Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

A taste of things to come

Those if us busy putting the "Don't blame me - I voted Labor" stickers on our bumper bars might yet have the best of it. At least we knew what was coming. But spare a thought, if you can, for the suckers who actually voted for John Howard in good faith - not out of sheer greed, but because they really believed that the little rodent could somehow magically guarantee an endless supply of fresh cheese.

It took just three days for the first signs to emerge suggesting that it might not be quite as simple as that. Peter Costello crept from the shadows to note that perhaps the Treasury forecasts of massive economic growth in the coming years had been just a tad optimistic. Perhaps the idea of three and a half percent was on the heroic side; and of course then the prediction of massive surpluses over the next four years would turn out, in Tony Abbott's delicate summation of Howard's promises, to be one of those statements, which were not always vindicated by future events.

If this is indeed to be the case it will be most embarrassing, because Howard and Costello have already promised to spend the said surpluses. Whoops, here comes a non-core promise.

And within another 48 hours another one bit the dust: the doctors announced that they would graciously accept the government's tacit invitation to them to lift their fees, thus absorbing at least half the increase in Medicare rebates - which, being unconditional, meant there was no incentive for them to do anything else.

And then we had the assurance that petrol prices would stay high, thus giving a nice boost to inflation and - guess what? - interest rate rises. Time for the other old joke: Howard warned me that if I voted Labor interest rates would go up, and he was right: I voted Labor, and they did.

But of course it won't end there. Until now Howard's feudal industrial relations program has been at least partly kept under control by the Senate; well, on July 1 next year all that comes to an end. The Senate will join the House of Representatives as a rubber stamp for government policies. The real John Howard can come out of the closet: no more Mr Nice Guy.

Those known as Howard's battlers, the workers who have given him his majority on four elections, will suddenly find themselves with no effective job security. For small business the unfair dismissal laws will disappear, and won't the employers have some fun then. In larger firms the unions will be locked out and workers issued with take-it-or-leave-it workplace agreements; there will be no arguments about wages or conditions and the role of the so-called umpire, the Industrial Relations Commission, will be reduced to that of a helpless onlooker.

Those who reject the offers (or whom the employers choose to reject) will be tossed into the Centrelink safety net, which will become even more arbitrary and ruthless in its application. They will be able to amuse themselves by watching, reading and listening to unstinting praise of the wonder and beauty of the Howard government on a media controlled exclusively by Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer, into whose hands the spoils will be delivered. Country voters who yet again chose to prop up the coalition will be unable to voice any misgivings they may feel as Telstra will have been sold off to the privateers and profit takers.

But the situation will not be entirely hopeless: there will always be room in the armed forces for those willing to volunteer for Washington's next adventure in Iran, or Syria, or Saudi Arabia, or wherever the God-given visions of Howard's masters demand our presence.

And those are just some of the prospects we already know about. What else Howard might have in store now that the voters have delivered untrammelled power to him, we can only guess. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

So what can Labor do about it all? The short answer is very little; the next three years will be devoted, at best, to rebuilding and rethinking, at worst to a descent into the kind of petty infighting that so often plagues long-term oppositions. But two things should be taken as given.

The first is that the time should be used to complete the generational change begun by the election of Mark Latham as leader. John Faulkner and Kim Beazley have both signalled their intention to fade out gracefully by withdrawing to the backbench. Simon Crean and Bob McMullan just want a change of portfolio; they should be encouraged to join Faulkner as soon as possible [after filing this column, McMullan did announce he was going to the backbench - Ed]. It is time to make the final break with the Hawke-Keating years; not to forget them, but to accept that they are now a part of Labor history, no longer relevant to the future.

And the second essential is to agree that there should be no challenge to Latham's leadership, at least until the rebuilding process is complete. He may not have been the Messiah that some impossibly hoped for, but he remains the party's best hope. And most importantly he is there: to push him aside now would not only be to have wasted almost a year, but also to invite the kind of endless shuffling and bickering that characterised the Howard-Peacock divisions in the Liberal Party back in the 80s.

And wouldn't Howard just love that. So please, let's at least deny him the pleasure. We've already given him far, far more than enough.