ABSTRACT
It was the best of times, and Australians had the right to feel relaxed and comfortable about who they were, and where they had come from. In Canberra, the nation was ruled by a balding leader whose command of the political process was as legendary as it was unfailing. The Howard years were years of construction and mining booms, on the back of the resource-hungry Chinese giant. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had the dubious honour of being ridiculed by nearly everyone. Yet the book’s headline idea captures something of this spirit of the times, which John Howard’s vision for the new Australia reflects. Fukuyama’s highly philosophical vision of the ‘end of history’ might look worlds away from John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ vision of a new Australia.
