For All of Us

John Howard became leader of the Liberal Party in January 1995 after Hewson's successor, Alexander Downer, resigned. Hewson had hung on for fifteen months or so after the March 1993 election, but his leadership was fatally wounded. As the election post-mortems had argued, he did not have the depth of political skills needed to rebuild the party's electoral plausibility. His successor, Alexander Downer was, if anything, worse and he collapsed under the merciless pressures of the job into embarrassing gaffes and displays of ignorance. Howard was drafted into the job by a desperate party, and fourteen months later, on 2 March 1996, he led it back into government. He has since won two more elections, in 1998 and again in 2001.

Early in 1995 it was clear that Labor under Paul Keating was in trouble. A by-election in the ACT electorate of Canberra delivered a massive 16.2 per cent swing against the government, and in May the popular Queensland Labor government had its majority reduced from twenty-one seats to one. Keating's second period of government, the one he had won in his own right, was dominated by cultural issues. With good reason, Keating believed that the economic reforms of the 1980s were starting to bear fruit.