Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Roll out the porky barrel

John Howard played silly buggers right to the end.

Only hours before setting off for Yarralumla to ask Governor-General Major-General Whatsisname for an October 9 election he was still teasing the media and everyone else, answering questions about election timing with winks and sniggers, evasions and lines like "That's for me to know and you to find out."

Exasperating as the endless teasing has been, at least it has given our Prime Minister something to giggle about. There won't be much else in the next month and a half.

On one level Howard's decision to run a six week campaign is based on simple self-interest: he can announce it in the afterglow of the Olympics, which (he must fervently hope) will have taken the public's attention away from the political morass in which he was engulfed a fortnight ago.

He all but eliminates further parliamentary sittings; for technical reasons the Senate still has to drop in and sign the visitors book, but Howard avoids any personal appearances in the House of Representatives, which has not been a very jolly place for him in recent times. And it should abruptly end the roll on which Mark Latham has rather unexpectedly found himself since his win over the Free Trade Agreement.

But on another level it smacks of desperation. Parliament should be the government's forum, not the opposition's; and by any standards Howard, along with Peter Costello and Tony Abbott, constitute a formidable swat team. The plan had always been to use question time and urgency debates to lambaste Latham over his past record, particularly as mayor of Liverpool.

The fact that Howard has now decided to cut and run rather than return to the venue in which he has starred for 30 years shows the extent to which his government has lost control of the agenda. Suddenly it is the Prime Minister, not the Opposition Leader, who is in need of a circuit breaker.

Certainly he has seized it in a somewhat unexpected way. The election, he told us, was to be about trust: and while our jaws were still dropping at the sheer hide of the man, he added quickly that he meant who could be trusted with the economy, not all that nonsense about honesty in government.

To confirm the point, he then made the outrageous statement that interest rates were always higher under Labor because Labor spent more money than it raised. Well, for starters rates are not always higher under Labor; back in the 70s treasurer John Howard himself delivered rates of 10 per cent and better.

Nor is the cause usually government spending: when rates were at their peak in the late 80s, Paul Keating's budgets were in surplus. The problem was that the Reserve Bank saw the current account deficit as a threat and raised rates in an attempt to tackle it. This is now considered to have been the wrong strategy, but it is worth noting that under Howard the CAD has continued to grow to record heights and the independent Reserve board has said that Australia's interest rates, already well above world standards, will almost certainly rise before the end of the year - but probably not before October 9. Interest rates could well be added to Labor's dossier of Howard lies.

Given his durability, and the overall thickness of his hide, Howard is surprisingly sensitive on the subject. When Craig Emerson put out the document called Truth Overboard a couple of weeks ago, most commentators saw it as no more than an ingenious piece of political mischief; they didn't take it very seriously and they certainly didn't expect the Government to.

But Howard reached for his sledgehammer. His apparatchiks were instructed to prepare a detailed reply, which eventually ran to 12 full pages, nearly half a page for each alleged lie. It was an extraordinary overreaction and one that served to fuel the growing anxieties among his colleagues that Howard was losing his political grip. Emerson, of course, couldn't believe his luck. Howard's response brought the whole issue up front and centre.

Moreover, Howard's rebuttal was, in the main, legalistic and unconvincing, relying largely on semantic nit-picking and the hoary old claim that he had been quoted out of context. It made it clear that even if Howard could argue that he had not lied in the strict technical sense when, for example, he promised there would be no $100,000 university courses, he had certainly set out to mislead ordinary listeners - in other words he was, as frequently accused, being mean and tricky.

And on that most notorious broken promise, the 'never ever' GST? This was not a lie, says Howard; he just changed his mind. In other words, in Howard-speak "never, ever" actually means "not unless I change my mind." But even this was a fib; Howard did not change his mind at all, he always wanted and planned for a GST. What "never, ever" actually meant was: "not until I think I can get away with it."

Howard now says that this is all in the past; what he and the electorate are concerned about is the future. Well, maybe; but let's just see how much of the Coalition campaign is devoted to combing over Latham's record and such matters as interest rates under former Labor governments.

The next few weeks will show whether Howard is sincere about putting the past behind him. Until then, it would be wise to treat the line as just one more porky.