The Money Men by Chris Bowen (superbooks4u .txt) 📕

treasurer Peter Costello. The prize of Bennelong, meanwhile, was Howard’s, and he would not let it go for thirty-three years.

A Rapid Rise

The 1974 election saw the Whitlam government’s already small majority halved. But despite the relatively strong result for the Liberal Party, Howard shared the concern of many of his new colleagues that the opposition leader, former treasurer Bill Snedden, was not going to be able to engineer the policy development necessary to return the Liberal Party to office. So he supported Malcolm Fraser in two challenges to Snedden, the second one, in March 1975, successful. Howard’s decisiveness here is instructive. Having only just reached federal parliament, he made the almost certainly correct judgement that Snedden was not up to the job of leading the Liberal Party back to government, and was prepared to take the risk of strongly supporting an insurgent bid from Fraser, which was far from guaranteed to succeed.

Fraser was evidently impressed with both the young member’s loyalty and his organisational skills, as he invited Howard to serve as Liberal Party whip. This was a significant appointment, which Howard accepted with alacrity. It was, however, a short-lived offer. Fraser had invited former solicitor-general Bob Ellicot onto the front bench. In doing so, he had repeated his not-unreasonable stipulation that he wanted an undiluted focus from shadow ministers on the task at hand, and that therefore they could not undertake outside work, such as accepting barrister’s briefs. This was an unacceptable requirement for Ellicot, who wanted to keep his hand in at the bar. Ellicot’s subsequent refusal to serve in the shadow ministry under these conditions created a vacancy, which Fraser chose to fill by inviting Howard to join the front bench as shadow minister for consumer affairs and commerce.

These were turbulent times, and they enabled the young shadow minister to make his mark. Howard played a role in the campaign against federal treasurer Jim Cairns by making allegations against his staffer Junie Morosi and her husband in the parliament (allegations that were later shown to be unfounded). More significantly, and with much more substance, Howard also played a key role in building the case against minister for resources Rex Connor. Howard was the member of the shadow ministry who was given the task of interviewing the Pakistani con man Tirath Khemlani, and of going through the boxes of documents that showed that Connor had continued to negotiate loans for the Australian Government from the Middle East long after the approval by prime minister Whitlam to do so had been revoked. Howard was thus at the epicentre of the scandal that was central in the downfall of the Whitlam government, providing Fraser with the justification he had been looking for to block supply.

Howard was rewarded for his diligence after Fraser’s landslide 1975 election win by being appointed minister for business and consumer affairs. A number of shadow ministers did not make the transition to the ministry, given Fraser’s view that the Whitlam ministry was too unwieldy and needed to be culled. So there was no guarantee that Howard would survive the transition to the ministerial ranks. The fact that he did, while more senior and prominent colleagues such as Don Chipp were dropped from the incoming ministry, is testament to the faith Fraser had in his abilities.

His appointment made Howard the third-ranking minister outside the Cabinet, and gave him responsibility for a grab bag of government agencies that would these days mainly be the responsibility of the assistant treasurer, most notably the Customs Bureau and the Prices Justification Tribunal. He also had responsibility for the operation of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

It was in this latter field that Howard made his most notable mark as a junior minister. He commissioned chemist and businessman Thomas Swanson to review the Trade Practices Act with a view to making it more business-friendly. The review made a series of recommendations, which Howard duly actioned. However, he wanted to go further. The Transport Workers Union had, at the time, been engaging in a series of boycotts against service stations as part of its campaign for better working conditions in the retail petrol market. Boycotts by one business of another were illegal under the Trade Practices Act, but boycotts engineered by a trade union were not. Given his natural sympathy with small service station operators, Howard saw this as a fundamental injustice. Despite the fact that the Swanson review had not recommended it, Howard sought Fraser’s agreement to ban union secondary boycotts. With a joint recommendation from Fraser and Howard, a reluctant Cabinet agreed to the suggestion.

This was a major battle for a junior minister to take on, and it presaged a consistent approach to and interest in industrial relations, which would grow in intensity as his career progressed. ACTU president Bob Hawke did not hold back, telling Howard there would be ‘blood in the streets’ if his reforms succeeded, but parliament adopted his changes. The Keating government amended the secondary boycotts law to limit its effect on actions that substantially reduced competition.

Fraser was impressed with Howard’s handling of his portfolio. A number of minor yet cumulatively significant ministerial promotions and additional responsibilities came his way. When the Cabinet agreed, against Treasury’s advice, to a 17.5 per cent devaluation of the Australian dollar in 1976, Fraser asked Howard to manage a series of tariff reductions in order to reduce the inflationary impacts of the action. Fraser was again taken with Howard’s attention to detail and his ability to work under pressure.4

These extra responsibilities were added to in May 1977 by Howard’s appointment as minister assisting the prime minister, and two months later as minister for special trade negotiations. This latter task was an onerous one. Howard’s role was to negotiate better access for Australian agricultural goods to the European Economic Community (EEC, now the European Union), with its common market. Fraser had recently visited Europe with the same aim, but had failed. He had clashed heatedly with EEC president Roy Jenkins, a former