No man did more to dismantle modern Australia as a decent egalitarian oriented society than did he.

During his time in office he squandered the mining boom, the greatest bonanza to Australia in a 100 years and gave it away in grants and tax breaks, always with the next election in mind.

When Howard came to office Australia had a reasonably targeted and means tested welfare system that had evolved over many years; by the time he lost office most of the means testing was gone, the services to the people were reduced and the benefits of the economy systematically transferred to the big end of town in tax breaks and ridiculously generous superannuation concessions.

When Howard came to office Australia had a large and effective Women’s Bureau within the Department of Labour and National Service designed to monitor and develop strategies for equal pay, childcare and maternity leave, one of his first acts was to abolish it.

He eventually set up the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission with a tiny budget.

He slashed childcare funding and changed family benefits to encourage mothers to stay at home by skewing the tax system against working mothers.

He refused to consider introducing paid maternity leave.

He systematically reduced numbers in the public service but outsourced many of the functions to a new group of consultants, mostly displaced public servants.

Highly paid consultants now pursued exact functions that used to be carried out by well paid public servants.

Public Service numbers and the wage bill went down and everybody said bravo, but the real costs went up though hidden and less noticeable in other budgets.

In the process of this privatisation, Australia lost a lot of the “corporate memory” that had been built up over years by an efficient public service and dedicated public servants who were committed to the country more than to their own bottom line.

But pushing wealth upward with privatisations, de-mutualisations and the explosion of executive salaries was core business for Howard.

He was a follower, with Thatcher and Reagan, of the economists Hayek and Friedman: if government is kept small and out of the way and the wealthy helped get mega-wealthy the manna from their plates will waft down and fill the cups of the poor.

But then there are also more obvious things: his whipping up xenophobia over the Tampa to get a second term of office, the lies over the “children overboard” claims, the helping his mate George Dubbya to set fire to the Middle East on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction that they knew did not exist.

We also remember his legislating that marriage is exclusively between a man and a woman, his refusal to acknowledge past wrongs to aborigines and his tricking Australia out of becoming a Republic with his underhand wording of the referendum question.

But it’s not all bad news: Howard did effectively amend the gun laws and for that he should be thanked. However, probably the worst thing he did for Australia was embed a note of sneakiness in Australian political discourse. You always knew with Howard that no matter what he said there was always another agenda lurking. He was the Shane Warne of politics but that’s not a good thing.