In a very rare selfless act in Australian Politics Malcolm Frazer steps down opening the way for Andrew Pea to become PM. Pea builds a new front bench with JW Howard as treasurer in a complete revitalisation and reinvention of the government.

They avoid the big spending deficits that undid Frazer and manage to re engage with the electorate.

Where would we be now?

I don't know that an Andrew Peacock led liberal government would have done any better economically or politically than a Fraser led one. Bob Hawke described him in his memoirs as being likeable but unencumbered by any knowledge whatsoever of economics. Its not just an old enemy taking another shot either, Hawke described Howard as a thoroughly competant politician in the same book and said that he thought the economy would have been in better shape in the early 80's if Howard rather than Fraser had been leader.

However, I'll work on the assumption that your premise is correct and that he did an ok job, which would have meant letting Howard doing his job as treasurer, unlike Malcom Fraser. I'd say big differences that we would have in Australia today would be:

 

1. We wouldn't have Medicare.

2. We never would have gone through the centralised industrial relations experiment with the accord.

3. We would have had tax refrom in 1988 rather than 1998.

4. We wouldn't have the same degree of entrenched middle class welfare as we do now.

5. Defence spending would be something closer to 2.5% of GDP rather than 1.9% and we would still have an aircraft carrier.

6. We wouldn't have gone into as much debt as we did during the recession in the early 90's, we might not have gone in as deeply and we might have come out of it more quickly.  

7. Australian soldiers would still get British Victoria Crosses and high achievers would still be able to aspire to be named Sir or Dame by the queen.

8. There would still have been children living in poverty in the year 2000.

 

I do however think we would have still undergone tariff, monetary and microeconomic reform as John Howard was touting those long before Paul Keating but couldn't get them past Fraser. The only question would have been whether Labor in opposition would have been obliging as the liberals. Their form during the Howard years suggest that this might not have been the case.

 

Howard being allowed free reign as treasurer is pivotal to this vignette. This would have reduced the size of the deficit and set us up better for the 80's. With luck we could have broken the "ratbag" unions as well as having a proper GST i.e. no exclusions by the end of the 80's.

 

Ideally Labor under Keating would have got up in the late 80's introducing Medicare, compulsory Superannuation, deregulating the banks, and above all beat some common sense into the remaining unions through to the mid 90's when the Liberals would be returned under Howard.

 

I think, as you suggested we likely would have bought a carrier, but at the expense of the ANZAC's and possibly the submarine program, although I believe there was too  much support, across the political spectrum and industry for the subs to have been canned. Probably additional FFG's would have been bought or built as the original plan was to have 10 with the possibility of an earlier acquisition of AEGIS to replace the DDG's in the late 90's.

 

What would the carrier have been as Invincible was not available, would we have built a new Invincible, a modified invincible or retendered the entire project? Would we have recommissioned Melbourne to fill the gap, lease / borrow Hermes or do without a carrier for several years? One of the original designs on offer was a modified GT powered LHA maybe we could have ended up with a pair of dockless GT powered ski jump and VLS equipped Wasps.

 

I remember reading around the time that they were looking at refurbishing an Iwo Jima class assault ship in the light carrier role with harriers.

 

A SM-1 armed, GT powered, Skijump equipped Iwo Jima derivative was selected as the preferred design over the other finalist the SCS (the base design used for the Principe de Asturias). This all changed when Invincible was announced as surplus to RN requirements.

The idea behind this thread is that Peacock is Prime Minister instead of Fraser, and Howard is Treasurer instead of.... Howard?????