But listen to John Howard tell it and you will hear that the Howard's baulked at leaving Wollstonecraft for glittering Kirribilli. The prime minister still wonders aloud whether he and his family might have been more content if they had stayed. If he had not mentioned in the very first press conference he gave as prime minister-elect in March 1996 the yen to stay in the family home, it would seem a preposterous affectation now. But there it is: this decade later, he says he and his wife seriously considered staying in the house that had been their home for all the years of his political career before he became prime minister in 1996.

“We quite literally ... I was tempted - in fact, had some work done - I had the idea that we might stay at Wollstonecraft,” Howard tells The Bulletin.

“And obviously I’d spend a lot of time in Canberra and at The Lodge and occasionally use Kirribilli for this or that. But the reason why in the end we didn’t do that [stay in Wollstonecraft] - it would have cost a lot of money for the security arrangements. They would have needed to have constructed police boxes. It would have been very disruptive. You’d have needed to have lights and all the rest.”

The Howard's never quite warmed to the idea of moving to Canberra and The Lodge. Sydneysiders by birth and inclination, they courted criticism by snubbing the official residence in the national capital and moving the few suburbs from Wollstonecraft, becoming the first, First Family to settle full-time into Kirribilli House.

Would you and your wife have been happier if you hadn’t shifted to Kirribilli? “I don’t know,” says Howard. “We’ve been very happy. We liked the house [at Wollstonecraft]; we’re very fond of the house, our children grew up there. That’s why we’ve kept it.

“When I leave politics, we will go back there, obviously. It’s the only asset we’ve got.”

So here is the Little Aussie Home-owner. John Howard has long projected himself not only as the champion of the Aussie battler, but as one of them himself. Does he still do it because - even unconsciously - he knows what happens to tall poppies in Australia? “I just sort of did it naturally,” he maintains. “I haven’t really behaved as prime minister any differently from the way I behaved as a citizen.”

It is a Howard family article of faith. Years ago, at one of the receptions John and Janette Howard used to host for journalists travelling with them overseas, I recall Janette looking me straight in the eye and declaring: “We’re not eastern suburbs sort of people, you know. We don’t need to have the John Laws’ and the rest of them around.” She may as well have said: “We’re not like the Keating's. We are not upstarts. We don’t need Kirribilli House.”

Indeed, the Howard's’ form of conservatism, expressed in an unremitting ordinariness of behaviour, sometimes seems studied, for of course neither is ordinary in any usual sense of the term. Having survived 30 turbulent years in federal politics, this is a double act (Howard admits he would have got nowhere without his wife’s drive) that has created Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister, and one who is credited with reshaping Australia in his own image. When John Howard steps out each dawn on his ritual power walk, it is as if half Australia sighs contentedly, satisfied that all is right with the world, while the other half wakes in fright and fury at the very thought that such a mundane individual should lead their country.

But sometimes, up there with that view across the harbour, the big white car and the chauffeur in the driveway, the stupendous office at Parliament House, The Lodge in its private park, and the endless lines of advisers on hand, there surely must be days when it is difficult to remember the little people, those anonymous residents of Australia that Robert Menzies called the forgotten people and whom Howard renamed his battlers?

“No,” says Howard, the jaw set. “No. I’m very conscious when I’m there, and when I’m at The Lodge, that I am only there for a defined period of time. I don’t regard those places as mine. They’re assets of the Australian people, temporarily made available to whoever happens to be the prime minister of the time.”

And there is the essential John Howard. The one, at least, that he would like you to see. The ordinary bloke made good, with just the right degree of downside to save him getting too big for his boots.

At the end of it all there is a simple house in a pleasant suburb, kept vacant for the sunset years (whenever they may be); agreeable memories unsullied by tenants.

There is more than a touch of the Doris Day filter on this picture, but there is, too, more than a clue to the secret of Howard’s political success, the scale of which sometimes leaves even him disbelieving.

“There is still a bit about me that wonders every so often: geez, incredible isn’t it? I’m here,” he says, and he blinks.

In fact, the national dream of a house in a suburb and all that it represents has been Howard’s greatest political fortune. He admits it happily.

Having suffered overwhelming ridicule back in late 1988 when as opposition leader he lassoed his political manifesto “Future Directions” to the vision of the white picket fence, he is here to tell you he was right all along.

Indeed, if you were to search for Howard the politician, you could do little better than to return to that period, and the dreadful corruption of a word - “Incentivation”. It even offended Janette Howard, a former English teacher. Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared it sounded like “something that you’d do to a cat”. The word lasted precisely 24 hours before being dumped from the Howard lexicon and, within a few months, he was dumped from the Liberal leadership, too. Yet we remember it all these years later because it distils Howard’s political philosophy. Australians, it declared, needed to be taught incentive to improve their lives. Privatisation, labour market deregulation, income-tax cuts and a shift towards indirect taxation were all to be found in the manifesto.

Socially, the traditional family had to be strengthened, educational standards improved and a homogenous Australian culture embraced more robustly. Professional purveyors of guilt had attacked Australia’s heritage and people. There had to be a return to common sense and traditional values. Sound familiar?

Yes, and on the cover was that family, behind the picket fence.

Lurking within, unstated, was the real John Howard. The boy who, attending the cinema with his mother, had the temerity to drop an empty packet of Jaffas on the floor. His mother excoriated him, lecturing him that he had no right to expect someone else to pick up his discarded lolly wrapper - or anything else. To this day, Howard almost falls over himself to thank anyone who offers him so much as a cup of tea, and expects his fellow citizens to take responsibility for their own lives.

It is there in his industrial relations revolution along with the young Howard’s experience of working weekends at his father’s petrol bowser. Search the philosophy stated in “Future Directions” or Howard’s major decisions as prime minister and you will find the child everywhere.

There can be little doubt that he found his resolve to send troops to East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan from the reverence he has attached to the memory of his father and grandfather, both soldiers of World War I.

Search his generally tough economic policies and you will discover an unusual weakness for assisting families and stay at home mothers. Is his mother, widowed with four sons, to be found here? Of course. Right behind the picket fence.

It is a measure of the confidence that Howard has gained from 10 years as prime minister that he is not only comfortable talking about the subject, but that he raises it himself, unbidden. In the 1980s, Howard and his picket fence were howled down as hopelessly out of date, anachronisms from some nostalgic vision of the 1950s, where beaming families lived in bliss behind a myth.

So crushing was the disparagement that he has hardly mentioned it in the 17 years since. But suddenly, here in 2006, Prime Minister John Howard sneaks the old vision right into the middle of a conversation with The Bulletin. He is explaining how he has always believed that the “aspirationals” - that group of voters who aspire to home ownership and upward social mobility - were central to his destiny.

“A whole lot of people like that picket fence, Mr Wright,” he says, as if somehow imparting deep wisdom.

“What?” we respond, taken by surprise.

“A lot of people like the picket fence,” Howard repeats. “They may not have a picket fence, but they like what it means.”

“So you’re still a picket-fence man?”

“Oh yes, very much so,” the prime minister says. “Always will be.”

The reason, he says, is partly to do with his own life. Howard was just 16 when his father, gassed in World War I and a heavy smoker, died. Howard, a precocious young man whose intellectual abilities were more acute than his physical attributes - he was all but deaf as a child - has always seemed in need of a secure refuge: mother, wife, home. When Howard won his seat in parliament in 1974, about the first thing he and Janette did was buy the house in Wollstonecraft. When children came, they borrowed and built a second storey.

His belief in the picket fence, though, goes deeper. He sees it as emblematic of a fundamental urge in the national breast. “It’s because it is what people most want,” he says. “All those surveys of young people - what do they want most? Relationships and families. The ‘Y’ generation in particular want relationships and families. It is very important to them. I mean, it’s all mixed - families-slash-relationships. It all means the same thing. What they want most in life is a stable set of relationships which then translates into having a husband or wife and children.” Howard pauses and laughs a bit self-consciously. “They don’t have to have children ...”

“So I take it we are not going to see an end to the first home-buyers’ scheme?” we ask.

“No, you’re certainly not. Not a chance,” he retorts.

Howard’s belief that the picket fence and what it represents could sustain his political career beyond almost anything was confirmed for him in mid-2001 as he reeled through a period of dread, heading anxiously towards his third - and most controversial - election.

The first few months of 2001 had been disastrous for the Howard government. A culture of complaint swept the land. The Bulletin got in a car in February of that year and drove 2000km, stopping at pubs and roadside cafes and town halls to inquire what ailed Australians. We copped mouthfuls about petrol prices, the problems in complying with the GST, beer prices, roads packing up. The Liberal Party’s own federal president, Shane Stone, had written a memo (leaked to The Bulletin) that accused the government of looking “mean and tricky”. State elections everywhere were returning Labor governments.

Howard performed desperate back flips, placing a ceiling on fuel excise, rolling out new road funds, ordering that small business compliance problems with GST be fixed pronto. But then Victorian Liberal MP Peter Nugent died, and the Howard government was saddled with a by-election in Nugent’s electorate of Aston. The electorate spread across the suburbs of south-east Melbourne, out where Australia was perceived to be complaining most vociferously.

Here was Kim Beazley’s big chance to signal the end of the Howard era. With the suburbs fairly rattling the windows with unfocused anger, surely Labor could recapture the heartland it had lost to Howard?

“Labor should have won that by-election,” says Howard. “We had a terrible six months ... and it was an opportunity for the public to say ‘we’re not happy with this mob’ and give us a kick in the shins. But they didn’t do that.”

Underlining the extraordinary degree of dissent in the air, 15 candidates took their divergent viewpoints to the ballot. The Liberal candidate, Chris Pearce, came in almost 3000 votes ahead of Labor’s candidate, with all the others trailing daylight.

Howard savours the story. “I did the very first Insiders program [Sunday mornings on ABC-TV]; it went to air the morning after the Aston by-election and I was interviewed and I still had laryngitis,” he says. “I think I ruined my voice the night before out at the rugby match between Australia and the British Lions. And I said in that interview that I thought we were back in the game. I thought Aston was a good sign, quite a turning point to me. [It was] Beazley’s failure.”

It was also the success of Howard’s quarter-acre vision. The picket-fence factor had hooked deep into Aston, where the red-tiled rooftops spread like a sea. Howard had tossed an irresistible bait into Mortgage Ville, Australia.

A year before, on July 1, 2000, he had introduced the $7000 first home-buyers’ grant. Now he doubled it to $14,000. And the voters sent back a message that made his heart swell.

Most commentators who discuss the 2001 federal election, held a few months after Aston, remember it as the Tampa election. Howard insists that after Aston, he would have won even if the MV Tampa, loaded with rescued asylum-seekers, had not sailed across the horizon, giving him the opportunity to whip old-fashioned xenophobia into a frenzied debate about border protection. He even discounts the impact of the jets hijacked by al-Qaeda smashing into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, introducing the Age of Uncertainty two months before the election.

“I think we would have won without 9/11 and without Tampa. I’m not saying that it didn’t add something, but we would have won without those, that’s my view.”

It is, perhaps, a convenient thesis designed to limit history’s judgment on Howard’s willingness to use the Tampa’s wretched human cargo, and what many critics still consider his government’s election-eve rush to damn asylum-seekers as the sort of people who would throw their children into the sea.

Perhaps. But Howard has rarely shown a willingness to offer apologies for his stance on boat people, and he says quite baldly: “I don’t think children overboard was an issue in the election.”

He reserves an equal measure of disregard for those who believe Australia has become a meaner, more inward-looking nation during his 10 years as prime minister.

“Can I just tell you I think that’s bunk,” he snaps, pointing out that the response to victims of the Asian tsunami in January 2005 was by any measure more generous than that of the citizens of any other country. Australian involvement in volunteer and community work, he says, continues to grow apace.

“Can I just say,” he says, “that when people say that [Australia has become meaner], what they’re really saying is ‘because the public doesn’t share our view of what the nation’s priorities should be, therefore we’ve become mean-spirited and inward looking’.”

It is a telling response, because it puts Howard on the side of “the public”. The others, by inclination, are whingers spouting bunk.

Indeed, when we ask him to name the attributes of the nation now compared with the Australia inherited from Paul Keating in 1996, Howard implies he simply went along with what was in the heart of Australians.

“Oh, yeah, inevitably it’s different,” he says. “Its fundamental character has not changed; it’s always been a wonderful country. I am not so presumptuous as to imagine that I alter ... no prime minister alters the fundamental character of a country, and no prime minister should think he is so good that he can. But it’s different. I think it is a more confident country now, it feels more settled in its view of its place of the world. We no longer have these perpetual seminars on our identity anymore. They were boring. People think that it is pretty good being seen around the world as an Australian. Most people think the country is strong and prosperous and there is still a lot of opportunity if you work hard. That is how people think about Australia. I would say it’s a more confident country.”

Howard, too, is obviously a more confident prime minister than the hesitant, shoulder-jiggling man of a decade ago. So confident, in fact, that The Bulletin isn’t even tempted to ask when he might consider returning to Wollstonecraft. Howard isn’t about to tell anyone when he is thinking of retiring, for the perfectly sensible reason that he is not thinking of it. Treasurer Peter Costello is no longer hounding him for a timetable and opposition leader Kim Beazley appears about as politically threatening as a bowl of cabbage soup.