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The Forum > Article Comments > The very model of a (post) modern Prime Minister > Comments

The very model of a (post) modern Prime Minister : Comments

By Nicholas Gruen, published 19/9/2007

'As long as my party wants me' is just a 'form of words'. The new form of words is that quitting isn’t in John Howard’s nature.

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You are certainly right about Howard and his 'I's, Nicholas, which he uses in most expressions rather than the more approriate democratic 'We's, but maybe with the colonial style corporate culture both parties seem stuck with now, maybe we will have to put up with it.

Also as a lover of learning in his retirement, might remind that the term the Lucky Country was not expressed under neo-liberalism and economic rationalism but under Keynesian center balanced politics.
Posted by bushbred, Wednesday, 19 September 2007 1:57:25 PM
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... and might also remember, BB, that the term "lucky country" was originally an ironic dig at the complacency of the second-rate people who ran Australia back in the 1960s, not an endorsement of the prevailing policy consensus
Posted by Rhian, Wednesday, 19 September 2007 3:24:13 PM
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Just a case of taking the Lucky Country two ways, Rhian, this one remembers the good feelings after we were de-mobbed at the end of WW2, got married and went back to the land and retired reasonably successful in 1975, leaving a son and his wife to run the farms.

Reckon they were the good times, Rhian, Don't know about now with our governments having to rely on pitstock quarry economics with a record overseas trading debt of
nearly 500 billion and the IMF well on our trail.

Cheers - BB, WA
Posted by bushbred, Wednesday, 19 September 2007 3:59:41 PM
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It seems to me that Howard has now won the election. Everyone will have to vote for him now, so we can find out whether his public promise to retire before the next election was core or non-core.
Posted by plerdsus, Wednesday, 19 September 2007 4:52:01 PM
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The point of Horne's book was that Australia had been lucky so far and that sooner or later the country's luck would run out, unless policies changed, and essentially they haven't. Howard will probably escape the well- deserved blame for the looming debt disaster, since he will most likely be retired.
Posted by mac, Wednesday, 19 September 2007 9:00:30 PM
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I doubt that Howard will escape the blame. He has based his career on the lie that he is somehow a "good economic manager", so it is only appropriate that he should be pilloried when it is exposed. Of course, the "anti-terror" laws may mean that we're not allowed to discuss it...
Posted by Antiseptic, Thursday, 20 September 2007 7:29:17 AM
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