Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

With hindsight, the writing on the wall was obvious

Talk about Murphy's Law in action. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and then some.

Three more years of John Howard/Peter Costello, their majority doubled. The Senate in the hands of the Coalition alone or, even worse, with a religious maniac from the Burn-the-Lesbians Party holding the balance. Most marginals turned into fairly safe Liberal seats, leaving Labor needing a swing of over four per cent to win in 2007.

New South Wales and Queensland confirmed as solid conservative states with Labor's heartland seats nailed down by the so-called Howard battlers. A resounding vote for woodchipping in Tasmania. And if you think it couldn't get any worse, think again. It wasn't Labor's vote that collapsed, but that of the broad left. The Greens are crowing that they picked up a couple of points, but these were more than cancelled out by the implosion of the Democrats. Overall the right gained another two per cent from an electorate already skewed a long way from the traditional centre.

Inevitably the famous quote from playwright Bertolt Brecht comes to mind: If the people insist on electing the wrong governments, it may become necessary to dismiss the people and appoint another in their place. The line was, of course, ironic: but there are times when irony is the only refuge.

So what happened? For starters let's dispose of a few myths. The most absurd is that Mark Latham won the six weeks of the campaign. Mark Latham did not win the campaign. Six weeks ago the polls had Labor winning a number of seats and possibly the election. In the end Labor lost a number of seats. Labor did not win the campaign, QED.

In retrospect it is easy to see why. Labor perhaps had the superior policies, although by releasing them in such numbers in the last, mad rush the party forfeited much of this advantage. But it simply failed to sell them. Instead of pushing a couple of big, easily understood points Latham constantly ended up bogged down in arguments at the edges.

The family package turned into a squabble about a $600 yearly payment, the education policy into a bitter dispute about the so-called hit list of private schools. Even Medicare Gold, perhaps the only memorable policy from the entire campaign, lost much of its appeal through bickering about private rooms and the availability of specialists.

Most, if not all, of the confusion was generated by the government and its allies, but this was always to be expected. Latham should never have allowed himself to be sucked in, but desperate to appear economically responsible, which his minders told him was the absolute imperative of the election, he insisted on arguing out every last dollar when he should have been hammering the big picture.

The minders got it wrong. This was never an election about promises; indeed, the polling suggested that less than a third of the electorate believed they would be honoured. And in spite of his frantic spending spree, Howard never really relied on the bribes either; the greed side of the equation was always secondary to fear.

In a sense Howard got it right on day one when he talked about trust - not trust in honesty, which he had long ago found to be dispensable, but trust in competence. What Latham had to do was to provide reassurance that he would be a steady hand at the wheel, and by constantly going on the defensive over detail he did exactly the opposite.

Which leads to the big question, the one that as yet dare not speak its name: was Latham in fact the wrong man for the job? Might not Kim Beazley, or even Simon Crean, have done better?

The answer, which is both good and bad news, is no to both. An older, more experienced leader might have run a wilier, less reactive campaign than Latham, but in the circumstances would hardly have been more effective. The great plus Howard had going for him - a buoyant economy and the fear of losing it - would still have been there, and the scare campaign on interest rates would have been even more devastating against a former minister from the Hawke-Keating years. Latham was always the best bet for what, in hindsight, was always an election in which Labor had no real chance.

Moreover, the party had to make the generational change sooner or later, and at least next time around Latham will be a familiar and established figure; the new leader was always going to have to face one election as a tyro, and now that initial blooding is out of the way.

And 2007 will be a new ball game; the economy is most unlikely to be as rosy by then as it is today, and in any case Howard has already spent all the spare cash. And of course Howard himself, the monomaniac master of mendacity, will no longer be around.

In the present euphoria the grateful Libs are all slobbering that of course he will never be challenged, he can stay as long as he wants, the Party is forever his to command. But reality will intrude: he may be a four-time winner, but he has already passed his political use-by date. The hubris and erratics of the last few weeks may have been forgotten at the victory party, but it won't be for long.

Perhaps the real irony of the 2004 election is that although there will certainly be rumblings in the Labor Party - there always are - the loser looks safe in his job. But not too long after the Liberals' champagne goes flat, the winner will be politely asked to move on.