Keating, Howard and constitutive politics: splitting the difference

Paul Keating and John Howard, as Australian Prime Ministers, were architects of some of the most profound changes in the Australian polity of the last thirty years. This article engages with recent accounts of their terms of office which have insisted that the continuities between these two very different Prime Ministers are far more significant than their differences, one even going so far as to claim that they contributed to a single “Australian project”. This paper insists that such a view misses what is most significant in any comparative perspective on Howard and Keating – their “constitutive politics” - and therefore misses what is essential to their immense impact on Australia. It also misses how each, via their “constitutive politics”, contested Australia’s relationship to the United Kingdom in the most fundamental terms.