The Hawke and Howard show

Time heals and a shared fascination with politics mellows old foes.

And so it was when Bob Hawke and John Howard - between them prime ministers for 20 years - came together in comfortable fellowship at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

In the 1980s, when they were direct opponents, they had little in common personally, even though they agreed on some of the big policy questions such as floating the dollar.

Hawke was the ruthless larrikin; Howard the uptight challenger whose time would come later. Howard was then much less relaxed with a media he now calls "aggravating", and meaning it as a compliment.

The odd couple were marking the club's 50th anniversary. Every prime minister from Menzies has appeared there. This pair, between them, 57 times.

Hawke started by calling Howard his "old political adversary and good friend". They agreed several times and exchanged the occasional guffaw.

Howard was probably the more interesting. But then he's younger and has been out of the game for much less time. He never, he said, lost his "boyish excitement" for the job.

While both were judicious in their remarks about current politics, it was clear they were troubled.

Howard said both sides were fragmenting and suffered from the disease of factions, which were "preferment co-operatives".

On the other hand, the parties were less ideological, which was a good thing. Australians didn't like zealots and fanatics.

The parties relied too much on slogans and too little on good argument. Another regrettable trend was the increasing number of MPs with no life experience outside politics.

Hawke thought his government - and here he acknowledged his much more bitter rival Paul Keating - had made Australia the most economically literate country in the world.

However, he was disturbed by the current attitude of Australians to parliament and the democratic process. It was held in contempt and disdain.

And he warned that oppositions couldn't expect to win government - unless the incumbent was going really badly - simply by opposing everything. That's a modest whack at both sides.

Hawke's big policy idea was dealing with the "blight" of federal-state relations by getting rid of the states.

Howard didn't think that was possible, but acknowledged that if you could start building Australia again, you wouldn't have states.

Unsurprisingly, they didn't argue when it was put to them that they'd both been better at selling big reforms than the current lot.