Horne On Pm: An Apparition From The Dreamtime Fifties

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday September 4, 2001

Paul Sheehan

Donald Horne was lying in a hospital bed suffering from heart failure. He had pneumonia. His pulse was racing at 200. At 77, death was not far. Yet he still managed to reach for his notepad and write, in a frail and spidery hand, a single sentence: ``Is John Howard Australia's worst Prime Minister?"

``It was the height of Hansonism and I thought I was seeing the end of the world as I knew it," he told the Herald during an interview in his Woollahra home.

Three years after that near-death experience, Horne has answered his own question in a book, Looking for Leadership - Australia in the Howard Years, published yesterday.

The book could be titled Why John Howard Makes Me Itch itching is a recurring theme and while he does not pronounce him the silliest prime minister (that honour falls to Sir William McMahon) he does judge him brutally:

``... a political freak, not emerging from the realities of his own party (in fact a disgrace to both its liberal and its pragmatic traditions), and not emerging from the political system as a whole or from dominant trends among his fellow citizens, but dropping down on us like an apparition from the Dreamtime Fifties, dividing the country, perhaps partly to gain votes, but mainly because he had a compass that was set backwards."

Mr Howard is unlucky that he is used as a narrative device for a much larger issue that is the failure of Australian politicians, all politicians, to talk about the big structural economic changes in people's lives.

``Since the 1970s, there has been a failure by our political leaders to talk about the economy in words that their fellow citizens understand. It's been going on for 25 years ..."

``Now they talk about globalisation, which means 22 different things and has entirely contradictory supporters and opponents ... A lot of this doesn't mean a thing to anybody."

While writing the book, Horne was struck down by cancer yet it didn't deter him.

``When the doctor said I had cancer I was oddly unmoved. Everybody has to die. I've reached an age where that is more and more evident."

His book is not simply a Howard bash:``I simply don't know why the Labor Party came to a halt ... (And what a contrast [with Paul Keating] with the amiable dilly-dallying of Kim Beazley with his faction chiefs, who spent most of his first five years not producing one real policy that anyone can remember."

But John Howard is the main target, although he remains almost invisible as a man, and is rarely directly quoted. Horne did not seek to interview him, an absence that flows through the narrative.

``I think that is a fair criticism," he concedes. Donald Horne's greatest source is Donald Horne, quoting often from his own works. This is his 25th book since his first and defining work, The Lucky Country, written in 1964. That's one new book every 18 months for the past 37 years. No wonder he was reaching for his pen while at death's door. He can't stop. Even while temporarily blind in 1976, he managed to dictate the draft of Death Of the Lucky Country.

He hasn't finished, either. The cancer is in remission, he appears tanned and sprightly, is enjoying his 41st year of marriage to Myfanwy, and expects to celebrate his 80th birthday on December 26 in good form.

Not surprisingly, he is planning his next book. It will be a collection of essays. ``I'm sick of going into hospital with half-finished books."