John Hewson

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For the English soldier and regicide, see John Hewson (regicide).

John Hewson
Opposition Leader of Australia
In office 3 April 1990 – 23 May 1994
Preceded by	Andrew Peacock
Succeeded by	Alexander Downer
Constituency	Wentworth
Born	October 28, 1946 (1946-10-28) (age 61) Sydney, New South Wales
Political party	Liberal Party

Dr John Robert Hewson AM (born 28 October 1946) is an Australian economist and former politician. He was federal leader of the Liberal Party of Australia from 1990 to 1994, and led the party to defeat at the 1993 federal election.

[edit] Early life

Hewson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, the son of a working-class, politically conservative engineer. He was educated at state schools, and then at the University of Sydney, where he graduated in economics. He then gained a master's degree from the then Regina campus of the University of Saskatchewan (from 1974 the University of Regina) and a second masters and a doctorate in economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1967 he married Margaret Deaves.

Returning to Australia, Hewson worked as an economist for the Reserve Bank of Australia. From 1976 to 1983 he was employed as an economic advisor to two successive Liberal Treasurers, Phillip Lynch and John Howard. During this period he developed a keen interest in politics, and was determined to enter politics himself. While a strong Liberal, he was critical of what he saw as the weakness and inconsistency of economic policy under Malcolm Fraser's government. He was a supporter of some of the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher.

After the defeat of the Fraser government in 1983, Hewson went into business journalism, and became a director of a private bank, the Macquarie Bank. This allowed the Labor Party to tag him as "a wealthy banker" when he entered politics. During this period he also went through a messy divorce. In 1988 he married Carolyn Somerville.

[edit] Entry into politics

In 1987 Hewson was elected to the House of Representatives for the upper-class Sydney electorate of Wentworth. He was lucky to enter Parliament at a time when there was a leadership vacuum on the conservative side of politics. His former employer John Howard had just lost the 1987 elections, and the Liberals had no obvious alternative leader. In September 1988 Howard appointed him shadow Finance Minister. In May 1989, when Andrew Peacock replaced Howard as Leader, Hewson became shadow Treasurer to Paul Keating. In the lead up to the 1990 election, Hewson, the trained economist, performed well against Keating, whose grasp of economics had only developed during his time as Treasurer.

When Peacock was defeated at the 1990 elections, Hewson was elected to the Liberal leadership, despite having been in Parliament only three years. He defeated Peter Reith 62 votes to 13. (Reith was then elected deputy leader and Hewson made him Shadow Treasurer.) His positive qualities were his strength in economic policy, and his attractive media personality. But he had no experience in other areas of policy, his views on most issues were unknown, and he had little experience of political tactics, particularly against such hardened veterans as Hawke and Keating. He was vulnerable to the accusation that he was a narrow economic technocrat, and his Thatcherite views laid him open to criticism.

[edit] Fightback! and the bid for Prime Ministership

Shortly after the leadership change, Hewson made up ground on the Hawke government in the opinion polls, as the Australian economy went into deep recession and unemployment skyrocketed. Hewson was determined to make a break with what he saw as the weak pragmatism of past Liberal leaders. In November 1991 he launched "Fightback!", a radical economic policy package. The key elements of the package were introduction of a consumption tax called the goods and services tax (GST), the compensatory abolition of a range of other taxes such as sales tax, deep cuts in income tax for the middle and upper-middle classes, and increases in pensions and benefits to compensate the poor for the rise in prices flowing from the GST.

In December, Keating successfully challenged Hawke and became Prime Minister.

Through 1992 Keating mounted a campaign against the Fightback package, and particularly against the GST, which he described as an attack on the working class in that it shifted the tax burden from direct taxation of the wealthy to indirect taxation of the mass of consumers. Keating memorably described the impact of Hewson's GST as "15% on this, 15% on that." Keating famously described Hewson as a "feral abacus."

This assault forced Hewson into a partial backdown, agreeing not to levy the GST on food. But this concession opened Hewson to charges of weakness and inconsistency, and also complicated the arithmetic of the whole package, since the weakening of the GST reduced the scope for tax cuts, the most attractive element of the package for middle-class voters. The complications of the new package were famously demonstrated in the "Birthday Cake Interview", in which Hewson was unable to answer a question posed by journalist Mike Willessee about whether or not a birthday cake would cost more or less under a Coalition government. Hewson was instead forced into a series of circumlocutions about whether the cake would be decorated, have ice cream in it and so on.

In August 2006 Andrew Denton conducted an in-depth Interview with Hewson on ABC TV program Enough Rope. Upon being shown footage of the Birthday Cake Interview John Hewson commented "Well I answered the question honestly. The answer's actually right. That doesn't count...I should have told him (Mike Willesee) to get stuffed!". [1] According to Channel 9's 20 to 1 episode Unscripted and Unplanned^{[citation needed]}, it was the moment Hewson lost the election with the interview held 10 days before polling day.^[1] However, polls right up to election day supported a Coalition victory.^[2]

Hewson's personal detestation of Keating clouded his judgment, and he lacked the political skills to counter Keating effectively. At the March 1993 election Hewson was defeated by Keating, losing what many had described as "the unloseable election" for the Liberals. The issue of the GST was dropped from the Liberal Party's agenda until the 1998 election campaign.

Despite previously having pledged to resign the leadership in the event that he was defeated at the 1993 Federal Election, Hewson decided to continue in his position. He defeated a post-election party leadership challenge from John Howard but his position was never secure from that point onward and political colleagues such as Peter Costello, Alexander Downer and Bronwyn Bishop consistently undermined his leadership over the subsequent year. In 1994 he attempted to quell leadership speculation by calling a leadership ballot, but he lost the vote and the leadership to Alexander Downer. In February 1995 he resigned from Parliament after one of the shortest parliamentary careers of any leader of a major political party.

[edit] After politics

Since his departure from politics, he has written extensively for the business and general press, and spent time on the lecture circuit. In his writings he demonstrated an increasing focus on corporate social and environmental responsibility. In 2003 he became chairman of RepuTex, a new company that conducts assessments of companies on these criteria, as well as issuing an annual public listing of Australia's top 100 companies on these criteria.

After 1996 he became increasingly critical of Prime Minister John Howard. In 2003 he opposed Howard's decision to take part in the Iraq War although in 2004 argued it would be electoral "suicide" for the Liberal Party to replace Howard with an alternate leader at the time.

He became Professor of Management at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Dean of the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in 2002 but resigned within two years after a falling out with the University's then vice-chancellor, Di Yerbury.

He has also served as a consultant to ABN AMRO. [2]

In July 2006, Hewson gave an interview to ABC's Four Corners program in which he voiced concern at the growing influence of what he characterised as a "hardline right religious element" in the NSW branch of the Liberal Party. [3] This was in breach of a Liberal Party rule about speaking to the media and he may face expulsion from the party for doing so. [4]

In August 2006 Andrew Denton conducted an in-depth Interview with Hewson on the ABC TV program Enough Rope, discussing both politics and aspects of his personal life. [5]

In mid 2005 Dr. Hewson was elected onto the Touring Car Entrants Group of Australia (TEGA) board as an indenpendant member. He left in June 2006 after a dispute with V8 Supercars Australia Chairman Tony Cochrane.

As of December 2006, John Hewson has held the position of chairman of the board of directors for the Elderslie Group, a company whose primary interests lie in the areas of corporate finance and property investments, but maintains a variety of other interests Australia-wide.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Video – John Hewson's satirical history of the Liberal Party
• RepuTex corporate website
• Elderslie Finance corporate website