Alan Jones' speech from the launch of Liberals & Power by Peter van Onselen (ed) last Friday, 7 November.

I have accepted the invitation to launch this book today mindful of the fact that I wasn't originally chosen to open the innings.

Thankfully I can't remember who was, but I accepted because I hold the seemingly unfashionable view that Liberals have historically, in this country, been more worthy of trust with political power than the alternative.

However, my enthusiasm was spurred by the knowledge that this collection of essays seeks to say something about the Prime Ministership of John Howard and, through that, canvasses directions for the Liberal Party in the future.

It is fashionable, in talking about John Howard, to highlight the catalogue of failure, notwithstanding that all political reigns contain seeds of their ultimate demise.

It's instructive that the book opens with a chapter by Robert Manne, who struggles to say anything worthwhile about John Howard.

But what he does say is couched in the language of political theory and often pseudo political philosophy.

The notion is canvassed that somehow, as one of the chapter headlines suggests, Howard was immersed in "the rise of populist conservatism".

If this means a politician recognising that he's not much more than a powerful public servant charged with great responsibility and authority from those who elected him, then all politicians have an obligation to be populist.

They also have an obligation, though, to exercise judgment as to what is right or wrong in the best interests of Australia.

Indeed, I would argue that judgment is most probably all that politicians have going for them, not fancy notions of political theory or a pretentious propensity to define one "ism" as opposed to another.

No politician in high office is devoid of advice.

Advice will come, as Shakespeare would suggest, not in single file but in battalions.

A leader is a good leader when his judgment allows him to choose, from amongst all options, that which best serves his country.

On so many of the issues that John Howard is criticised for, the jury is very much yet to deliver its verdict.

A library could be built of the views of Australians and what they expect of their Government on this issue.

But it's hard to read too many highlighting where multiculturalism has been a demonstrable failure.

No one objects to a nation that is multiracial.

But if national sovereignty is to mean anything, most Australians would believe all those multiracial strengths and weaknesses should sit under one umbrella, the umbrella of the nation which is Australia.

To believe that there is virtue in a plurality of competing cultures is to sow some of the seeds of difficulty that we are confronting now.

Then, of course, there's the odium that John Howard is branded with in relation to Aboriginal policy.

Proof of the strength of the Howard argument is that in spite of decades of throwing money at the problem, we still have Governments of all persuasions telling us that Aboriginal health, housing and education are still in a shameful state.

And, interestingly enough, not one iota better off as a result of an apology issued by the incumbent Prime Minister.

John Howard talked about practical reconciliation.

Had he said what Noel Pearson is now saying, then he most probably would have been run out of town.

But Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine are echoing the very position on this vexed question that John Howard has argued all his life.

Robert Manne suggests that "Howard's resistance to the ethnic racial transformation of Australia was rooted partly in local forces".

What on earth does that mean.

What it may mean to most Australians is empty theory as opposed to the task that politicians have of practical government.

Howard also gets belted over the head for his handling of the so-called Hanson affair. 

It seems that the most mind-numbing views of the Left with all their often vituperative outpourings can be foisted upon any unsuspecting Australian.

Indeed, denigration is often the order of the day.

But it's okay, so long as it's denigration from the Left.

When Pauline Hanson spoke she had to be silenced.

It mattered little if you agreed with her or not.

Yet as an Australian, she was surely entitled to her view.

John Howard should be given credit for recognising that that freedom to speak was central to what our forefathers fought and died for.

Then there's the issue of asylum seekers and somehow the "explosive nature of public sentiment" is a terrible thing that forced the Labor Party "to toe the Howard line".

What on earth is government of the people, by the people and for the people about if it can dismiss or trivialise "the explosive nature of public sentiment".

And then I note that the Prime Minister chose "friendly talkback radio hosts" and I am amongst them.

John Howard would well remember the many occasions on which the interviews with me were anything but friendly.

But no censure of non-conservative leaders for choosing friendly, pliant and almost sycophantic media outlets.

In other words, in all of this there is a decided absence of objectivity about the Howard performance.

Howard is condemned simply because he believes and thinks differently from some of his critics.

Many Australians for many years simply said to that, thank God.

And then of course the issue of global warming.

Because John Howard didn't accept the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change, he was ignoring "the depth of the danger posed to the wellbeing of the earth because of the growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases in the earth's atmosphere which was caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas".

I thought the respected economic commentator Terry McCrann got it right when he described global warming as "a crazy religious cult that infected the world in the early years of the 21st century.".

He described the British Stern report as an uneasy mix of religion married to dodgy economical and statistical analysis.

As Terry McCrann said, even the notion of tackling climate change is a nonsense. 

He said, "If we reduce our emissions by 100 per cent we have no impact on the climate, not just the global climate but our local climate. If we reduce our emissions by zero or double them, we'd have no impact on global climate or our climate".

But there is no recognition by the climate change apologists that they might in any way be wrong.

John Howard's obligation as Prime Minister, unfashionable though it might be, was to not take Australia into the promotion of a theory of science which many were arguing as fraudulent.

Dr David Bellamy, the famed UK environmental campaigner, has said "Global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can't be fixed."

Australians may live to regret that they were seduced into believing that John Howard was wrong and his critics were right.

To his credit, Mr Howard didn't give ground.

But I note Robert Manne talks about the Howard Government's "unwillingness to rise to the challenge of global warming".

And it goes further, "Any restoration of the good name of the Liberal Party requires a fearless reckoning with the abject failure of the Howard Government in relation to global warming".

If John Howard had expressed such certainty about being right, he would have been roundly condemned.

It is instructive to note the Abbott essay.

As always with Tony Abbott, he sustains his argument with unarguable fact.

Where would we be today, in the wake of the Democratic-induced low doc loans and sub-prime mortgage crisis in America, the authors of whom were esteemed leaders of the Democratic Party, without the strength of the Howard legacy.

John Howard and his Government saw this country through some awful times, whether it was Bali or an Asian economic crisis, reforming the waterfront, or creating two million new jobs.

As Tony Abbott writes, a 20 per cent increase in real wages, a doubling of net wealth per head, surely these can't be dismissed as mere economic accomplishments of no moral account.

Indeed, we're learning today how hard they are to come by.

Then the boat people and the Iraqi war.

There would be flaws in the prosecution of both, but flaws based on hindsight.

An Iraqi leader who had defied every dictate of the United Nations and murdered and brutalised people.

Far from there being no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was the greatest weapon of mass destruction.

And whatever the limitations of the asylum programme might be, the world got the message that we were no soft touch when it came to seeking to enter our country via the back door.

And yet the Howard efforts on these and other issues were prosecuted by his enemies with a hatred that, thankfully, has never entered the attitude or the behaviour of John Howard.

But even the book itself seems steeped in the kind of hypocrisy that is inherent in many of the judgments of John Howard.

Plagiarism by one of the contributors, Julie Bishop.

As the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University Greg Craven wrote recently, "The simple truth is that Bishop did not fail to personally author a piece for Peter van Onselen's edition because she was incapable, rather, she had it written by one of her staffers because that is the standard practice of senior political life".

How can it be plagiarism for someone to author a Julie Bishop chapter because she's too busy, but not plagiarism for Kevin Rudd to read someone else's speech, equally because he is too busy.

As Professor Craven wrote, "Since the time King David stood for the seat of Jerusalem East, politicians have had words put into their mouths. Often when we thrill to the oratory of Gough Whitlam, we actually are responding to Graham Freudenberg. And who was Paul Keating but the support act for Don Watson.

"Of course," writes Craven, "there is the odd eccentric like Tony Abbott who nobly pursues the craft of Churchill and Menzies, and they are to be honoured as the splendid freaks they are. But to pretend the average Minister, Shadow Minister, Governor, captain of industry or chain store behemoth forges their own words is like believing that there really is a Colonel Sanders behind Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Indeed Greg Craven argues that "if Bishop, as deputy leader of the Opposition, withdrew from the political fray to labour over a theoretical thesis, the same columnists now damning her as a plagiarist would be dismissing her as invisible and an irrelevant swot".

So in many ways, Julie Bishop is a symbol of the book itself.

The standards applied to her are not applied to her critics.

The standards applied to John Howard are not applied to his successors.

There would have been greater merit in the criticism of John Howard if three issues had been addressed.

One, the failure to do anything worthwhile about water and the failure to prosecute the argument that we don't have a problem with water, we've got plenty of it.

We just can't get it from where it is to where it's needed.

The Howard Government failed to deliver on water and we are paying the price.

Equally, the Government failed to warn the nation that it was living beyond its means.

As a result of this profligacy, we have a 700 billion dollar net foreign debt bill, which has made us vulnerable to those overseas to whom we owe the money.

It should have been possible to mobilise the more than one trillion dollars of national superannuation money to the future development of our country.

Better to reward and mobilise domestic savings, and educate Australians to understand that there could be no better use of their superannuation funds than in rebuilding Australia.

And the third point, which is a corollary of the second, is that the Government failed to haul in middle class welfare to such an extent that 42 per cent of Australian families receive more in welfare now than they pay in tax.

It's impossible to accept that as our nation got richer, our welfare bill got greater.

In my view these would be legitimate criticisms.

You could add those volunteered in his essay by Professor David Flint when he talks about mental health, drugs policy, the decline of infrastructure, the decline in educational standards, the decline in law and order.

But this then raises significant conflict with the States and that is most probably the subject for another book.

May I congratulate the contributors, many of whom I've known for a long time, the integrity of whose views I and others respect.

The future is, as Brett Mason has written, and Janet Albrechtsen, a battle of ideas.

And that battle will go on.

But it mustn't be sidetracked simply because there are snipers from the sidelines.

Or be intimidated, as Janet Albrechtsen rightly says, by the Marxist view that capitalism has outlived its purpose.

Janet Albrechtsen gets it right when she says "I'm not suggesting the Liberal Party should succumb to Utopian blueprints in order to inspire, but it does need to reframe its message to take account of how human nature shifts as the economic cycle turns".

As she rightly says, "At this juncture in the cycle it means that the Liberal Party must learn to frame policies and pitch its messages in a way that appeals to both rational thought and people's emotions".

To that extent it might be time to cease listening to the image-makers.

The electorate is not unintelligent.

There are two major challenges, and they're not philosophical, they're attitudinal.

Politicians are there to service the electorate.

Tax cuts are yesterday's political clothes.

The electorate today believes in Harbour Bridges and Snowy Mountains schemes, very fast trains, transporting water, kids not being educated in demountable classrooms.

They are reviled by people with mental illness sleeping under the Harbour Bridge, with police men and women becoming de facto mental health workers.

They are sickened by a statute book which says the use of drugs and the trafficking in them is illegal, yet we have heroin injecting rooms and needle exchange programmes under the fallacious guise of harm minimisation.

And the electorate don't want to hear that on issues critical to them there's some constitutional demarcation.

They elect a national government to build a nation that they're proud of, in which they want to live, where there's room for everyone, where strugglers are not left behind but where minorities don't carry inordinate sway.

Secondly and finally, the public, who are in all these things the final arbiter, share the view often expressed by the late Sir James Killen, a faithful servant of the Liberal Party, when he argued not all the good players are in the one team.

That point amplified would hear Jim Killen say "Give credit to the other bloke if he's got something worthwhile to say. Find virtue in your opponents and the electorate will find virtue in you".

Success in most things is attitudinal.

When Barack Obama talked about changing America, the first thing he had to do was to change their attitude towards political issues and political leadership.

That change was effected in the ballot box.

It makes all the other change a lot easier.

Too many people are not beaten in life, they just never fight.

Victory sometimes seems elusive and illusory.

I congratulate Peter on the work that he's done and the compilation that he offers.

I'm honoured to be given the opportunity to say a few words and to officially launch the book.