Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Abbot gets Howards goat

Last week an enthusiastic but naïve observer of politics asked me if I thought Tony Abbott was facing the chop over the skulduggery surrounding the trial and conviction of Pauline Hanson.

Of course not, I replied facetiously; John Howard can't sack Abbott. After all, Abbott has the video of the Prime Minister with the goat. My companion's eyes widened, not in amazement, but in understanding. Ah, he nodded, he'd always thought there must be something like that.

I had to explain immediately that I was just making a tasteless joke (and I should also take this opportunity to apologise for the unwarranted slur on the goats of Australia). But the point of the exchange was that this government has now sunk to such depths of sleaze that no allegation against it, no matter how far fetched or disgusting, is unbelievable. These days we no longer just expect Howard and his ministers to lie; we expect them to do so for the most squalid of motives. And it must be said that they seldom disappoint us.

Having commiserated with Hanson on the severity of her sentence (there but for the grace of God go I), Howard took the initial line that Labor was being hypocritical in expressing disquiet about Abbott's plot to sabotage her. After all, he complained, it had been Labor who had urged him to step up the attacks against Hanson. Simon Crean could hardly object if Abbott did just that.

But this is to miss the point by such a wide margin that it amounts to yet another deliberate deceit. What Labor, and a lot of other people, were demanding in 1996 was that Howard as Prime Minister denounce Hanson's ignorance, bigotry and xenophobia. Instead Howard responded by embracing them as the end of political correctness and the dawn of a new era in which the muzzled and downtrodden battlers could finally say what they really thought. The real hypocrisy lies in the fact that at the same time his chief hit man was conniving with two of the more unpleasant characters in Australian politics to wipe out Hanson's ability to say anything at all.

Peter Coleman is a conspiratorial Liberal who was an abject failure in both state and federal parliament and likes to spread malicious gossip about his opponents; Abbott has been a frequent conduit for it. John Wheeldon is a supercilious relic from the Whitlam years who pioneered the kind of snide and sneering editorials in The Australian that are now embraced by Imre Saluszinsky. These three distinguished Australians (as Abbott preposterously described them) sat down over a series of boozy lunches to form an organisation named, with wonderful irony, 'Australians for Honest Politics.'

Like its target, One Nation, this institution had exactly three members: its founders, who were in sole charge of whatever funds their 'supporters' liked to kick in. According to Abbott the loot was spent not on picking up the gigantic tab at the Moncur restaurant, but on financing challenges by embittered former members aimed at denying funding for Hanson's party. As Abbott has since admitted, this was done not through any sense of public duty or political idealism. The problem with One Nation was not that it was racist, divisive and just plain crazy; the problem was that it might represent a threat to the Liberal Party's power base. The whole exercise was about self-interest. It may have been a bit grubby, but hey, that was the way the government operated. It certainly wasn't a sacking offence.

In any case Howard, acting with the knee-jerk reflex by which he denies responsibility for everything, insisted that no-one had told him anything about it. As the media pursued the story, our Prime Minister produced one of his better back-flips. Actually, he said, everyone had known about it; there had even been stories in the papers. So why didn't we all go and take a cold shower - a nostalgic echo of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's famous advice to annoying journalists, "Don't you worry about that."

And he was able to reassure us further: "I know Tony Abbott is an honest man." Well, all things are relative; perhaps by Howard's own high standards of mendacity, Abbott remains comparatively untainted. Of course, he's much younger than his glorious leader; he has time to catch up. But he shows promise as a disciple to whom idealism, ideology, ethics and common decency are all dispensable when it comes to winning.

As Howard himself might put it admiringly, Abbott is a man without convictions. Unlike - in every sense - Pauline Hanson.

Our Prime Ministerial Man of Steel returned from his extended photo opportunity with our troops in the Solomons to face a walkout by the eight states and territories when he refused to renegotiate what is seen by the entire medical industry as an inadequate and inefficient hospital package. Inevitably, he dismissed it as a Labor stunt, and crowed when his threat of punitive fines forced his vassals to sign up to the deal.

And yet John Howard still poses as a federalist. But then, Phillip Ruddock still wears an Amnesty badge. Does this make the Pope a Moslem?