As Australian prime minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard faced 11 tumultuous years of foreign, defence and domestic security policy challenges. As a political leader interested primarily in domestic economic issues, he faced a steep and sometimes rocky learning curve. Not surprisingly, his foreign policy legacy was mixed: partly durable and desirable, partly dubious and potentially damaging to Australia’s longterm interests. In this legacy, he is little different from his predecessors. Howard strengthened ties with the United States, adroitly avoided tensions with China, and gradually repaired relations with important Southeast Asian neighbours, including Indonesia, after periods of strain. He was also defined by his willingness to dispatch troops to foreign trouble spots, to enact far-reaching anti-terrorism legislation at home, and to substantially expand military spending on advanced new weaponry. Yet Howard largely quarantined international trade and economic interests from controversy – at least until the Australian Wheat Board Iraq bribery scandal exposed Australia’s trade policy duplicity late in the life of his government.

In 1996 the Coalition government set out to define and articulate its foreign policies for Australia. In doing so it implied, and sometimes explicitly posited, some key differences between its approach and that of the preceding government. Paul Keating had been driven by grand visions. By contrast, John Howard would be commonsensical and pragmatic. Keating had been intensely concerned with Asia. Howard, while maintaining concern with Asia, would right the balance by tilting back towards the Western powers. Keating had been preoccupied with economic issues. Howard would balance economic concerns with a renewed focus on security matters. The Keating government had pursued multilateralism and middle-power activism in its quest for wider influence. The Howard government would be more interested in a revival of bilateralism, especially in the US relationship, and had few illusions about Australia’s potential for influence on the world stage; it saw ’activism’ as too often merely meddlesome, an irritant to other countries. In adumbrating these shifts the new government was, among other things, defining and presenting itself as practical, tightly focused, and above all realistic.

The period 1996–2000 was a relatively difficult and turbulent time for Australia’s defence decision-makers. They had to deal with a number of unforeseen events and crises, adjust their policies and practices to changing political and social expectations, defend themselves from criticism from a range of quarters, and continue to do ’more with less’. The department was forced to acknowledge that it did not have the resources to complete its existing, let alone planned, equipment-acquisition program. And the Australian public was both entertained and appalled by a series of incidents and events that attracted unusual, and increasingly critical, media attention. These included a protracted public brawl between the Minister for Defence and his politically appointed civilian head; continuing revelations of sexual harassment and other misdemeanours within the armed forces; accounts of departmental ineptitude; and the spectacle of the current Secretary of Defence publicly lambasting his department and some of its senior officials.

In chapter 3, I argue that international law appeared in the 2003 debates primarily as an autonomous reason for or against war. Speakers invoked the legality or illegality of the invasion of Iraq as reason enough, on its own, to justify or condemn Australia’s actions. Speakers constructed international law as a measure of the justifiability of government action separate from any other measure such as morality or participation in an alliance, calling on a power that they believed international legal status would create. The 2003 debates included some examples of international law as a collective justification, but these were generally subordinate to the autonomous form of international legal language.

‘The times will suit me’, John Howard proclaimed some months after he won the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1985. He was convinced that Labor’s attempt to reconstruct the economy through an agreement with trade unions was doomed to fail, and expected a mounting crisis of national solvency that would turn voters to a statesman prepared, like Reagan or Thatcher, to apply the same reforming vigour to the labour market. On regaining the Liberal leadership a decade later, Howard played on the hardship inflicted by the recent recession: ‘The Australian people cannot understand why they should have to suffer the indignity, the denial and disappointment of a bare five minutes of economic sunlight’. Over the past decade, as one prime minister after another has had to introduce herself or himself to counterparts at international gatherings, Australia has gained the reputation of ‘the coup capital of the democratic world’. Each change of leadership is dressed up in policy differences that fail to hide the personal nature of the rivalry and the fickle loyalties of parliamentarians who switch their support according to calculations of the best chance of electoral success.