It was a landslide win that swept John Howard to power in 1996, washing away more than a decade of Labor rule under Hawke and Keating. With a 45-seat majority that would be the envy of today's politicians, a young government was ready to get to work on its economic reforms.
Fate intervened and less than two months later, the new prime minister and the nation were confronted with a tragedy at Port Arthur that would lead to landmark gun laws still in place today.
The inner workings of the government in those early years have been revealed in thousands of pages of declassified cabinet files, released by the National Archives of Australia. They reveal how cabinet refined the gun buyback program over months, trying to placate angry farmers, sporting shooters and collectors - and some in the government's own ranks.
The cabinet surged ahead with economic reforms to get the budget into surplus. The national shipping line was sold, as was Telstra. The papers also reveal some of the tougher measures that cabinet considered, but never went through with, like a plan to put a 12-month limit on unemployment payments.
Cabinet wanted the savings but internally, admitted the proposal would create a 'poverty trap', pushing people through the doors of charities and into the informal cash economy. The cabinet was deeply concerned about being internationally isolated over climate change
And strategized about how to avoid sanctions for rejecting the binding emissions targets in the Kyoto agreement. Cabinet historian Paul Strangio is from the National Archives.
When the landmark Wik case expanded Indigenous land rights, the cabinet set about looking for new test cases it could get involved with, warning the rights of pastoralists and miners were under threat. There were big cuts to immigration - but levels were much higher by the time Howard left office in 2007.
And the government went ahead with reforms that gave Australian-born citizens the right to become dual citizens. And, right in the footnotes of the documents was a prescient warning that the change could cause problems for politicians much later on, as then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull noted in 2018.
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