The glaring errors in Amy Remeikis' hatchet job on John Howard are the tip of the iceberg... This has to be the most breathtaking failure I've read in years: PVO

By PETER VAN ONSELEN, POLITICAL EDITOR, AUSTRALIA Published: 14:09, 18 April 2026 | Updated: 14:09, 18 April 2026 There is a serious book* to be written about John Howard's role in shaping modern Australia. Amy Remeikis has not done it. Her publisher promises a 'searing analysis' of how the former PM 'sold our future'. Talk about over-promising and under-delivering. Where It All Went Wrong is meant to be a sweeping reassessment of Howard's legacy and its connection to modern Australia's failures. A perfectly legitimate project, if done well.  Howard governed for more than 11 years and remains one of the most consequential prime ministers of the modern era. A rigorous book could have argued, with real force, how his government hardened the politics of exclusion, narrowed the country's civic imagination, deepened its strategic reflexes and entrenched habits of market thinking that have outlasted him. Instead, Remeikis has produced something much less impressive: a morally inflated polemic that confuses indignation with insight, and certainty with intelligence. The central weakness of Where It All Went Wrong is not that it's harsh on Howard, as many conservatives might think. A harsh book about Howard could have been excellent, from various ideological perspectives.  The weakness is that Remeikis seems to think harshness is itself a methodology. She doesn't really investigate Howard's legacy. She simply prosecutes her case. Every modern Australian problem appears mainly as another opportunity to return the same verdict.  She started this writing project with a goal and was intent on proving it, irrespective of what findings were uncovered. Such callowness drips off every page. 'Remeikis doesn't really investigate Howard's legacy. She simply prosecutes her case,' writes Daily Mail political editor Peter van Onselen. (Pictured: author and lobbyist Amy Remeikis) Housing affordability, labour insecurity, climate drift, asylum-seeker cruelty, native title backlash and political cynicism - all these roads lead to Howard because the book is structurally incapable of allowing them to lead anywhere else. That's not serious analysis; it's accusation by repetition. The argument does not develop so much as recur page after page, with the same charges coming back in slightly altered form, as though insistence might eventually harden into positive proof. Instead it becomes monotonously boring. That monotony would still be survivable if the book were intellectually disciplined, but it's not. What keeps letting Remeikis down is her own moral certainty. She writes like someone who has decided that being passionately convinced of a thing relieves her of the obligation to test it properly.  The effect is not conviction in the admirable sense, but self-importance in the wearying one. Orwell once wrote that 'one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality', and that 'good prose is like a windowpane.' Remeikis's prose doesn't efface the authorial ego, instead it drags it noisily across every page. The reader is never allowed to forget that the book's real subject isn't just John Howard, but Remeikis's own agenda about him. It's a fatal weakness in a work pretending to have historical seriousness nearly two decades on from his prime ministership. Part of what makes the author's certainty so grating is that it's not matched by equivalent care. The book has already drawn public criticism for factual errors, and it's certainly riddled with them, including the claim that Howard 'only just flopped over the line in 1999', despite there having been no federal election that year. Howard won office in 1996, then fought elections in 1998, 2001, 2004 and 2007, winning all but the last. Such sloppiness isn't an ideological quibble or a fine point of interpretation. It's basic chronology. And once a writer asking for a wholesale reappraisal of a major prime minister starts slipping on the basics, the larger argument begins to sag. You stop reading with interest and start reading defensively, checking whether the author is in command of the material or merely in command of her own tone. 'The reader is never allowed to forget that the book's real subject isn't just John Howard, but Remeikis's own agenda about him.' (Pictured: John Howard in December 2006) Remeikis also claims that all four of Howard's election victories occurred without securing a majority of the popular vote. Unless she's only talking about primary votes instead of the two-party vote, which plainly she isn't, that's patently wrong.  But if the defence is that the author is referring only to primary votes, what's the point of the observation? And what about Labor, which hasn't won more than 50 per cent of the primary vote in the post-World War II era? The Coalition won more than 50 per cent of primary votes in 1975, does that mean that Sir John Kerr was correct to dismiss Gough Whitlam so that Malcolm Fraser could call an election? Of course not. The litany of basic errors throughout the book, which the publisher has been forced to admit will be cleaned up if a reprint occurs, reinforces an impression the book already gives off on its own: impatience with factual discipline, impatience with nuance, impatience with anything that slows the rush to judgement.  Remeikis has attributed some of the mistakes to 'typos and editing errors', and no doubt some are exactly that. But there is a larger problem here beyond such sloppiness. The mistakes matter because they fit the book's broader disposition.  Where It All Went Wrong feels like it's written by someone who regards checking, qualifying and calibrating as secondary chores to the higher calling of denunciation. The deeper failure is conceptual. Remeikis appears almost allergic to complexity. Howard is not treated as a powerful politician working within larger ideological, institutional and historical currents. He's turned into a one-man explanation for nearly every development she dislikes.  It is a cartoonishly monocausal way to write politics. Modern Australia didn't become what it is because one sufficiently malign leader bent the nation to his will in our parliamentary bicameral system. It became what it is through a mix of party incentives, business interests, media ecosystems, inherited policy settings, international pressures, voter anxieties and bipartisan acts of cowardice. Howard mattered enormously, of course.  But to elevate him into the master cause of everything is not a mark of boldness. It's a sign that the writer lacks the range, patience or confidence to handle a messier truth. A serious biographical work needs to at least try to understand its subject, even if taking issue with them. Remeikis doesn't even try, which is a shame because there is a critical case to mount against the former PM's time in office, by a serious scholar. Howard did not invent neoliberalism. He didn't create from nothing the managerial hollowing-out of politics, deregulation, privatisation, housing speculation or the retreat from older egalitarian instincts. Much of that predated him. He inherited trends already in motion, sharpened them, sold them more effectively than other politicians and fused them to a conservatism that won elections.  But that's not enough for Remeikis, because accepting such framing would require admitting that modern Australia's problems were built by a broader political class, not simply by the one villain who best suits her agenda. So context is flattened, Labor's role recedes from view, and history is over-simplified until it becomes morally neat and analytically useless. The same habit shows up in the book's treatment of symbolic moments. The 1997 Reconciliation Convention has long been understood as a defining episode in Howard's relationship with Indigenous reconciliation. The official transcript records the speech, contemporary and retrospective accounts note the hostile reception the then PM received, and Howard's own acknowledgment that he might have handled himself differently is on the public record.  In a serious work, moments like that are handled with nuance because they carry real interpretive weight. In a careless work, they become just more scenery in a predetermined drama. Remeikis doesn't seem especially interested in the discipline of getting such moments interpretively right, only in the utility of criticising them. Ultimately, hers is a vain book. Not merely partisan, repetitive and error-prone, but vain. It's written by someone who appears to believe that occupying the morally approved position is itself a kind of intellectual achievement. Remeikis seems to want credit not just for attacking Howard, but for attacking him from the correct moral altitude. Yet moral altitude, by itself, is cheap. Plenty of mediocre writers have it. The harder task is to turn that instinct into a work of discriminating intellectual honesty. Instead, she produces the familiar spectacle of a writer with a platform and a grievance, discovering that book-length arguments are less forgiving than commentary. Where It All Went Wrong will flatter readers already convinced that Howard is the source of everything rotten in modern Australia. But it will not deepen anyone's understanding of Howard, his era, or the wider political failures that made modern Australia what it is.  In the end, the book does less damage to Howard than to Remeikis's own pretensions as a serious political writer. She set out to expose the hollowness of his legacy but instead exposed her own limitations. *Professor Peter van Onselen co-authored the critically acclaimed bestseller John Winston Howard: The Biography (Melbourne University Press), named the best biography of 2007 by The Wall Street Journal No comments have so far been submitted. 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