The Howard Government was the most ideologically radical in Australia's history, transforming Australian values in a way to which the Labor Opposition had no answer, former Labor leader Bill Hayden said yesterday.
Mr Hayden, who constructed the Labor policy platform on which Bob Hawke later cruised into government in 1983, said that under John Howard large sections of the Labor constituency had been remade with "middle-class employer values" antithetical to Labor traditions.
As a result, Labor now faced the "seemingly impossible conundrum" of holding its remaining working-class base while simultaneously appealing to the "new, middle-class small-business people Howard and [Employment Minister Tony] Abbott have created," Mr Hayden said. [...]
Mr Hayden suggested the transformation wrought by the Howard years would be permanent, and that Labor could "wither" as a result.