With so many matters in John Howard's political calculus beyond his capacity for influence or control – Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pacific crises, wheat scandals and water reform – he must be thinking it would be nice to have a hold on something. Especially if it becomes important for a political legacy. Targeted programs for some disaffected constituents needing stroking may well be on the agenda for this election year.
One constituency which will not be uppermost on the mind of John Howard is that of Aboriginal affairs. Why should he bother, he may well ask. There's no votes in it for him, and not much prospect of thanks. He never expected much praise and has been surprised, if anything, at how low the criticism level is – a sign, indeed, that the chattering classes have more or less given up.
He is in any event entitled, on the evidence that he has, to doubt whether anything on anyone's agenda will make much difference. Admittedly the natives of this country are restless, but their rage and frustration is at the moment more directed at state governments and the legal system, particularly in Queensland, than at the federal government. Distracted from the real game, in much the same way as
they have been over the past ten years.
Furthermore, they are morally on the back foot. Out in the electorate, Aborigines are now well understood not to be victims or the dispossessed, but criminals, drunks, welfare layabouts, wife bashers, people who neglect and sexually abuse their children and do not send them to school. Honestly, what more could one do, he might ask. Maybe tough love, as applied to our Pacific neighbours, is in fact good
policy?
Yet by almost any benchmark – social, economic or political – there is hardly any area of failure in Howard Government policy more abject than in Aboriginal affairs. For five years, perhaps, failure could be blamed on the legacy of the Keating years, or the fact that practical policy had not much changed, except in terms of what Howard would have called political correctness. In the past six years, radical new Howard policy has been in play, and it too is going nowhere. On the face of things, the Howard Government must be judged to have been routed in its war on Aboriginal poverty, disadvantage and
disengagement.
John Howard had consciously abandoned the notion this