Howard, nation and identity: from overlapping consensus to citizenship test

The very longevity of John Howard’s period in office means that we often forget to what extent his electoral success from 1996 to 2007 transformed the fortunes of the Liberal Party of Australia. We can regain a sense of this if we re-read the opening chapter of Gerard Henderson’s book, Menzies’ Child, published in 1994, a year prior to John Howard’s resumption of the Liberal leadership and two years prior to his electoral victory in 1996. When Henderson published this book, the Liberal Party had been out of national office for eleven years, and the very bleakness of their plight resonated in his prose. Henderson argued that the problem that beset the Liberal Party was one of leadership. Not that leadership was absent, but rather that it dominated the party – that the Liberals had a “leadership fixation†or a “Messiah complex†.