For the 16-30 year-olds who constitute electiontracker's target demographic life before the Howard Government must seem like an awfully long time ago. 

Having scarcely any recollection of that election means I have absolutely no memory of what a Federal Labor Government was like.  It doesn't help that I was born four years after they came to power or that I was not even living in Australia for most of the early 90s.

With most of my age group having next to no personal recollection of The Hawke and Keating years it is left to politicians and the media to fill in the blanks.  Both are hardly reliable sources as the former tend to speak out of self interest and the latter would like Australia to believe the recreational exploits of Ben Cousins are the most important issue in the world at the moment.

The prevailing view of the Labor years is at best over-simplified and at worst completely fallacious.  The area that attracts the most discussion when talking about the previous Labor government is economics.

The current view of the economy under Labor is one of hardship and mismanagement – the early 1990-1991 recessions being the hallmark of this – and of a government that was light on reforms compared to current administration.

However a great deal of literature has come out this year to challenge this popular view.  In his book Ozonomics economist Andrew Charlton lists the number of economic reforms of the Hawke and Keating Governments compared to Howard's.  He lists 23 major reforms under the two Labor governments and only 13 under the Coalition.

From this we can gather the previous Labor governments were certainly no slouches when it came to economic reform.  
 
Arguably the three most important reforms of the Labor years were the floating of the Australian Dollar, the cutting of tariffs and the introduction of enterprise bargaining.  Former Prime Minister Paul Keating says these reforms are the reason the Australian economy is not overheating.  
 
He argues the current income surge is being buffeted by the rise in value of the Australian Dollar, and the low tariff walls and the enterprise bargaining system are moderating inflation.  
 
His summation is the "exchange rate taking the shocks, there's tariffs letting the deflation in and there's enterprise bargaining giving within sector flexibility keeping inflation low".  
 
Of course Keating would obviously want to say good things about Labor's record, but the evidence is hard to refute.  Whatever one thinks of the Coalition's economic management kudos must be given to the Hawke and Keating governments for contributing to Australia's current prosperity.  
 
The "recession we had to have" as Keating infamously put it is the main blotch on Labor's time in power.  By some measures it was the most severe economic downturn in Australia since the Great Depression.  
 
One could take two historical views of this event.  One is the belief that events are primarily shaped by leaders.  Winston Churchill was a proponent of this view for instance.  The other view is that the complex machinations of the general public are the real drivers of change.  
 
Subscribing to the first view means the Labor Government was entirely responsible for the rescission.  Adherence to the second means one accepts there were deeper forces at work.  
 
The truth as always seems to lie somewhere in between.  Former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane noted recently that of the 18 developed OECD countries 17 experienced a recession in that time.  So unless there was a convergence of coincidences on a monumental scale the early 1990s recession had a global aspect to it.  
 
Macfarlane contends that because the Australian economy was overheating in the late 1980s interest rates had to be raised to put the breaks on.  This in turn stopped investment and caused employment to fall.  
 
While Hawke and Keating were two of the main people involved in setting up interest rates, Macfarlane argues that if this were not done then the country would have most likely suffered an even more severe bust.  
 
The recession was also notable due the slow recovery.  Most recessions are followed with a big boom, but the early 1990s event lingered around for a long time.  Macfarlane says this was mainly due to the desire by the government and the reserve bank to finally curb inflation.  
 
Since that recession inflation in Australia has more or less stayed in the 2-3 per cent barrier desired by the Reserve Bank.  
 
While the Labor Government could have handled things better during the inflation it appears that many aspects of it were beyond their control and the severity of the incident had the positive effect of locking in moderate inflation for Australia in subsequent years.  
 
With all of this evidence it is very hard to categorise the Hawke and Keating governments as poor economic managers.  Those governments were not without their faults to be sure, but casting them in a completely negative light is neither fair nor reasonable.  
 
The Howard Government's own record in this area has been very good, but we should never forget that these issues are always more complex than they might seem.

Zackary McLennan is studying journalism at The University of South Australia. He is an active member of the Liberal Party and has been sharing his campaign experiences with electiontracker. 

Edited by Patrick May

Photo: Bentley Smith