Howard was not a major economic reformer, the key reform of his premiership was the GST which was a Hewson relic anyway. His economic record is catergorised by penny pinching spending cuts in a wide range of services, nothing draconian like Bob Bown would lead us to believe but still enough to gain a significant amount of government revenue. He used most of this money on progressive tax cuts, noteably these were across the board tax cuts. The result of which were signifcantly more money was entering the wallets of the wealthy then the working class so the extra money the working class got is offset by inflation prompted by the increased spending of the wealthy and subsequent inflation. However as this favoured business, in particular expanding big business it did stabilise employment figures.
What he did that was really conservative was curtailing minimum wage rises and pension increases whilst wages rocketed for upper middle class and beyond, very rich getting richer, but that ensured high employment even if high employment didn't mean satisfactory income.
