The man who missed his moment in history

End of a dream: Costello’s unfulfilled ambition

But the meat in Howard’s statement was this: “He was treasurer in a government which left Australia better able to weather the financial storms of recent times than virtually any other nation in the world.

Here was the final insult, that last slap across the face as Costello walked out the door: apparently, the lowliest Howard government backbencher could take as much credit for Australia’s strong economic position as could Costello, who served for more than 11 years as treasurer.

Costello did announce his intention to leave the Parliament the day after the 2007 election but his formal declaration this week that he would not renominate in Higgins, a seat he will have held for 20 years come next year, still came as a shock.

Privately, Costello has said that the success in pushing through his most important policies had, by the final term of the Howard government, left him with little more than a lower-tax agenda to pursue.

To understand exactly how Costello could have gone from hankering, badgering, posturing for the Liberal leadership for so long to, in what seems a very short space of time, abandoning his dream and walking away, his crushing disillusionment with Howard and the organisational structure and culture of the Liberal Party are the keys.

It took more than 10 years, but eventually at the mid-point of the Howard government’s final term, Costello, as putative prime-minister-in-waiting, finally came to understand what he was up against.

Howard and many in the party would be saying that they could not change leaders during a global financial crisis.

As he has said several times since his book The Costello Memoirs was released last year, he had joined the Liberal Party but in his final years in government found himself serving the Howard Party.

Costello’s exit might have resolved his own immediate future, but it leaves unresolved cultural problems within the Liberal Party that Costello diagnosed in his memoir.

When Costello was first touted as a potential prime minister, back in 1980 when he was a nationally prominent student leader and had just joined the Liberals, Victorian interests, led by Malcolm Fraser, dominated the party.

Since the 1990 election, the entirety of Costello’s time in Parliament, there have been five leaders and none of them have been Victorian.

One of the main internal legacies of Howard’s stint at the helm, and his breaking of Costello’s political, rather than policy, objectives is this: the party’s leadership is now firmly centred in Sydney, with the Liberals’ two most prominent figures, Turnbull and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey, holding seats either side of the harbour.

There’s little point now in wondering whether Costello could have been a successful prime minister or even a good leader of the Liberal Party.

theage.com.au

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