Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Costello's star not bright enough

For all the media space it's consuming, the Peter Costello Challenge (as it is hyperbolically described by the commentators) remains a bit of a beat up.

In even the most breathless and conspiratorial accounts of the backroom manoeuvrings, sooner or later there appears the admission that the reluctant treasurer has no more than 20 votes in the party room - barely a third of what he needs.

Moreover, the general public still overwhelmingly prefers John Howard as Prime Minister. And to cap it off, even the media, normally baying for the excitement change of any kind brings, are pretty unenthusiastic about a man who has never raised the political temperature by much.

For all his efforts to project himself as a dynamic young modern Liberal, Costello remains very much a belt-and-braces style of politician. This does not mean, of course, that he will not get there eventually; a year before Howard's ascension, things looked hopeless for him as well.

But Howard made it not because he was seen as the natural face of the future; the party turned to him in desperation after all else had failed. When people look at Costello and his prospects for greatness the inevitable comparison is with Paul Keating; and here the omens are not encouraging.

It is true that Keating started his run with few committed supporters in the party room; then as now, there was a feeling that things were going along pretty well with a popular prime minister and an assiduous treasurer, and no one particularly wanted to break up what was seen as a successful partnership. But this changed with the revelation that Bob Hawke had in fact promised the kind of orderly transition for which Costello yearns, and had subsequently broken his promise on the Howard-like grounds that the party and the public still wanted him.

This gave Keating enough support to make his first challenge respectable, and his consequent retirement to the backbench proved just how vital a part of the government he had become. Keating had not only been the man who delivered the annual budget; in all sorts of areas - from foreign policy through to communications and the arts he had been one of the government's generators of ideas. Without him it looked tired and lost.

And Keating made it clear that there would be no respite; not only would he not help to restore Labor's fortunes, he would actively work to destroy his party unless it gave him the leadership. His colleagues berated him as selfish and disloyal, but eventually they accepted that their only chance of saving the government (and in many cases their own seats) was to give him what he wanted.

Keating was never popular with the bulk of the public; along with the normal baggage of being treasurer (and the one who gave us the recession we had to have) he was seen as too brash, too rude, even too dangerous to entrust with the top job. But the media loved him for exactly the same qualities; his reckless style, which he once described as "downhill, one ski, no poles" provided endless stories. Moreover, he was always seen as a politician of substance. Even his hobbies (antique clocks, the music of Mahler) were weighty ones.

To put it as charitably as possible, Costello has yet to show he has that kind of star quality. In the past he has promised to break out of the treasury straitjacket and tell us what he really believes in, but nothing has really happened.

We know he is a kind of a, sort of a wishy-washy republican; he is vaguely sympathetic towards Aborigines and the cause of reconciliation; he is a bit unhappy about locking up asylum seekers, especially children; and he likes footy. And that's about it.

It is worth noting that if the first three items are indeed his political passions, he has been singularly unwilling or unsuccessful in pushing them as government policy; Keating was never so reticent. The only area outside treasury where Costello has shown any real enthusiasm is in industrial relations where he is, if possible, even more hard line than Howard.

It is hard to see Costello, PM, as some kind of fresh and invigorating breeze blowing through what even some of its supporters admit is a somewhat moribund-looking government. But this is really his only chance; he has somehow to convince the party (which also means, to a large extent, convincing the public and the media) that he is a better bet than Howard.

He apparently intends to start the formal process in about nine months time with a demand that Howard stand down, and if (when) Howard refuses, a formal challenge (which he would expect to lose), followed by retirement to the backbench in the hope that a new treasurer would mess things up. Howard himself would falter through either age or hubris, and after a bad year the party would turn to him for salvation, giving him another nine months or so to establish himself as Prime Minister before facing an election.

There are a lot of ifs in the scenario, the first being that Costello needs to double his present support even for a respectable loss next year. If this doesn't happen (and at present it is hard to see why it should) he falls at the first hurdle.

His prospects are not good, which is why he and his supporters are still mouthing the magic mantra "orderly transition" in increasingly plaintive tones. It is also why the Howard forces are not taking any notice of them.