a 4-door ute as the family car, tax deductible as a business expense. Your employer can now undercut his competitors who are paying full employee entitlements. But you see John Howard’s father was self-employed just as Margaret Thatcher’s was.
The Liberals haven’t changed their focus on forgoing government revenue to give high income earners tax concessions and government services. E.G. vouchers for child-care nannies; tax concessions for property investors.
In regard to the CGT tax concession. On Insiders 15 February 2026 Senator Jane Hume’s response to David Speer’s question “Are you open to any changes on the tax breaks that are there for property investors” she responded “ We’re going to oppose an increase in the capital gains tax to residential houses. If you tax residential housing there will be less of it. No-one has come out and demonstrated that a wholesale change on CGT on residential housing will create more houses or provide more rental opportunities/houses for those who are yet to purchase their first home”. ABS 5601.0 Lending Indicators Table 13. Housing finance; Investors; New loan commitments; for 2025 calendar year discloses that new investor loans for construction and newly erected dwellings were 17.5% of investor loans and existing dwellings 82.5%. And for the period from July 2019 to December 2025 construction + newly erected dwellings 18.3% compared to existing dwellings 81.7%. In the FY 2019-20 construction + newly erected dwellings 21.2% existing dwellings 78.8%. How does incentivising, with tax concessions, investors to overbid what may have been an aspirational first home buyer to acquire an existing dwelling, create more existing dwellings or new dwellings? The message is loud and clear that investors prefer to make the highest bid for existing houses over aspirational first home buyers, rather than invest in new builds. Investors are incentivised to grab existing homes that make an operating loss from rent which is subsidised by negative gearing to deduct from their exertion marginal tax rate, mostly at the highest income tax rate. Then, after they have held it for as little as 366 days, they are eligible to sell it at a capital profit that is reduced by 50% before it is taxed at their marginal tax rate. Many of the investor construction loans could by builders who sell the completed home to an owner occupier newly erected home buyer, or an investor. So, there will be some double counting of investor construction and new builds.
The PBO reported on 21 January 2026 that government forgone revenue from the CGT discount went: 12.5% to the bottom 80% of taxable incomes; 18.4% to the bottom 90% of incomes; 81.6% to the top 10% of taxable incomes of which: the top 5% got 75%; the top 2% got 65.7%; the top 1% (>$362,900 pa (in 2022-23)) got 59.2%.
A very competent summary .
An excellent, insightful reflection of historical damage to the nation. And, of course, set in train divisions and the demise of the Liberal Party as it became more conservative.
Wow! Let us know what you really think. I agree with everything you wrote. I find it obscene the way the current crop of politicians will deny any suggestion that the mass importation of people might just have something to do with the housing crisis. What they leave out is more significant than what they say.
One omission from Howard’s legacy is the Liberal Party itself often described by Howard himself as a “broad church.” In Howard’s political times there were the Wets and the Dries. The interferences run by Howard and his acolytes like Abbott into preselections led to the dominance of the Dries and Religious Right. The Wets evolved into the Teals. Howard evolved into the Incredible Shrinking Man characterised during his small target 1996 election strategy. History disolays the inyernal party and external policy damage.