On top Down Under: the dazzling and purposeful career of Australia's John Howard.

Melbourne, Australia

OCTOBER'S cover of The Bulletin, Australia's version of Newsweek, said it all: a relaxed and confident Prime Minister John Howard sprawled above the caption "Mr. 57 Per Cent--Why On Earth Does This Man Still Bother?" Tucked under his left hand was the Bulletin cover of 17 years ago on which a younger and more anxious Howard was asked by the headline, "Mr. 18 Per Cent--Why On Earth Does This Man Bother?"

When the first cover appeared, Howard was just about to lose his leadership of the (conservative) Liberal party to a palace coup, largely because he was scoring, so miserably in the opinion polls. He spent most of the next decade in opposition under other party leaders, thinking through a reform program few thought he would ever implement. He finally became prime minister in 1996. He has won four general elections in all. Though he is widely expected to retire sometime next year, handing over power to the longtime crown prince, Treasurer (i.e., Finance Minister) Peter Costello, no one would be surprised if he were to try for a fifth election victory.

Howard dominates Australian politics more thoroughly than any Aussie prime minister since the famously sarcastic Robert Menzies. He is hated by the cultural-cum-media Left of Melbourne and Sydney, but popular with most Australians and completely trusted by the Liberal party faithful. He is the reason many blue-collar workers abandoned the Labor party and, like Reagan Democrats, chose conservative social values over short-term economic self-interest. As a leading Liberal strategist said to me last year: "English-speaking countries tend to have both a conservative party and a conservative movement. You lose elections when the party and movement split. John Howard is the leader of both the party and the movement." In other words, he maximizes the conservative vote in Australia. That "Mr. 57 Per Cent" refers to the percentage of Aussies who prefer Howard as prime minister to his Labor opponent, Kim Beazley.

This electoral achievement is all the more remarkable because it has been built on pursuing controversial policies and passing tough reforms. Indeed, Australia has been on an austere regime of economic reform under both parties since the mid- 1980s. It was badly needed, because "the Lucky Country" was then one of the most protected, cosseted, subsidized, and so distorted economies in the world. Unemployment in 1983 was at its highest point since the 1930s. Inflation and interest rates were high, the federal budget mired in deficit. In short order, tariff protectionism, financial controls, labor regulations, and tax policy were all dismantled and/or overhauled. Howard himself pushed through a major tax package, cutting the income tax and replacing lost revenue with an indirect goods-and-services tax. It was bitterly unpopular at the time. Howard almost lost power over it. But he persevered and the reform went through.

Taken together these reforms have produced an astonishing rebirth of the Australian economy, today in its 15th year of economic expansion. Though ranked only 53rd in terms of population, Australia is the world's 13th largest economy and its eighth in per capita living standards. (Two decades ago it was 18th in living standards.) Howard's former campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, writing recently in the London Sunday Telegraph, gave vent to a great cry of Aussie triumphalism:

"Australia's net debt position has fallen from 20 percent of GDP to 1.3 percent. And within a year, Australia will have no net government debt at all. Read that again: no debt. Down from $96 billion to zero in a decade. The tax system was reformed through the introduction of a goods and services tax--your VAT--with offsetting cuts in income and other taxes. This reduced taxes on exporters and job creators. The burden on the private sector fell, helping it to create more jobs--more than 1.5 million new jobs since 1996 alone. Not bad for a country of just 20 million people. Today, unemployment is at a 30-year low."

Yea, verily. But what doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and still lose the Ashes? (Cricket joke; U.S. subscribers, please ignore.)

Not that Howard is resting on his laurels. Since being reelected in 2004 he has privatized the telecommunications giant, Telstra, and his government is just about to present a second major reform to make employment contracts and the labor market more flexible. Like earlier reforms, this is unpopular. The Labor party and the unions are attacking it as contrary to Australia's long tradition of highly regulated union-employer relations. And there are signs of a Labor recovery in the polls.

Nor is that Howard's only little legislative difficulty. He is bringing in new antiterrorist laws that, like the Patriot Act in America and Tony Blair's proposed measures in Britain, are under attack as abolishing civil liberties, ancient and modern. Howard is safe in parliamentary terms since the official Labor opposition supports the legislation in principle (partly because it is popular) and since the (Labor) premiers of most states have had a hand in shaping it. But the legal and media Left are out for his blood, depicting the laws as totalitarian and outside the tradition of Anglo-American constitutionalism.

That was an argument advanced at a recent Melbourne "Conversazione" on judicial activism, where supporters of greater judicial authority argued that Australia should follow Britain's recent example and bring in a Bill of Rights that would give judges an effective veto over legislation they dislike. British commentator Melanie Phillips was on hand to argue, very forcefully, that, in Britain, this greater judicial power was being used to gut and weaken anti-terrorist actions that the people wanted.

But that may be the point: Australia's cultural Left now looks favorably on antidemocratic constitutional mechanisms. You can see why. It has been out of power for over a decade, dislikes the general direction of government policy, is especially hostile to the Iraq War, and would like to shift Australia on a new foreign-policy course that it senses most Aussies don't want. This is no problem for Howard. Whenever the cultural Left attacks him on any issue, the voters say: "Hey, we agree with Little John on this." It is, however, a problem for Labor. Its last leader, Mark Latham, was himself a cultural leftist who confided to his now published diaries that he thought the U.S. alliance (which he publicly endorsed) was the last vestige of the White Australia policy. Latham was the polar opposite of Howard--he was the leader of both the Left party and the Left movement. Not surprisingly, he led his party to a massive defeat. His successor, Kim Beazley, is both more pragmatic and more shrewd--he has criticized the anti-terrorist laws as too lenient! And last week he made a speech to a religious group affirming his personal Christian faith, the importance of belief in politics, and, specifically, his and Labor's opposition to gay marriage.

Like Thatcher in the U.K., Howard may find that his last great reform is his reform of the opposition Labor party, as it realistically accepts the other changes in Australian life that he has wrought. As in the U.K., however, that reform would make Labor more electable. Which will be a problem for someone--Howard himself or, if Howard retires, his patient and perhaps less lucky successor, Peter Costello.