Fed: A vintage year for the great survivor

AAP General News (Australia)
12-23-2003
Fed: A vintage year for the great survivor

He took his country to war on doubtful evidence, his choice of governor-general proved
a disaster, he didn't win any elections, yet he enjoyed the finest year of his leadership
and perhaps his life.

John Howard helped depose an evil tyrant, hosted the world's most powerful men, cemented
his position as one of the great stalwarts of Australian politics, even became a proud
father of the bride.

Small wonder he took the one key decision that most influences Australia's immediate
future - he chose to stay.

Doug Conway reviews Australia in 2003 - Howard's year.

By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

Saddam Hussein, Peter Hollingworth, Simon Crean ... worlds apart but now all consigned
to the long line of heavyweights toppled while John Howard powers on into history.

The dictator, the viceroy and the opposition leader were the three biggest casualties
of the three biggest stories on Australian radar screens in 2003.

Any or all could have sunk Mr Howard, but did nothing of the sort.

The prime minister is now well used to seeing off Labor leaders - Mr Crean, Kim Beazley
and Paul Keating - and wasted no time fixing brash newcomer Mark Latham in his sights.

But invading another country and overthrowing a despot?

Escaping untarnished while his personal choice as Queen's representative falls on his mitre?

Australia's best-known cricket tragic will, in a matter of days, outlast Steve Waugh
in public office - not bad for an oft-rejected battler once expected to predecease Mark
Taylor.

Mr Howard's navigation through the labyrinth of challenges this year provided a fascinating
study in power - political, electoral, military, moral - how to get it, how not to get
it, how to keep it, how to keep others from it.

It was hardly surprising, then, that George W Bush dubbed Mr Howard a "man of steel"

by way of thanks for joining his coalition of the willing in Iraq - something many other
countries, notably Germany and France, refused to do.

Iraq could have left Australian blood on Mr Howard's hands; it could quickly have become
his worst nightmare.

The nation was deeply divided, fearing involvement in "another Vietnam", another unwinnable
war against the invisible enemy of terrorism.

Many feared it would render them more vulnerable rather than safer, anxieties given
substance when Osama bin Laden named Australia as a specific enemy and target.

They may yet be proved right.

But in the meantime Mr Howard has not had to weather the heavy hits to popularity endured
by President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair.

More US troops have been killed since Mr Bush declared victory in Iraq than in the
preceding war proper.

But Australia has had the great fortune not to sustain a single combat death among
the 2,000 troops it sent, though freelance cameraman Paul Moran, 39, was killed by a car
bomb.

The allies have failed to find a trace of weapons of mass destruction - their prime
justification for going in.

But still Mr Howard is eyeing a fourth straight election victory in the new year, something
achieved only by Bob Hawke and seven-time winner Sir Robert Menzies.

He is just 14 months away from overtaking Mr Hawke as Australia's second longest-serving PM.

For a staunch monarchist, Mr Howard's choice of the monarch's representative in Australia
proved to be an appalling one seemingly devoid of scrutiny.

Dr Peter Hollingworth, it transpired, had failed to root out known paedophiles from
the Anglican church when he was Archbishop of Brisbane - a sin of omission which tainted
both him and his office until the inevitable day he agreed to move out of Yarralumla.

Not only the masses wanted his head on a plate.

Senior ministers did, too, and the senate passed a motion to that effect unprecedented
in the 102 years of federation.

Constitutional experts had warned Mr Howard against appointing a churchman as governor-general.

Even senior Anglicans felt it was inappropriate for one church to be perceived as more
dominant than another.

Safety first certainly dictated his choice of replacement - the thoroughly vetted and
sterling old soldier Major-General Michael Jeffery.

But Mr Howard survived with teflon intact to enjoy a year in which, for one giddy night,
his small nation hosted the two most powerful men on earth, George Bush and China's Hu
Jintao, and one heady afternoon he gave his 28-year-old daughter Melanie's hand in marriage
to a man like himself, a solicitor.

Mr Howard turned 64, the age at which he said he would consider his future, and to
the manifest disappointment of his long-serving Treasurer and leader-in-waiting Peter
Costello, decided life at the top was too good.

His political longevity ultimately forced the opposition to gamble on what Mr Costello
wished the Liberals would embrace - generational change.

By the narrowest of margins, 47-45 over Kim Beazley, Labor chose as its new chief that
rare beast - an arm-breaking intellectual from the same seat as his patron Gough Whitlam
who, at 42, is the party's youngest leader in a century.

Mark Latham, however, was quickly made to rue his description of George Bush as "flaky"

and "dangerous", and forced to start cuddling up to the US by John Howard, the man he
had called an "arse-licker".

Mr Latham succeeded poor old Simon Crean, who staved off a challenge from two-time
election loser Mr Beazley before getting the tap on the shoulder which left him as Labor's
only federal leader denied a crack at an election.

Bob Carr, often touted as foreman material in Canberra, was re-elected for a third
term as Premier in NSW, ensuring Mr Howard remains surrounded by a sea of state Labor
governments.

Mr Howard's contribution to regional leadership included sending off 2,000 more peacekeepers,
this time to the troubled Solomon Islands.

He also helped in the healing of the Bali bombings anniversary, a process aided in
no small part by the sentences - life and death - handed out by Indonesia to the five
key operatives.

He further shrank Australia - at least as defined by its migration zone - after a boatload
of Kurdish asylum seekers landed at Melville Island.

He also reshuffled his cabinet, promoting his refugee policeman Philip Ruddock and
key hatchet man Tony Abbott, and shook up his party with the warning it was just eight
seats away from "electoral oblivion".

Mr Howard need not worry too much about the self-immolating Democrats, whose leader
Andrew Bartlett stepped aside after an astonishing episode in which he stole wine then
drunkenly abused Liberal Jeannie Ferris before the cameras in the Senate.

The prime minister's most uncomfortable threats could come not just from the unpredictable
Mr Latham but from Pauline Hanson.

The Queensland "wild card", along with One Nation co-founder David Ettridge, spent
11 weeks in jail before a court overturned their convictions for electoral fraud.

Ms Hanson could throw an almighty spanner into the political works if she decides to
re-enter the fray, this time as the wrongfully imprisoned battling mum who triumphed over
the system.

"I received over 1,000 letters and cards - I'm not as famous as Pauline Hanson," quipped
another jailed Queenslander, former chief magistrate Di Fingleton after serving six months
for threatening a fellow magistrate in an e-mail.

Another big name to end up behind bars was insider trader Rene Rivkin, but ill health
and appeals have so far limited him to precisely one day, one hour and 15 minutes of a
nine-month stretch of weekend detention.

Life sentences were handed out for two of the nation's most horrifying crimes - to
Hunter Valley woman Kathleen Folbigg, 35, who killed her four babies, and to Australia's
worst serial killers, John Justin Bunting, 37, and Robert Joe Wagner, 31, for the grisly
"bodies-in-the-barrel" slayings at Snowtown, South Australia.

It was a stormy year for the peak indigenous body ATSIC, whose leader Geoff Clark was
suspended after being convicted of obstructing police in a pub brawl in Victoria and whose
deputy "Sugar" Ray Robinson resigned blaming a campaign of vilification against him.

Sydney-based Pan Pharmaceuticals lost its licence to make pills and potions, went into
voluntary administration and was later sold off cheaply after slipshod practices led to
Australia's biggest ever medical product recall.

The other big health scare was the worldwide SARS epidemic, which killed over 900 people
in more than 20 countries, but there were no local casualties apart from the tourism industry.

Sydney archbishop George Pell went to the Vatican to become one of 31 new cardinals,
Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for playing Virginia Wolf, teenager Delta Goodrem won a record
seven ARIAs and millions of hearts as she battled cancer, and author Peter Finlay (otherwise
known as DBC Pierre) won the prestigious Booker Prize.

Actor Russell Crowe married singer Danielle Spencer at his Coffs Harbour property,
with the couple now awaiting the birth of their first child.

Wedding bells will also ring soon for an Australian princess. Tasmanian commoner Mary
Donaldson, 31, who once wanted to be a vet, was engaged to the crown prince of Denmark,
furnishing a new fairytale for the land of Hans Christian Andersen.

Cricketer Shane Warne's year, however, was a nightmare.

He was sent home from the World Cup in South Africa and banned for one year for taking
outlawed diuretic pills, which can be used to mask steroid use. He said his mum had given
him the tablets.

But that did nothing to diminish Australian sport's familiar roll call of world champions
- swimmer Ian Thorpe for a record third time in the 400m, hurdler Jana Pittman just as
Cathy Freeman bowed out, boxer Anthony Mundine and the one-day cricketers led by the blazing
bat of Ricky Ponting, who was also anointed to take over from Steve Waugh in the Test
arena.

Opener Matthew Hayden set an individual Test record of 380 runs against Zimbabwe, Mark
Philippoussis's heroic comeback from injury sealed the Davis Cup final against Spain and
the Kangaroos extended their 33-year grip on rugby league's Ashes.

George Gregan's brave Wallabies succumbed only to the boot of Englishman Jonny Wilkinson
in rugby's World Cup final as Australia hosted its biggest event since the Sydney Olympics.

The once-scorned Aussie dollar was nudging 75 US cents for the first time in six years
after Australia became the first western country to raise interest rates.

Two modest quarter-point hikes, the first for 17 months, started taking some steam
out of the overheated property market.

Corporate success, and excess, continued unabated when the Commonwealth Bank gave fund
manager Chris Cuffe a record $33 million golden handshake, and the Big Four banks between
them recorded profits of $10.5 billion - or $1 million for every hour of the year.

At the other end of the scale, troubled giant AMP contrived to shed $4 billion in market
worth in a single day, and a royal commissioner recommended charges against Ray Williams,
Rodney Adler, Brad Cooper and others over the $5.3 billion HIH insurance collapse.

The passing parade of famous Australians in 2003 was much longer than usual.

Political obituaries were written for former deputy PM Jim Cairns, his fellow Whitlam
government minister Don Willesee, Australia's first Aboriginal affairs minister William
Wentworth, controversial former Labor senator senator Mal Colston and Victorian governor
Richard McGarvie.

Sport lost Test cricketers Doug Ring and Ernie Toshack, AFL greats Jack Dyer and Bob
Rose, Socceroo coach Eddie Thomson, ultra-marathon runner Cliff Young, and horse breeder
and poultry entrepreneur Jack Ingham.

The nation also farewelled country music king Slim Dusty, Bee Gee Maurice Gibb, bushman
R M Williams, wine pioneer Deen De Bortoli, WWI hero Frank MacDonald, WWII's Sandakan
death march survivor Owen Campbell, composer Malcolm Williamson, artist William Dargie
and Navy vice-admiral Sir James Willis.

Somewhere, some time a few weeks before Christmas, there was also one landmark birth
- that of the 20 millionth Australian.

AAP dc/jc

KEYWORD: YEARENDER NATIONAL RPT

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