John Howard used nostalgia successfully as a political weapon. Angus Taylor will find it tougher |
John Howard used nostalgia successfully as a political weapon. Angus Taylor will find it tougher
February 23, 2026 — 4:00am
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In a speech 10 years ago, novelist Zadie Smith pointed out the way nostalgia divided people. “Time travel is a discretionary art,” she said, “a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” A US study had found Republican voters preferred the 1950s, a nostalgia “unavailable to a person like me”, Smith said, “for in that period I could not vote, marry my husband, have my children, work in the university I work in, or live in my neighbourhood”.
If anything, since then, nostalgia has become more powerful. That year, 2016, seems to have been an inflection point. Smith was writing in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election as president. His slogan, “Make America Great Again”, was a perfect meld of pitches. It felt new because “America” always stands for renewal. But the idea that the country could be great again called back to an older version of America. Desire for the past and hope for the future both played their part.
The blend is not novel. It was there in earlier incarnations of conservatism. The years in which John Howard was prime minister were marked by an intense focus on preserving what had been. His government legislated to protect marriage in its traditional, homophobic form. Traditions devoted to celebrating certain aspects of Australia’s past – Australia Day and Anzac Day – were given new importance.
But at the same time, the economy and its place in our society were changing fast. Those changes – initiated by Labor and added to by Howard – carried the hopeful promise of a gleaming new society. But change unsettles people, too, and Howard reassured Australians by reminding them that in other respects the country could stay comfortable and relaxed – or go further back into the past, should that be still more relaxing.
There is nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia. Some things, at least in isolation, really were better in the past. Still, we should pay close attention to the appearance of that nostalgic impulse in our lives or in our culture: it is often an indication of deep uncertainty about what’s next. There is nothing more frightening for most of us than a blank patch in our imagining of the future – and so we paper over it with a vision of the past.
Today, Howard himself has become an object of nostalgia. On the day of the recent Liberal leadership spill, in fact, his party sent out invitations to a celebration of the 30th anniversary of his government’s election, as if to emphasise its preference for the past.
But it is not only Liberals: it sometimes feels as though the whole country pines for those “relaxed and comfortable” days. Albanese – often compared to Howard – would never use the phrase himself. And yet, it is not a million miles away from the atmosphere he often seems to want to summon: in which politics rarely troubles people and in which strong disagreement is avoided.
But was the country really so relaxed and comfortable then? In the days of the Cronulla riots, the waterfront dispute or children overboard? We received a reminder of this in the graceless timing of Howard’s contribution to discussion after the Bondi massacre, his decision to immediately attack Labor. Howard always understood that whatever else they demand, moments of national attention provide platforms to intervene sharply in national debate.
This is another reminder that the pull of nostalgia can be deceptive. It is not only that the past was not the same for everyone. It was often not the past we think we remember, either.
The right’s affection for the past has often been symbolic: gestured at or implied. Trump’s contribution, as with so many areas, was to make the subtext explicit. Tony Abbott followed that lead recently, telling the ABC, “I quite liked the way our immigration policy was run in the ’50s, ‘60s and ’70s, where there was an expectation on integration from day one and ultimately assimilation.”
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The White Australia policy continued through much of that time. 1966 is sometimes cited as its end. Abbott was not advocating for that policy. But this goes directly to Smith’s case about the selectivity of nostalgia: you cannot easily untangle that era’s focus on integration and assimilation from the racist attitudes that drove White Australia.
Smith noted that the left, too, had its nostalgia, wanting to impose old economic approaches on a “world of fluid capital”. But in the past 10 years, parts of the right have moved onto this ground too. In doing so, they are creating a new, more forceful nostalgia, one that blends what right and left prefer about the past. This is part of the appeal of figures such as Pauline Hanson and Andrew Hastie (journalist Bernard Keane has called their audience the “Nostalgia Right”). Powerful politics is never only about reproduction of what has worked: it is about invention, too.
Which is something Angus Taylor needs to remember. He performed solidly last week. But watching him answering calls on talkback radio, saying things any Liberal leader could have said, felt uncanny: like one of those old black and white films that has been painted with colour.
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Taylor might seem like he is trying to follow in Howard’s footsteps – but it is Albanese who understands the formula better. Yes, he leans on the desire for a calmer, quieter past; but, like Howard, he also understands that he must excite people about the future. Last week, he foreshadowed an announcement on high-speed rail.
There is interesting symbolism here. High-speed rail sounds futuristic. But trains themselves are old: sturdy relics from a golden age of infrastructure. And high-speed rail itself is far from new: the first line opened in Japan more than 60 years ago. It may well be an excellent idea. But its present appeal is also a pointer back to our collective sense of fearful uncertainty at this stage of our history: another way of filling in the blank space of our future not with new imaginings, but with reassuring visions taken from the past.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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