Well said. No ideological or emotional claptrap from a journalist with a personal agenda to push; just the facts.

Brendan Nelson,take note!

Good article.
The simple fact is that JH, thankfully, went a bridge too far with workchoices, and caused ordinary Australians to take stock as to what our country had become under his stewardship.
Howard built a society in his own image - unfeeling, arrogant, and polarised towards wealth, privilage, and religious right wing bias. He also hitched our foreign policy to the demented ravings of the American neo-conservative right. Most Australians take little interest in politics outside of 'what's in it for me' unless they are forced to look. Workchoices forced them to look, and they did not like what they saw.

It's a well argued piece - while I concur that the previous election does discount the 'Howard hater' theories, I do think this article doesn't give quite enough exposure to the 'accumulated baggage' theory, which while similar to the Howard Haters, isn't quite the same.

It's hard to accept that voters turfed out Howard simply because he wasn't enough of a policy wonk.
The author's dead right in the workchoices wasn't an efficient piece of work by any stretch of the imagination. When both business (not all business, granted, but large swathes) and employees are opposed to it, you know you're in pretty dire trouble.

I tend to think that the Howard Haters played a role, but it was the fact that WorkChoices was seen as abandoning Howard's 'battlers'. Besides, Kevin Rudd's hardly a radical choice.

Spot on Gym Fish about Howard, who indeed was carrying on an agenda mostly more related to colonial days, as his mentor Menzies also did, the only one game to argue with Menzies was my Country Party chief, Black Jack McKewen, who strove to quit hanging onto Britannia's apron strings.

But the biggest shock for one formerly poorly educated and making up for it in his retirement, has been the flouting of laws which held our democracy together.

Probably the most important was the Separation of Powers, in which questioning must only come from the ethical authority.

First spoilt by allowing ruling Parties to choose who should fill the Judiciary complement rather than those who have been specially trained and tested. Secondly the Federal Reserve which must never be influenced by a ruling Party, especially concerning Interest Rates.

And thirdly, so very important right now, the Arbitration Court which I found to my horror was completely absolved by the Howard Government to bring in Work Choices.

Was also horrified when a supposedly educated acquaintance informed me the other day, that the Separation of Powers law is now a thing of the past.

If true, looks like our democracy is now a thing of the past also?

The wheels began to fall off towards the end out of sheer desperation.They realised too late that even a fairness test wasn't going to appease his new following of blue collar workers who felt betrayed.This is why the cupboard was bare.

I still find it amazing how blinkered they were to reality of Nicholas described as, "Their IR reform is an impromptu mess".28/4/06

They elimated the debt of $96 billion and saved us $8 billion per yr in interest payments.I doubt that Labor would have achieved that goal.