The day parliament was dissolved for the 2004 federal election, senior Howard government ministers met to authorise almost $4bn in sweeteners to announce during the election campaign.
A cabinet minute from 31 August 2004 records that three of the biggest spending promises Howard announced in the five ensuing weeks were signed off at that meeting in the government’s final hours.
Released by the National Archives on 1 January, the records of cabinet’s deliberations throughout 2004 show Howard and his colleagues were acutely conscious of the politics of their decisions as they prepared to seek re-election.
In that 11th-hour meeting, a pared-down cabinet of unnamed “senior ministers” allocated more than $1.7bn to increase the Medicare rebate for all GP visits from 85% to 100%, to take effect from the following January. They spent another $1bn for a new tax rebate of up to $500 for mature-age workers – backdated to 1 July – and $83m increasing the rebate for local medical services to veterans from 100% to 115% of the schedule fee. That was on top of a veterans’ access payment which Howard had authorised the day before.
The previous day, cabinet’s national security committee had directed that legislation be drafted to implement the recommendations of a recently completed national intelligence review and authorised millions of dollars in extra funding for agencies.
Cost of living ‘all-pervasive’
Speaking last month ahead of the release, Howard noted that then, as now, Australians were under financial pressure in an election year.
“The cost of living was all-pervasive,” Howard recalled. “And although things have changed a lot, one thing hasn’t changed and that is the dominance of cost of living as a pervasive political issue.”
Howard described 2004 as “a year that went up and down – and ended very agreeably”.
The records show cabinet grappling with major issues of global and national security, including climate change, the war in Iraq and the fear of terrorism, ever-present since the 11 September 2001 attacks and the 2002 Bali bombings. Several of the 2004 cabinet records relating to terrorism remain sealed.
Two years on from the devastating Bali attacks, cabinet was focused on devising a plan to protect critical infrastructure, with agencies directed to conduct “red team” testing to identify vulnerabilities. Ministers Philip Ruddock, Daryl Williams and Ian Macfarlane secured $50.6m in a decision taken swiftly to “counter criticism of alleged ‘slow progress’”.
After a bomb went off outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta on 9 September 2004, the cabinet moved fast to fund blast-proofing of the windows of all diplomatic missions worldwide.
The government’s hardline policy against asylum seekers remained a key focus. On 29 March, the cabinet received an update on its strategy to combat people-smuggling and discussed creating new offences, among other measures aimed at avoiding Australia receiving an adverse listing in a US congressional report on countries not doing enough.
In the same month the immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, sought cabinet’s agreement to increase the number of skilled migrants and expand the humanitarian category by 1,000 places and the refugee intake by 2,000. The prime minister’s department opposed the refugee increase, warning that a rise from 4,000 to 6,000 would carry “higher costs and greater risks of unsuccessful integration into the broader community”.
Howard’s confidence in spy agencies
The cabinet commissioned an official history of peacekeeping, not including operations in Timor-Leste, and endorsed the view of the veterans’ affairs minister, Danna Vale, that it must not be subject to “censorship” other than to protect official secrets. Vale noted the Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq operations would be handled separately, but counselled against the delays that had plagued histories of the Vietnam and Korean conflicts.
She said the Iraq volume was slated for 2009. Like the volumes on the Afghan conflict, it had still not been published in 2024. The second Timor volume is still being vetted.
In August, the cabinet was briefed on negotiations with Timor-Leste over maritime boundaries. Much of that record is redacted and one other on the subject has been withheld. Nine years later, leaked information revealed Australia’s secret intelligence services had bugged the Timorese cabinet room.
Commenting on the release of the records last month, Howard said he could not remember “the detailed discussions” about relations with Timor.
“I had such confidence in our external intelligence services that I think they would have always behaved in a way that promoted the Australian national interest.”
On 1 April 2004, the government had legislated to allow Asis to work more closely with foreign counterpart agencies, even those that might employ violence, and to use weapons to protect themselves.
But the cabinet explicitly directed that Asis officers were not permitted to engage in violent or paramilitary activities themselves, nor use weapons for anything other than self-protection.
Earlier in the year, ministers had wrestled with the cost of placing air marshals on planes – and the refusal of Qantas to provide free seats for them.
In a minute marked “Australian eyes only”, cabinet’s expenditure review committee authorised increasing the number of air marshals available for domestic and international flights, especially on Asian routes where the risk of a terrorist attack was deemed greatest. A trio of ministers sought an extra $43m over four years for the AFP, $14m of which was to pay for seats for the marshals. They reported that Qantas was only willing to provide seats free of charge on domestic flights and a 50-50 funding agreement for international flights was due to expire.
Ministers warned that unless the funding issue was resolved, Qantas was likely to accuse the government publicly of failing to provide support for counter-terrorism.
One domestic policy was proposed but then abandoned. On 22 March, the cabinet endorsed Howard’s proposal to seek to change the constitution so re-elected governments could use a joint sitting of both houses to pass legislation blocked in the previous term without having to call a double dissolution. But the public response was so negative he dropped it less than three months later.
Howard went on to win a majority in both houses at the election on 9 October, but would overreach with his WorkChoices legislation, resulting in him being tossed out of office – and his own seat – three years later.
The prime minister was also accused of playing wedge politics with a bill to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to allow scholarships specifically for male teachers. The education minister, Brendan Nelson, wrote to Howard about the issue in February 2004. Without receiving a formal submission, cabinet authorised the attorney general, Philip Ruddock, to draft legislation.
The move enraged some in the Labor party, with the WA MP and former premier Carmen Lawrence writing in the Sydney Morning Herald that the government was “using a potentially divisive social issue to political advantage”.
“It has already used such tactics on all the usual suspects – the people the Howard government has encouraged us to think of as ‘not one of us’ – Indigenous Australians, refugees, single mothers, the unemployed, homosexuals,” she wrote.
The sex discrimination commissioner and former NSW state Liberal minister Pru Goward also raised concerns about creating discriminatory scholarships. The bill was introduced on 11 August but never passed, lapsing when parliament was dissolved 18 days later.
