I was both right and wrong. When Tony Abbott’s Battlelines came out a few months ago I wrote in these pages that it had many excellent things to say but its thinness on economic policy meant that his Parliamentary colleagues would be unwilling to elect him as their leader. That was wrong. But I added: ‘except in the most extraordinary circumstances’ — and that turned out to be right. The Liberal party is lucky to have had him to fall back on. The rage of the Left shows that it knows it now has a fight on its hands.
John Howard will be both the guest of honour at the Quadrant Dinner this week and the man in the hot seat. Guest of honour because Quadrant wants to thank the prime minister of Australia’s golden age. In the hot seat because it will be the occasion for the launching of the The Howard Era, a collection of essays, published by Quadrant Books, assessing Howard’s successes and failures.
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