John Howard and the constitution.

 
   That what we have we prize not to the worth 
   Whiles we enjoy it, but being lack'd and lost, 
   Why, then we rack the value, then we find 
   The virtue that possession would not show us 
   Whiles it was ours. 

--Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing

TO ONE WHO HAD lived and worked in Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the United States and New Zealand before moving with my family to Australia in 2005, the then Prime Minister Howard and his government appeared as a breath of unexpected fresh air. Any native-born Canadian such as I will tell you that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to imagine a Canadian prime minister voicing public scepticism about the United Nations and its effectiveness. Likewise, one suspects the search would be in vain to find even a small handful of present or recent New Zealand residents who could pretend--with a straight face--that their prime minister could ever bluntly state that if would-be immigrants did not like the liberal, tolerant ways of their would-be new country, they need not (indeed should not) come.

Put more bluntly, Prime Minister Howard and his government were astoundingly free of the cant and humbug and genuflecting political correctness that serves to take important social policy issues out of the realm of acceptable public discussion in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada (not to, mention the preponderance of university campuses in the United States). And I refer here to such things as hard-nosed, cost-benefit discussions of limiting immigration (including by those who claim to be refugees), of issuing apologies to indigenous groups, of the legitimacy of unelected judges having last-word moral (not legal, but moral) input that changes the elected government's policies, and of how to respond to the threat posed by Muslim extremists.

In American terms John Howard struck me as a Rockefeller Republican, a seemingly dying breed back in its homeland. He was a free-trader. He aimed to (and did) pay off government debt. Although nowhere near being a libertarian or small-government purist, he certainly doubted that government often delivered value for money or could out-perform the private sector. His social conservatism was not overly proselytising, eschewing recourse to the law to ram through, say, new restrictions on abortion or homosexuality or sex outside marriage. In many matters he was simply pragmatic.

Yet despite, or because of, all that he was a remarkably successful prime minister. He left Australia better off--I would say much better off--than he found it, which is high praise indeed.

The remainder of this article will focus on the Howard legacy as regards Australia's Constitution. And here, former Prime Minister Howard was in all but one respect a true conservative or traditionalist or, to use the older term, Tory. I want to be clear that I mean that term to be taken in a Humean sense. Let me elaborate.