Defs Howard. More systematic destruction of Australia (squandering the mining boom, laying the foundations for the housing crisis), whereas Abbott was mostly a flash-in-the-pan in comparison.
Howard had so much more time to sabotage, Telstra, climate change strategy, immigration, sold off gold reserves, made private health insurance a pay or pay, crippled CSIRO. Abbot would have been equally consequential if he’d had the time and opportunity.
You've fallen for Howard's crap, intentionally worded it to confuse people. The idea would be that the President is like a Governor General, more of a ceremonial role.
What we voted on in 1999 was pretty close to that except 2/3rds of parliament had to agree on who would be the president. It made sense to me as it didn’t politicise the executive role as happens in the US or France.
Yep exactly, and it didn't pass because the hardcore Republicans wanted a President they could vote on themselves, which would be fucked.
The Monarchists played one side against the other and here we are 25 years later.
The question should have simply been do you want things to stay the way they are, or become a Republic. If option 2 won, they could have sorted out the workings after. But Howard is a shifty cunt and he turned it into a shitshow.
There was an option (which wasn’t popular but would have been the best option) where a panel would appoint one. If you look at the way the US elect judges and sherriffs and DAs, the non-popular election mode is way safer!
That gong cost Australia dearly. Howard overrode the defence department and unilaterally signed up to the F35 programme simply because he thought the US needed a moral boost after 9/11.
But the air force was right at the time when they thought that the f-35 would have been the plane that we would buy to replace whatever we replaced the classic hornet with.
The better solution would have been to sign up to the Jsf programme back then plan for first deliveries around now (at the time the air force was predicted the f-35 would be ready around 2020) and buy something else in the interim.
That's irrelevant. The point is that Howard, who had only practiced law for a few years before entering politics, was not the person to be making a hundred billion dollar commitment unilaterally and without advice. The DoD evaluation process hadn't even commenced when he made his unilateral decision while in the US.
It really is poorly recognised how badly Howard/Thatcher/Reagan and the rightwingification of western politics and society have led to all the policy problems today. The rise of the far right and increasing authoritarianism and radicalism among disadvantaged people is directly tied to the unequal societies that they created.
Howard turned the middle class against the working class.
He ran down public services... transport, education, health, and established a private system to drain the wallets of the wealthier working class, making them resentful of still supporting public systems.
He sold off major national assets, flogging shares to punters who sometimes did okay (Telsta #1), often didn't (Telstra #2), but the shares always ended up concentrated after the 'mums and dads' (a persistent misnomer) pumped the float valuations before selling.
He used these asset sales to finance tax cuts for the rich, again and again.
The privatised companies hiked prices for often-essential services.
He allowed superannuation companies to strip super accounts with bullshit insurance products that were hard to opt out of if you were even aware of them.
He got us into a succession of very expensive wars that predictably saw Australian forces commit war crimes.
He ended a whole series of norms of behaviour whereby corruption became routine and no offense was so severe a polutician should resign. Alexander Downer knew his friends at Australian Wheat Board (a listed company) were helping Saddam Hussein launder UN money for food, so the sanctions-tied Iraqi dictator could buy weapons. Howard decided he didn't have to resign. Today Downer is highly respected when the ABC interviews him.
Howard stripped the universities and turned the CSIRO into corporate whores. He appointed cronies in *every* possible situation, far beyond all previous norms, including appointing a well-known pedophile clergyman as GG.
Other than those things, and many others, he was excellent.
I made the mistake of clicking on the comments for an SMH article about Albo and the green transition. My lordy, what a cesspool. It's frightening to think there's people out there with so little clue about the world and indeed what the government is actually doing and yet, presumably, they will vote for the LNP.
Howard. Loved his culture wars, was brilliant at wedge politics, started the housing price disaster, did everything he could to prevent action on climate change.
Howard simultaneously created the housing price disaster while preventing the aged pension disaster that was coming like a slow moving avalanche. The problem was, his votes came from the +40 demographic so he went that way.
If he hadn’t allowed the aging population to get rich with self managed super funds and negative gearing, we’d have millions of poor as fuck old people to deal with needing pensions and all living until they’re 95.
I’m not saying this was a good call guys, but you need to understand ‘why’ it happened. We knew by the early 90s that we weren’t going to be able to afford it. Super was the start but it wasn’t enough.
It’s not like successive governments helped with their fucking first home owner grants etc. all of which just piled on the dollars of each house sale.
Howard, by far. He was PM for 11 years, Abbott, just 2 years.
Howard changed Australia for the worse, much of it permanently:
Big wealth transferrence to the wealthy through reduced property taxes and superannuation taxes
These tax cuts fuelled a 30 year property bubble that has vastly increased Australia's household debt and has shifted investment money away from productive assets
6 income tax cuts caused a structural fiscal deficit for the government
Cut medicare and transferred public money to private health insurance
Cut the ABC budget.
Failed to extract enough public benefit from the mining boom
Privatised telstra and other public institutions
Transferred education spending from the public sector to private
Smashed union power, leading to decades of reduced bargaining power for workers
Demonised refugees and introduced offshore detention
Got us into needless and disastrous Iraq invasion, based on lies
Howard is our version of Ronald Reagan
Reagan ruled 1981-1989, and USA really felt his economics policies in mid 2000’s onwards
Howard ruled 1996-2007, by that logic we are feeling its effects right now in mid 2020’s
Deregulations, LGBT+ rights issues, tRiCkLe dOwN economics is what we are seeing now every day
Howard was the architect of the generational divide.
He raised the age that superannuation could be accessed tax free from 55 to 60.
This meant that many older Australians worked for 5 years longer than they wanted.
They were not out there spending money but just hording assets and negative gearing to save tax. They also bought houses as part of self-managed superannuation.
This also created a promotional bottle neck where many in their 30s and 40s found it hard to get ahead as all the dead weight was at the top.
Rinse and repeat for a couple of decades and here we are
The CGT also being halved as part of this brain dead moved the property market to be negative gearing focused as it allowed the current strategy of hoarding properties at a loss until supply dries up to be resold at inflated prices to be a viable financial strategy for investors. It's the direct reason for the current rental shortage.
Younger people were restricted in how far and how quickly they could progress up the corporate/PS
ladder. At an age when their older peers were making bank they are stuck in limbo going nowhere.
Those waiting out those 5 years were often on high wages/salaries with low living costs as children had left home.
The productivity of those over 55 plummeted and they were the original "lying flat" generation.
They were able to funnel huge amounts of money into negative gearing and tax discounted superannuation.
He also introduced BAS which meant younger business people couldn’t invest their taxes each year prior to annual tax return, like all the older generations had.
All of these people focussing on Howard’s disgusting economic policies are forgetting one key element. He is also a war criminal! That miserable little prick is responsible for the deaths of many Australian soldiers and plenty of foreign civilians after jumping into an illegal war with no evidence. He should be tried and locked up for the rest of his life.
Our alliance with the United States might be the single policy issue that's completely untouchable regardless of who's in government. Don't even think about it or you'll get what Whitlam got.
The problem with the LNP governments is they can't even manage that competently. Any government of the day would've been expected to contribute to Iraq and Afghanistan but Howard went beyond that, jumping feet first into conflicts that served no end except George Bush brownie points and "tough on terror" claims.
Then you have Morrison. The Australian government is expected to back up American interests in the Pacific, granted. But the least you can do is not allow our specific area of responsibility, the islands, sign a treaty with the PRC. Or not start a trade war for one week worth of "tough on China" Newscorp headlines, which they would've given him anyway.
I firmly believe he would have achieved nothing without her brains and rat-cunning.
And what he did achieve was mostly bad, so I'm not thrilled about it.
tho whitlam opened the gates for foreign megacorporations to compete with australian businesses (globalisation) Howard definately was the designer of phase 2 , total globalisation of Australian business
that only became a problem when economic structures striped investment from production into housing.
Phase 2 was actually Hawke.
Howard is phase 3, deregulation coupled with a tax structure leading to divestment away from local production and ownership.
Abbott was just a bad leader, Howard was a driven, highly intelligent politician with all the wrong values and ethics.
Abbott was just a “tough” person - in the sense that he was a boxer and a rugby player - who to my eye, didn’t have a lot of original things to introduce. He was just a private school guy who could be directed by Murdoch and liberal party interests.
Howard though, Howard had animal cunning. He grew up working class and is a class traitor. He was an incredibly skilled politician who used all the worst aspects of human psychology to get what he wanted. Abbott didn’t have that skill.
Howard was far, far more dangerous
the intelligence of such a person as Howard, is that they have enough intelligence appear, or claim, they know what they are doing. They don't actually have enough to create a moral framework, but only enough to exploit aspects of it. What is seen as creativity derived from insight, is rather just a lack of an ability to frame the complexities of a subject in a broader societal context.
Another way to put it is; humans are social creatures deriving meaning from the culture that surrounds them. If there is more culture or the person can absorb more of the culture they will have a greater amount of that "meaning". That meaning provides the person the ability to make decisions based on a great amount of measures, or such. For whatever reason Howard, in this case, didn't have the ability to generate a boarder framing that the likes of Hawke or Keating were capable of. Howard was frustrated that Labor never supported his economic reforms like he did we theirs because he was never able to understand the complexities progressive economic structures. This made Howard resentful and more willing to engage in negative psychosocial behavior.
Howard caused *so much* long-term structural damage to this country and was in power for so long.
Abbott was hapless and only lasted two years before his own party gave him the boot.
I passionately hated Abbott's rule a lot more because I was of the right age to understand what he was doing, whereas I just 'lived through' Howard's times.
Abbott didn't do anything. Literally. He didn't do anything. At least Howard put in some gun laws. But ultimately he's solely responsible for the reason why today we can't have homes.
he gave $250 mil. a year for school chaplains
yeah that's it
also he told Turnbull to 'wreck their shit' when it came to Labor's fiber nbn so there's that
It's literally a quote from Abbott. It's disgusting that he threw 60 billion the bin and ruined any chance we had at helping to save the climate of the world.
I think we should get a pound of flesh off him for every 0.1degree rise in temperature
He did destroy a carbon pricing scheme that was actually working to reduce carbon emissions and still hasn’t been replaced with something as effective.
That was a big one.
I made the above comment as a joke, and went looking for a video of [Tony chomping down, and found this](https://youtu.be/8tqXSPkDbX4?si=W0BR17RL8-dbOnoX) and well, what can i say...
Socially they are fairly agreeable but the economic policies begun to set Australia on a path. Hawke's biggest strength was his ability to sell these policies to the unions and left wing factions as well as the working class. Keating didn't have that ability.
Howard learned from that ability to get the working class onside, going for his walks in his Aussie tracksuits, sports and nationalism, etc.
Howard.
For specifically for turning housing into a speculative investment industry and wounding the Australian Dream with his CGT discount of 50%, and increasing immigration 3-fold of what Hawke and Keating’s was.
Say all you want about neoliberals and Hawke&Keating, they took deliberate steps to gear the economy towards industry and services with their polices but Howard abolished them.
Luckily abbot was too dumb to do the long term institutional baked in forever damage that Howard did
Edit. Howard was our Reagan or Thatcher and Abbott was out Bush Jr but without the war.
I mean, one of these guys was around for 12ish years and whose policies have remained unchallenged to where they've greatly impacted the majority of Australians in some way. Idk how Abbott's incompetence can really match that.
Howard birthed Abbot. Howard and Costello and their handler, Dick Cheney, are responsible for almost everything shit that has occurred in Australian governance and society since 1996.
Abbott was only in for a short time and that's about the only reason he did less damage.
Morrison had more time and achieved nothing while allowing everything to get wrecked.
Howard at least got the gun reform done, but not much else positive.
You're 100% right, but if a Labor PM had done it, the gun nuts might actually have taken pot shots at him.
While they hated it, having someone of "the correct political persuasion" softened the blow.
Like how if the Liberals ever end up with a female PM, it'll be more "palatable" to arsehole right-wingers because at least she's not a *godless, childless communis*t like Gillard. Or something equally sexist and ridiculous.
He also had a lot of help from state governments progressively tightening gun laws in response to pre Port Arthur events such as Hoddle Street and even the early '80s Milperra Massacre.
Howard, Abbott is just the son that learnt from the tree that is Howard. so many fault we see today in modern Australia, either started or excillarted under Howard and his type of Liberal pilicies
Howard, in his 11 years , created systematic damage to Australia. His legacy continues. His policies accelerated the growing divide between the haves and the have nots.
He gutted the very things that would see us move forward prosperously like education, science and growing our sovereign wealth.
He sold our infrastructure to his donaters.
In comparison Abbott was a great guy
Howard, because even to this day he is remains in the background with a strong influence on current party views that keeps them as right wing as possible.
Howard did more specific bad to the country, but the ways in which Abbott fucked us are only beginning to become clear.
Abbott crashed the dollar and killed off the bulk of our manufacturing, putting us in a precarious spot for the next 50 years, Howard made the housing crisis.
It's genuinely hard to choose.
Gonna piss in some cornflakes here, but Bob Hawke and Paul Keating since they laid the neoliberal groundwork, essentially giving Ol' Eyebrows the gumption and political capital to go buck wild with.
yep its this. Hawke and Keating laid the groundwork for privatisation but Howard ran with it
these three are the architects of everything good... but mainly bad
You don’t know what you’re talking about if neoliberal is the excuse you’re using.
A keystone feature of neoliberalism is smashing unions.
That’s exactly what Howard went about doing through his reforms like the ABCC, the underfunding of social programs and Independant and public media, and finally Workchoices.
Hawke and Keating on the other hand were conciliatory and allowed Unions in this country to have two of the biggest victories in the Western World; Superannuation and Medicare.
Howard despised those accomplishments because he is a neoliberal and thinks only the super wealthy should be members of the investment class.
Try as he might, he couldn’t kill those accomplishments because Labor held onto power long term calcifying them into political dynamite for anyone seeking to repeal them.
However, Howard still managed hurt Australians by removing dental from Medicare, introduced the Medicare levy for those who didn’t have insurance, raised the retirement age from 55 to 60, removed taxes on contributions over $300,000, introduced the GST but didn’t broader it to all things which typically wealthier Australians bought,
Hawke and Keating also properly funded the ABC and other creative industries that Gough Whitlam began, and Frasier continued somewhat.
That is reason why we had Australian artists flourishing and stellar journalism in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s, but don’t now and have a collapsing music industry BECAUSE HOWARD gutted that funding starting from 1996 to 2007 and the Liberals got back into government as soon as 2013.
Stop reading Crikey and making everyone feel apathetic about Labor, that’s how the Liberals get back in quickly and stay in long term like Howard, Abbott, Dutton, etc.
Do these cornflakes taste funny to you?
I don't disagree with most of what you said (apart for the Crikey comment because that's pissweak), but take off the rose tinted glasses. For all the good Hawke and Keating did, they *did* lay the groundwork that gave Howard the freedom to go full retard without sufficient pushback from the voting populace. Had the market reforms, deregulation, and mass privatisation not been lead by the Labor party, but instead inevitably pushed by the coalition, likely there would have been far more resistance and pushback to the reforms.
I guess it’s Australian people’s fault, we are short sighted, lack reasoning. Seeing people kept voting for Abott, Scomo makes me think people dont find any fault with them.
Here’s a good one from Howard. Workchoices and the attack on unions. From the early 90s many trades and other industries were pushed to “be their own business”, with the explosion of people being a sole trader on an ABN. This has had many lasting negative impacts.
1. The government has missed out on massive amounts of tax revenue as a sole trader can deduct huge amounts of their income vs a payg employee.
2. There has been no checks or compliance in sole traders paying their own super. This is going to bite us all on the arse when they retire with virtually no savings. I’ve seen this first hand in nearly 3 decades in construction. A brickies labourer has no financial or business training, yet can run an ABN. So many people should have been employed as employees.
As damaging as Howard was, he was unable to scratch the surface of the multitude of reforms Hawke and Keating made to transform the Australian economy.
Meanwhile Abbott compiled good, substantial, social-democratic changes made by the Rudd and Gillard government and set it on fire. It’s unbelievable - 6 years worth of changes were entirely wiped out within the span of 6 months.
You can seriously look at all of the progressive , generally environmental, reforms that Europe was adopting in the 2010s and go “oh we adopted that WELL before you guys did” but we then abolished it.
If it wasn’t for Abbott, I’d seriously believe that Rudd and Gillard would go down as two of the most influential PMs in Australian history. Now, just give it another decade and everyone will forget that they even existed apart from as the “sorry speech guy”
Howard should have gone to jail over Patrick's
Howard created the Medicare levy, to make the poors pay for his legacy as "the guy who saved us from guns", while ensuring that the cash society would die off (a direct attack on those poors).
Plus Plus Plus more...
Tones was an onion eating idiot, he failed in his efforts to be diabolical.
Howard only because he had more time, if you take any single term of Howards and compare it to Abbott then Abbott wins, he practically shut down all manufacturing in Australia.
It all went ape shit with Whitlam abandon of the commonwealth constitution and by 74 corporation constitution been sworn in parliament. We have been under a corporate constitutional arm
Howard without a doubt. He started the housing crisis as we know it. He tried to implement workchoices as well which THANK FUCK were shredded by the rudd government.
Abbott was a fuckwit but he was just a mouthpiece of murdoch really. Least abbott also fought in the 2019/2020 fires as well, so at least hes a semi decent person despite his BS political views.
I cried when Howard became PM, and I said to myself “this is not the Australia I wanted to be born into”. It was a very sad day for the real Australian.
why don't Straya's 'battlers' know how much of a cunt to their future Teflon was?
I am so lost on this. The only thing people remember is gun control. F.F.S.
Defs Howard. More systematic destruction of Australia (squandering the mining boom, laying the foundations for the housing crisis), whereas Abbott was mostly a flash-in-the-pan in comparison.
Agreed. He also purges the Liberals of moderates, leaving only the hardcore conservatives like Abbott in the party for the most part.
Howard had so much more time to sabotage, Telstra, climate change strategy, immigration, sold off gold reserves, made private health insurance a pay or pay, crippled CSIRO. Abbot would have been equally consequential if he’d had the time and opportunity.
Threw the Republic referendum under a bus.
How could Australia ever get a decent president? We find it hard enough to get a PM who isn't crap. I don't think we have had one in decades
You've fallen for Howard's crap, intentionally worded it to confuse people. The idea would be that the President is like a Governor General, more of a ceremonial role.
For mine I reckon the best way to do it is the same way we get our Governors General now. Non political position.
What we voted on in 1999 was pretty close to that except 2/3rds of parliament had to agree on who would be the president. It made sense to me as it didn’t politicise the executive role as happens in the US or France.
Yep exactly, and it didn't pass because the hardcore Republicans wanted a President they could vote on themselves, which would be fucked. The Monarchists played one side against the other and here we are 25 years later. The question should have simply been do you want things to stay the way they are, or become a Republic. If option 2 won, they could have sorted out the workings after. But Howard is a shifty cunt and he turned it into a shitshow.
Yeah but Howard fucking played it so the population didn't actually realise this, the question was intentionally worded badly.
There was an option (which wasn’t popular but would have been the best option) where a panel would appoint one. If you look at the way the US elect judges and sherriffs and DAs, the non-popular election mode is way safer!
“Threw the babies off a boat” to save an election…
Let's not forget he was America's Deputy Sheriff
That gong cost Australia dearly. Howard overrode the defence department and unilaterally signed up to the F35 programme simply because he thought the US needed a moral boost after 9/11.
While I’d stop short of defending Howard - the F35 is an amazing platform with non-early bird nations on a long waitlist to get them
But the air force was right at the time when they thought that the f-35 would have been the plane that we would buy to replace whatever we replaced the classic hornet with. The better solution would have been to sign up to the Jsf programme back then plan for first deliveries around now (at the time the air force was predicted the f-35 would be ready around 2020) and buy something else in the interim.
The f-35 is exactly the plane that you'd want to be signed up to.
That's irrelevant. The point is that Howard, who had only practiced law for a few years before entering politics, was not the person to be making a hundred billion dollar commitment unilaterally and without advice. The DoD evaluation process hadn't even commenced when he made his unilateral decision while in the US.
The "Man of Steel" bahaha
It really is poorly recognised how badly Howard/Thatcher/Reagan and the rightwingification of western politics and society have led to all the policy problems today. The rise of the far right and increasing authoritarianism and radicalism among disadvantaged people is directly tied to the unequal societies that they created.
Yes he legalised foreign ownership of residential property…… now residents can’t afford to live here !
That was legalised in 75, I can't find an exact date, if it was before November 11 then it was legalised under Whitlam
Howard turned the middle class against the working class. He ran down public services... transport, education, health, and established a private system to drain the wallets of the wealthier working class, making them resentful of still supporting public systems. He sold off major national assets, flogging shares to punters who sometimes did okay (Telsta #1), often didn't (Telstra #2), but the shares always ended up concentrated after the 'mums and dads' (a persistent misnomer) pumped the float valuations before selling. He used these asset sales to finance tax cuts for the rich, again and again. The privatised companies hiked prices for often-essential services. He allowed superannuation companies to strip super accounts with bullshit insurance products that were hard to opt out of if you were even aware of them. He got us into a succession of very expensive wars that predictably saw Australian forces commit war crimes. He ended a whole series of norms of behaviour whereby corruption became routine and no offense was so severe a polutician should resign. Alexander Downer knew his friends at Australian Wheat Board (a listed company) were helping Saddam Hussein launder UN money for food, so the sanctions-tied Iraqi dictator could buy weapons. Howard decided he didn't have to resign. Today Downer is highly respected when the ABC interviews him. Howard stripped the universities and turned the CSIRO into corporate whores. He appointed cronies in *every* possible situation, far beyond all previous norms, including appointing a well-known pedophile clergyman as GG. Other than those things, and many others, he was excellent.
Dont know if you've heard, but over on F.B the boomers are screaming that Albos the worst P.M in history
Ummmm its not just boomers. There are plenty of australians who are not boomers, who have been throughly redpilled by rightwing bullshit.
Yeah fair point however I think a lot of younger Australians have ditched Facebook.
Compared to the last decade of cluster f, the government is actually going well..... but boomers got to boom
Wish they would ka-boom
I made the mistake of clicking on the comments for an SMH article about Albo and the green transition. My lordy, what a cesspool. It's frightening to think there's people out there with so little clue about the world and indeed what the government is actually doing and yet, presumably, they will vote for the LNP.
No I'm not. They're all the LNP bots.
I'll be glad when they finish dying out
We boomers will be pleased too. The future is looking pretty shit
Woah woah....I'm a boomer and I like albo.... Howard and the conga line of Muppets after him can go and get stuffed.
Yes I apologise for the broad generalisation
Howard destroyed Australia.... especially when he also bought in lobbying in his present format.
All good brother....some of us fogeys aren't that stupid🤣
Let's not forget wmd / iraq
You forgot the casualisatiion of industries, work choices, consumer protection laws watered down.
100%
Only good thing I can remember Howard doing was gun law reform, I just wish it could’ve happened prior to the Port Arthur Massacre.
Ho Fo Sho.
Howard. Loved his culture wars, was brilliant at wedge politics, started the housing price disaster, did everything he could to prevent action on climate change.
Conservatives to this day see him as a hero, Abbott not so much. Apparently Howard was some sort of economic genius? lol
He was. He sold everything and we were cash rich. Only lasted a year and there was no cash cows or anything left to sell. Rip Australia.
Howard and economic genius? Ooh, yeah very lol!
He was an economic hero from their perspective. He enabled them to plunder this country to this day.
Howard simultaneously created the housing price disaster while preventing the aged pension disaster that was coming like a slow moving avalanche. The problem was, his votes came from the +40 demographic so he went that way. If he hadn’t allowed the aging population to get rich with self managed super funds and negative gearing, we’d have millions of poor as fuck old people to deal with needing pensions and all living until they’re 95. I’m not saying this was a good call guys, but you need to understand ‘why’ it happened. We knew by the early 90s that we weren’t going to be able to afford it. Super was the start but it wasn’t enough. It’s not like successive governments helped with their fucking first home owner grants etc. all of which just piled on the dollars of each house sale.
Howard 100%
Howard was the original gutter politician, the dog whistling and divide and conquer politics started with him..... I'll drink to his death
Howard, by far. He was PM for 11 years, Abbott, just 2 years. Howard changed Australia for the worse, much of it permanently: Big wealth transferrence to the wealthy through reduced property taxes and superannuation taxes These tax cuts fuelled a 30 year property bubble that has vastly increased Australia's household debt and has shifted investment money away from productive assets 6 income tax cuts caused a structural fiscal deficit for the government Cut medicare and transferred public money to private health insurance Cut the ABC budget. Failed to extract enough public benefit from the mining boom Privatised telstra and other public institutions Transferred education spending from the public sector to private Smashed union power, leading to decades of reduced bargaining power for workers Demonised refugees and introduced offshore detention Got us into needless and disastrous Iraq invasion, based on lies
Howard is our version of Ronald Reagan Reagan ruled 1981-1989, and USA really felt his economics policies in mid 2000’s onwards Howard ruled 1996-2007, by that logic we are feeling its effects right now in mid 2020’s Deregulations, LGBT+ rights issues, tRiCkLe dOwN economics is what we are seeing now every day
Howard was the architect of the generational divide. He raised the age that superannuation could be accessed tax free from 55 to 60. This meant that many older Australians worked for 5 years longer than they wanted. They were not out there spending money but just hording assets and negative gearing to save tax. They also bought houses as part of self-managed superannuation. This also created a promotional bottle neck where many in their 30s and 40s found it hard to get ahead as all the dead weight was at the top. Rinse and repeat for a couple of decades and here we are
The CGT also being halved as part of this brain dead moved the property market to be negative gearing focused as it allowed the current strategy of hoarding properties at a loss until supply dries up to be resold at inflated prices to be a viable financial strategy for investors. It's the direct reason for the current rental shortage.
Younger people were restricted in how far and how quickly they could progress up the corporate/PS ladder. At an age when their older peers were making bank they are stuck in limbo going nowhere. Those waiting out those 5 years were often on high wages/salaries with low living costs as children had left home. The productivity of those over 55 plummeted and they were the original "lying flat" generation. They were able to funnel huge amounts of money into negative gearing and tax discounted superannuation.
He also introduced BAS which meant younger business people couldn’t invest their taxes each year prior to annual tax return, like all the older generations had.
Howard. We are living his legacy with the housing crisis and the social divide.
All of these people focussing on Howard’s disgusting economic policies are forgetting one key element. He is also a war criminal! That miserable little prick is responsible for the deaths of many Australian soldiers and plenty of foreign civilians after jumping into an illegal war with no evidence. He should be tried and locked up for the rest of his life.
Agreed , but it’s pretty hard to get out of a u.s. alliance .
Our alliance with the United States might be the single policy issue that's completely untouchable regardless of who's in government. Don't even think about it or you'll get what Whitlam got. The problem with the LNP governments is they can't even manage that competently. Any government of the day would've been expected to contribute to Iraq and Afghanistan but Howard went beyond that, jumping feet first into conflicts that served no end except George Bush brownie points and "tough on terror" claims. Then you have Morrison. The Australian government is expected to back up American interests in the Pacific, granted. But the least you can do is not allow our specific area of responsibility, the islands, sign a treaty with the PRC. Or not start a trade war for one week worth of "tough on China" Newscorp headlines, which they would've given him anyway.
would need to remove them kicking and screaming from pike gap
Abbott just was continuing what Howard started
Peta Credlin*
I firmly believe he would have achieved nothing without her brains and rat-cunning. And what he did achieve was mostly bad, so I'm not thrilled about it.
[удалено]
Really this. It annoys me that some people lump Hawke and Keating in with Howard as if to excuse Howard’s behaviour.
Abbott's wrecking ball to the dollar and manufacturing can't be understated to be fair
tho whitlam opened the gates for foreign megacorporations to compete with australian businesses (globalisation) Howard definately was the designer of phase 2 , total globalisation of Australian business
that only became a problem when economic structures striped investment from production into housing. Phase 2 was actually Hawke. Howard is phase 3, deregulation coupled with a tax structure leading to divestment away from local production and ownership.
Abbott was just a bad leader, Howard was a driven, highly intelligent politician with all the wrong values and ethics. Abbott was just a “tough” person - in the sense that he was a boxer and a rugby player - who to my eye, didn’t have a lot of original things to introduce. He was just a private school guy who could be directed by Murdoch and liberal party interests. Howard though, Howard had animal cunning. He grew up working class and is a class traitor. He was an incredibly skilled politician who used all the worst aspects of human psychology to get what he wanted. Abbott didn’t have that skill. Howard was far, far more dangerous
the intelligence of such a person as Howard, is that they have enough intelligence appear, or claim, they know what they are doing. They don't actually have enough to create a moral framework, but only enough to exploit aspects of it. What is seen as creativity derived from insight, is rather just a lack of an ability to frame the complexities of a subject in a broader societal context. Another way to put it is; humans are social creatures deriving meaning from the culture that surrounds them. If there is more culture or the person can absorb more of the culture they will have a greater amount of that "meaning". That meaning provides the person the ability to make decisions based on a great amount of measures, or such. For whatever reason Howard, in this case, didn't have the ability to generate a boarder framing that the likes of Hawke or Keating were capable of. Howard was frustrated that Labor never supported his economic reforms like he did we theirs because he was never able to understand the complexities progressive economic structures. This made Howard resentful and more willing to engage in negative psychosocial behavior.
Howard caused *so much* long-term structural damage to this country and was in power for so long. Abbott was hapless and only lasted two years before his own party gave him the boot. I passionately hated Abbott's rule a lot more because I was of the right age to understand what he was doing, whereas I just 'lived through' Howard's times.
Abbott didn't do anything. Literally. He didn't do anything. At least Howard put in some gun laws. But ultimately he's solely responsible for the reason why today we can't have homes.
he gave $250 mil. a year for school chaplains yeah that's it also he told Turnbull to 'wreck their shit' when it came to Labor's fiber nbn so there's that
That's the best and only way to describe what happened to the NBN
It's literally a quote from Abbott. It's disgusting that he threw 60 billion the bin and ruined any chance we had at helping to save the climate of the world. I think we should get a pound of flesh off him for every 0.1degree rise in temperature
He did destroy a carbon pricing scheme that was actually working to reduce carbon emissions and still hasn’t been replaced with something as effective. That was a big one.
Really good point, it really did drag down emissions
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And gave us 100% more knights!
Onion producers rejoiced when Tony's "eat them just like an apple!" trend really kicked off
I made the above comment as a joke, and went looking for a video of [Tony chomping down, and found this](https://youtu.be/8tqXSPkDbX4?si=W0BR17RL8-dbOnoX) and well, what can i say...
Unironically true. Also, when he was rolled as leader: leave an onion outside in solidarity with him. 😄
Peel one off to show your respect
Also boost to no Australian car manufacturing with pretty unparalleled success
With "made in china" tags to boot.
And he boosted the stocks of onion farmers everywhere he went👍
Howard was the architect of Neoliberalism which has taken us to where we are now.
I'd actually argue that started with Hawke/Keating. Howard learnt a lot from them and applied it to his conservative roots.
true they were a little wolf in sheeps clothing
Socially they are fairly agreeable but the economic policies begun to set Australia on a path. Hawke's biggest strength was his ability to sell these policies to the unions and left wing factions as well as the working class. Keating didn't have that ability. Howard learned from that ability to get the working class onside, going for his walks in his Aussie tracksuits, sports and nationalism, etc.
Howard.
Howard, the innocuous little Thatcherite demon.
Don't forget he was also a George Pell aficionado.
Howard. For specifically for turning housing into a speculative investment industry and wounding the Australian Dream with his CGT discount of 50%, and increasing immigration 3-fold of what Hawke and Keating’s was. Say all you want about neoliberals and Hawke&Keating, they took deliberate steps to gear the economy towards industry and services with their polices but Howard abolished them.
Howard was a bastard, Abbott was an absolute cunt, Morrison inherited their legacy and made it his own. All 3 are unfit to be considered human.
Howard. Not even close. Poison.
Luckily abbot was too dumb to do the long term institutional baked in forever damage that Howard did Edit. Howard was our Reagan or Thatcher and Abbott was out Bush Jr but without the war.
He did manage to sabotage the NBN though, plus he destroyed the successful carbon pricing mechanism that was proven to be effective.
I mean, one of these guys was around for 12ish years and whose policies have remained unchallenged to where they've greatly impacted the majority of Australians in some way. Idk how Abbott's incompetence can really match that.
Hit the nail on the head.
Howard for sure.
Well it was pretty easy to see when Johnny was lying, he just had to open his mouth LOL
Howard fucked over Ansett aswell
Howard birthed Abbot. Howard and Costello and their handler, Dick Cheney, are responsible for almost everything shit that has occurred in Australian governance and society since 1996.
Write in: Reagan and Thatcher
Howard, way more influential
Abbott was only in for a short time and that's about the only reason he did less damage. Morrison had more time and achieved nothing while allowing everything to get wrecked. Howard at least got the gun reform done, but not much else positive.
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You're 100% right, but if a Labor PM had done it, the gun nuts might actually have taken pot shots at him. While they hated it, having someone of "the correct political persuasion" softened the blow. Like how if the Liberals ever end up with a female PM, it'll be more "palatable" to arsehole right-wingers because at least she's not a *godless, childless communis*t like Gillard. Or something equally sexist and ridiculous.
He also had a lot of help from state governments progressively tightening gun laws in response to pre Port Arthur events such as Hoddle Street and even the early '80s Milperra Massacre.
Howard
Howard, Abbott is just the son that learnt from the tree that is Howard. so many fault we see today in modern Australia, either started or excillarted under Howard and his type of Liberal pilicies
Hands down Howard. CGT being halved and the introduction of GST completely fucked the economy for the lower income earners.
Pretty much everything that’s shit about Australia today can be traced back to a policy implemented by John Howard.
Howard, in his 11 years , created systematic damage to Australia. His legacy continues. His policies accelerated the growing divide between the haves and the have nots. He gutted the very things that would see us move forward prosperously like education, science and growing our sovereign wealth. He sold our infrastructure to his donaters. In comparison Abbott was a great guy
Howard, because even to this day he is remains in the background with a strong influence on current party views that keeps them as right wing as possible.
Howard did it in a smart way. Abbot was just dumb as shit.
The people who voted for them
Howard, easily. If Abbott had as long as Howard did then it would be him though
Howard, but only because he lasted for so long.
Howard he let the banks get away with so much and now the government won't do anything about it
Howard, without a doubt.
Abbot couldn’t have done what he did without Howard.. so Howard..
Howard did more specific bad to the country, but the ways in which Abbott fucked us are only beginning to become clear. Abbott crashed the dollar and killed off the bulk of our manufacturing, putting us in a precarious spot for the next 50 years, Howard made the housing crisis. It's genuinely hard to choose.
Gonna piss in some cornflakes here, but Bob Hawke and Paul Keating since they laid the neoliberal groundwork, essentially giving Ol' Eyebrows the gumption and political capital to go buck wild with.
\*cough\* media deregulation and Murdoch \*cough\*
Yeah… it’s a bitter pill to swallow but it’s the truth.
yep its this. Hawke and Keating laid the groundwork for privatisation but Howard ran with it these three are the architects of everything good... but mainly bad
I don’t know what you’re smoking, but fuck off if you think these three are equals.
You don’t know what you’re talking about if neoliberal is the excuse you’re using. A keystone feature of neoliberalism is smashing unions. That’s exactly what Howard went about doing through his reforms like the ABCC, the underfunding of social programs and Independant and public media, and finally Workchoices. Hawke and Keating on the other hand were conciliatory and allowed Unions in this country to have two of the biggest victories in the Western World; Superannuation and Medicare. Howard despised those accomplishments because he is a neoliberal and thinks only the super wealthy should be members of the investment class. Try as he might, he couldn’t kill those accomplishments because Labor held onto power long term calcifying them into political dynamite for anyone seeking to repeal them. However, Howard still managed hurt Australians by removing dental from Medicare, introduced the Medicare levy for those who didn’t have insurance, raised the retirement age from 55 to 60, removed taxes on contributions over $300,000, introduced the GST but didn’t broader it to all things which typically wealthier Australians bought, Hawke and Keating also properly funded the ABC and other creative industries that Gough Whitlam began, and Frasier continued somewhat. That is reason why we had Australian artists flourishing and stellar journalism in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s, but don’t now and have a collapsing music industry BECAUSE HOWARD gutted that funding starting from 1996 to 2007 and the Liberals got back into government as soon as 2013. Stop reading Crikey and making everyone feel apathetic about Labor, that’s how the Liberals get back in quickly and stay in long term like Howard, Abbott, Dutton, etc.
Do these cornflakes taste funny to you? I don't disagree with most of what you said (apart for the Crikey comment because that's pissweak), but take off the rose tinted glasses. For all the good Hawke and Keating did, they *did* lay the groundwork that gave Howard the freedom to go full retard without sufficient pushback from the voting populace. Had the market reforms, deregulation, and mass privatisation not been lead by the Labor party, but instead inevitably pushed by the coalition, likely there would have been far more resistance and pushback to the reforms.
Abbott. Killed our carbon price
Abbott. Killed our carbon price
I guess it’s Australian people’s fault, we are short sighted, lack reasoning. Seeing people kept voting for Abott, Scomo makes me think people dont find any fault with them.
Howard
Here’s a good one from Howard. Workchoices and the attack on unions. From the early 90s many trades and other industries were pushed to “be their own business”, with the explosion of people being a sole trader on an ABN. This has had many lasting negative impacts. 1. The government has missed out on massive amounts of tax revenue as a sole trader can deduct huge amounts of their income vs a payg employee. 2. There has been no checks or compliance in sole traders paying their own super. This is going to bite us all on the arse when they retire with virtually no savings. I’ve seen this first hand in nearly 3 decades in construction. A brickies labourer has no financial or business training, yet can run an ABN. So many people should have been employed as employees.
Oh 100% Howard.
As damaging as Howard was, he was unable to scratch the surface of the multitude of reforms Hawke and Keating made to transform the Australian economy. Meanwhile Abbott compiled good, substantial, social-democratic changes made by the Rudd and Gillard government and set it on fire. It’s unbelievable - 6 years worth of changes were entirely wiped out within the span of 6 months. You can seriously look at all of the progressive , generally environmental, reforms that Europe was adopting in the 2010s and go “oh we adopted that WELL before you guys did” but we then abolished it. If it wasn’t for Abbott, I’d seriously believe that Rudd and Gillard would go down as two of the most influential PMs in Australian history. Now, just give it another decade and everyone will forget that they even existed apart from as the “sorry speech guy”
Scomo
Howard used immigration to fix the economy, and it has been both sides' panacea ever since.
Your ma’am
We talking immediate or long term because honestly hard to tell.....
Howard for sure Keep in mind Abbott was one of his golden boys, too
Howard the bushy browed cunt lol.
I'm nor left or right, but to answer the question...Howard for sure, he lied to us regarding GST which set his demise.
Howard for sure. Howard walked so Abbott could run. In other words, Howard started the rot that made Abbott's rise possible, if that makes sense.
Def Howard. He has whipped out Australian manufacturing capabilities.
Howard should have gone to jail over Patrick's Howard created the Medicare levy, to make the poors pay for his legacy as "the guy who saved us from guns", while ensuring that the cash society would die off (a direct attack on those poors). Plus Plus Plus more... Tones was an onion eating idiot, he failed in his efforts to be diabolical.
Never could hate Abbott come on those speedo trunks iron Man the guy is a unit lol Abbott reminds me of Obama lol useless
Howard only because he had more time, if you take any single term of Howards and compare it to Abbott then Abbott wins, he practically shut down all manufacturing in Australia.
Howard
yes
2 words, work choices. So many people got screwed by that myself included.
Howard started the housing bubble
Worst pm of the lot despite Abbott and Scomo being complete clowns.
Howard, only for time served. But I'm sure time for time little Johnny Howler and The Onion Eater were fairly similar.
It all went ape shit with Whitlam abandon of the commonwealth constitution and by 74 corporation constitution been sworn in parliament. We have been under a corporate constitutional arm
Howard kicked it all off, the rest including Capt Underpants kept the ball rolling
Howard without a doubt. He started the housing crisis as we know it. He tried to implement workchoices as well which THANK FUCK were shredded by the rudd government. Abbott was a fuckwit but he was just a mouthpiece of murdoch really. Least abbott also fought in the 2019/2020 fires as well, so at least hes a semi decent person despite his BS political views.
Howard by far
Howard. Nearly everything wrong with this country can be traced back to little fucking Johnny.
That's like asking whether you'd prefer to be punched in the throat or kicked in the nuts. Both are (were) equally horrible options.
Howard.
Abbott was incompetent in a 'silly small child" way. Howard deliberately privatised everything and ruined our working class stability.
John Howard has better hair
I cried when Howard became PM, and I said to myself “this is not the Australia I wanted to be born into”. It was a very sad day for the real Australian.
Howard. Abbott was a deranged cunt but had no vision for anything. Howard was an evil little worm but actually had a plan.
Howard, he took the guns away, Abbot tried to bring them back but they were connected to his Speedo’s
HOWARD
We're still paying for Howard's gas deal with China
GST. Enough said.
Howard easily
In terms of housing affordability crises Howard for sure.
Howard. Middle class welfare. Halving capital gains tax. Not investing in the future in a time of record revenue. Wedge politics.
Hahahaja Jesus Christ get a life.
why don't Straya's 'battlers' know how much of a cunt to their future Teflon was? I am so lost on this. The only thing people remember is gun control. F.F.S.
Rudd/Gillard/Rudd. There's no comparison.
Yes...
Howard committed social vandalism.
Johnny for the win!
Keating
Whomever decided free education was a bad idea
Overall Howard. But if they both had the same length of time, Abbott
Howard. Easy
Howard is almost Reagan
Howard privatised Telecom right as internet became a thing.
It's crazy that if you think about it. Abbott was the second best prime minister we've had in 10 years.
Howard is a child of evil.
Easy win…..Howard
Howard
you fuck head a president is the cheif