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"There's real anger about that," agreed the Prime Minister. (November 22,
2007, para. 9-11)
Rudd, on the other hand, avoided engaging in the history/culture wars debate, seeming to
engage only with practical topics such as the national curriculum, about which he had
expressed his perspective early in 2007 in consideration of the federal election later that year.
One reason for his decision (undoubtedly strategically considered) not to enter any
history/culture wars debate can be found when responding (as the new Prime Minister,
having defeated Howard) to why he presented an apology to Indigenous Australians of the
so-named Stolen Generations. In February, 2008 G. Henderson wrote, “...the Prime Minister
declared that his position on the apology had nothing to do with the culture wars which he
dismissed as “abstract intellectual academic theoretical debates”” (2008c, para. 12). Even
before the 2007 federal election took place, and in the days leading up to it, the end of the
history/culture wars was being discussed. Certainly post the 2007 federal election, this debate
seems to have largely disappeared from the public domain.
The end of the history/culture wars (perhaps) called prematurely in 2006 by various
commentators. For example, journalist Michelle Grattan wrote an article in The Age with the
headline reading “Howard claims victory in national culture wars” (2006, p.1); and Inga
Clendinnen’s wrote “the ‘history wars’ might be over, but history is in the news again
because the Prime Minster has put it there” (Clendinnen, 2006, p.1). The election defeat of
Prime Minister John Howard on 24 th November, 2007 saw a more rigorous assertion that the
end of the cultural wars had arrived, or if not the end, then it was hoped the newly elected
Rudd government would “…signify an important cultural realignment for the nation”
(Soutphommasane, 2007, para. 8), moving away from Howard who “...yearned for the
certainties of the old Australia” and a “‘relaxed and comfortable’ national identity” (2007,
para. 9). Whether this is actually the case or not is a debatable point, and one which Noel
Pearson took up in his The Weekend Australian column the weekend following Howard’s
loss. Discussing the resumption of parliament led by a new government, and the issue of
saying sorry for injustices of the past towards Indigenous Australian, N. Pearson wrote that
this “…draws the new PM and the Labor government immediately back to ground zero of the
Australian history and culture wars of the past decade and a half” (2007, p. 23). There were
favourable recollections from conservative commentators, even internationally, of Howard’s
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