Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

After the celebrations come the hangover

John Howard did not actually thumb his nose at the voters and scream "Ha ha, I fooled you!" before retiring for this Christmas break last week; this would have been bordering on the hubris he warns his colleagues about, and in any case would have been far more honest than is his wont.

But at least he had the decency to warn us. Bushy eyebrows furrowed and lower lip aquiver, our beloved Prime Minister hinted darkly of troubled times ahead. The trade gap was too big, exports were too small, and current account deficit was out of control, he admitted. Or, in technical terms, the arse was about to fall out of the economy.

This may have come as a slight surprise to the punters who had gone to the polls under the impression that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds and that merely by voting for the Coalition they had guaranteed themselves prosperity into the foreseeable future: after all, wasn't that what Howard had promised?

Well yes, in a non-core sort of way; but now, all of a sudden, there were challenges: "We do have a bit of a problem on the export front and that's a combination of the high dollar and the residual effects of the downturn in farm activity because of the drought," he told his dear friend and asset Alan Jones.

Yes, it is a bit of a problem, but hang on a minute. The dollar was hitting the highs against the greenback long before election day and the drought has been going on for yonks. Last week's trade figures produced the 36th successive blow out - that's three straight years of bits of problems.

The current account deficit has been running at a near record 6.5 percent for most of the year, higher than it ever was under Paul Keating, when Howard fulminated about the unsustainable horror and incompetence of it all. Are we supposed to believe that Howard has only just noticed?

Apparently so, and the blindness has been a collective one, because the economists who were so optimistic, or at least silent, until October 9 have also suddenly discovered that the trade figures are in terrible shape, that in spite of very favourable commodity prices and increased international demand there is no sign of the long-awaited export recovery that was supposed to make up for slower domestic activity and all ahead is doom and gloom.

Howard assures us that there will be no recession - at least, not yet. But there will be less growth than predicted, leading to lower surpluses in the next few years. Which is a touch embarrassing as Howard has already spent them in his great pre-election spree. Either we will have to go into deficit (which both Howard and his long-suffering Treasurer Peter Costello agree is unthinkable) or there is going to have to be a bit of a rethink about Crazy John's bonanza of bribery.

So it may just happen that some of the goodies don't get delivered after all: no Christmas box and an unhappy new year for all our loyal supporters. See you in three years, suckers.

And the season of peace and goodwill to all men brings in yet more reports of the mistreatment of the Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, abandoned by their Government to the unaccountable inquisitors of Guantanamo Bay.

Our zombie Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock says wearily that he'll ask the Yanks to look into it while making it clear that he couldn't give a stuff one way or the other; and indeed, why should he? Australia has now concurred with the American dictum that evidence extracted under torture will be admissible in the hearings of those accused under no known law; and of course, if evidence given under torture is acceptable, then we'll go ahead and use torture to get the evidence we want.

On the same day John Howard was assuring a rapturous band of Liberals that he governed equally for all Australians, irrespective of their beliefs. If his attitude to Hicks and Habib is to set the benchmark, we should all be very afraid.

When he launched my election book Run, Johnny, Run (at $22 it's a steal, but I'd rather you paid for it) in Canberra last week, Mark Latham quoted approvingly some of my less flattering assessments of the way some journalists performed during the campaign.

This prompted the following character sketch in the Murdoch Sundays: "MacCallum can most kindly be described as a broken-down journalistic relic of the Whitlam era, who, in his final days in Canberra, was an object of pity around the bar of Old Parliament House... a person whose hatred of John Howard borders on the irrational."

The writer was Glenn Milne, a sporadic and widely despised member of the press gallery currently employed by Rupert's weekend tabloids. He was once christened by Paul Keating "The Poison Dwarf," an epithet which sums up the essence of the man while rather overstating both his potency and stature. However, if one is to be mauled by a mouse, it might as well be by one of the Prime Ministerial Rodent's own chosen pack of cheese-nibblers.

And I note that he describes my dislike of his master only as "bordering on the irrational" - in other words, it remains on the reasonable side of the line. I regret I cannot say as much for his own grovelling sycophancy.