“I always read your web diary with some degree of interest, but in today’s entry you’ve gone completely feral. You have allowed your personal dislike of Crean and Beazley to cloud the site. I always thought you were a bit rough on the Prime Miniature, but your anti-Labor text on today’s page was ridiculous.
“Crean’s announcement was “sickening” – how so? His announcement simply followed on from his previous calls for Howard to keep his promise on the price of petrol ie. that it wouldn’t rise as a result of the GST. Howard is the one who is at fault – he made a promise he could never keep, as he knew full well that:
(a) GST is always 1/11th of the price of anything;
(b) Petrol prices are always higher in the country than in the city; and
(c) Our constitution prevents federal taxes being levied at varying rates in different geographical areas.
“Howard got caught out, Crean made the running on the issue and now he is cleaning up. The rise because of GST was more than 1.5 cents per litre. Crean is going to give back the real amount of the windfall. It might be a bit pedantic, give Howard’s long-term freeze on petrol indexation, but that is his job. I don’t see how his conduct is “sickening”.
What’s your real beef? My beef is that Howard is an opportunistic little wretch who will freeze the indexation of excise on petrol but won’t do the same on beer. There are other ways of protecting the revenue, of course. How about taxing trusts as companies? As far as I know that is still ALP policy. And so it was for the Libs until the going got tough last month.
If your stated aim is to lift the standard of your web diary, you could take tomorrow rather than today as the first step. Today’s effort was woeful, and if you look back at it in a few weeks’ time as you are wont to do, you’ll probably agree.” KEN McALPINE
I’ve led with Ken’s critique because I’ve been feeling a bit queasy myself on whether I’m being too hard on Kim Beazley. I stand by the anti-Crean remark, though. To announce a revenue cut while refusing to announce any spending increases on the grounds that the budget parameters are unknown is pure hypocrisy. It’s also an admission that cheap populism is being elevated above what Labor claims are desperately needed investments in education, research and innovation. If Labor had serious guts, it would have opposed Howard’s disastrous decision to impose a permanent freeze on petrol excise indexation over and above his hand-back of the 1.5 cents a litre GST windfall. It’s one of those areas where your stomach sinks in the knowledge that good policy must, just must, give ground to short-term political advantage, or the neutralising of the other side’s short term advantage.
Personally, I don’t think the “must” is right. I believe that when the ramifications of that Howard decision were exposed – that is, the brakes it puts on credible, long term investment in the future prosperity of our country – opposition to the freeze would not be a negative.
When Howard and Beazley talk about “listening” to the people, I get scared. I think people want to be let into the “joke”, the truth that priorities must be set and hard choices made. They KNOW political parties can’t change the world, and are hostage to events beyond their control in many areas. They want to know what CAN be done, under what constraints. They no longer believe that choices in their interests are being made.
Now all this is certainly naive gibberish, and the proof is that politicians buy votes with hip pocket promises and always have, because it works. The big exception was John Hewson with Fightback, a vision statement if ever there was one. I disagreed with most of it, but its clarity and purpose was undeniable, and admirable. He lost. The second big exception was Howard in 1998 – where he won, somehow, promising the GST. The public, after decades of debate, were convinced something needed to be done about the tax system, and gave him the chance.
What worries me is that politicians keep promising they can deliver what the other can’t, don’t specify how, get trusted, let people down, and the cycle goes in in an ever tighter circle of cynicism, until politics becomes mere blood sport and its participants objects of distaste.
This is the hole I think Beazley is falling into. As I’ve said before, there is a collapse of consensus on the appropriate role of government. I’d like Kim Beazley to set out his re-envisioning of that role in detail. I’d like to read his manifesto to transform our investment in education, research and innovation. This is a time for big ideas. This is a time for strong, rigorous frameworks for priorities and action to be laid down for discussion and debate. I’m disappointed that Beazley didn’t write to the voters of Ryan outlining that framework.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the media and political obsession was with “where’s the money coming from”. Now, the time has come for a focus on the big ideas to get us where we want to go. That focus then puts the money question where it belongs – here’s what we’ve got, what’s the best way to spend it, over time, to achieve our desired results. This focus broadens questions of individual gain or loss from a decision, and allows voters to truly judge whether short term pain is worth longer term gain, for themselves and/or their children.
The bottom line for me is that I hate the Government’s ideological imperatives, its narrow view of human nature, its corruption of democratic process, its petty intolerance and its revengeful paranoia. I want a refreshed, renewed, reinvigorated Labor to win the next election, but I see no evidence that it has thought through the lessons of its time in office, let alone imagined a new direction.
Granted I’m being tougher on Labor than the Libs. But I’ve SEEN what they offer, and its awful. I saw what Labor became in its decadent years, and that was awful too. I don’t think I’m the only voter who wants a breakthrough in the arid, dog-eat-dog, praise-yourself-for-good-news, blame-others-for-bad landscape of Australian politics. I don’t think I’m the only voter who wants some honesty and some risking taking in the national interest.
Now to DOMINIC RIORDAN in Warwickshire, who brings me down to earth with a less emotional take on the political trend.
I have been in the UK for 12 months and enjoy reading the Web Diary – a bit of a window on the mood of the electorate.
Your prediction on Ryan seems to have been pretty accurate. What’s interesting is whether it is time for the media bandwagon to tire of kicking Howard and turn, (as they did, briefly in 1996 on Howard until they realised no-one cared) and start pushing Beazley on policy.
All of this is very interesting for the media, which for its own sake would much prefer a close election and therefore habitually talks up the underdog. (MARGO: Can’t agree there. The media likes a winner – we’re a conservative lot really, and a bigger winner the better. analysis becomes much less risky. We do want regular changes of government though, for professional reasons of keeping it interesting.)
“I think it all comes down to sentiment. The sentiment for change has to be there at election time. It certainly seems to me from here that it is. And when it is there, just as in 1996, 1983 and 1975 (who can remember what Hawke and Fraser stood for?) we will elect a new government.
It seems rather a strange paradox is at work when the media carp on at how the ALP lacks policies. On the one hand virtually nobody believes in old labour ideology any more. Yet much of the criticism of Beazley seems to come down to a rather nostalgic view that, unlike his predecessors, he and the rest of the ALP do not believe in anything.
What they seem to me to believe in is what most western leftist parties believe in – social inclusion, equality of opportunity, environmental protection and good economic and administrative management. So it is with Blair, Clarke in NZ, Cretien in Canada and Jospin in France, to name a few.
From Blairite Britain, here is my punt on what Beazley is doing. First, the electorate is weary of change. So you don’t do what Hewson did, promise them something totally different, as this will allow Howard (as it did Keating) to exploit fears of change. Blair did the same, promising to the great frustration of old Labour not to depart from the Tories’ tax and spending commitments for his first two years in office.
Second, Beazley is rightly about being cautious on policy. The policy landscape is almost always determined by the sitting government. So the policy settings put forward by the opposition are usually fairly reactive. Ask yourself honestly when was an opposition actually elected on the basis of its policies? Where they matter is whether they set or build on the voters’ impressions of the opposition. So Beazley is building on the electorate’s prevailing view that he is more trustworthy on health, education and the environment, and throwing some pat solutions to the government’s big policy problems like GST and petrol.
Third, let sentiment run its course. Howard, having won in 1996 due to discontent about Keating’s ‘elites’, proceeded to accentuate the divisions his election manifested for his own cynical political ends. The social discontent that first poured out in 1996 has been constantly reinforced by the present government, with its meanness, its language of division and its general tolerance of intolerance. Howard is reaching the natural end to the cynical political journey on which he has taken us since he became PM.
What seemed to matter in 1975, 1983 and 1996, when we changed governments, was a sense that Australia was a divided nation. Howard’s greatest mistake has been to use this to buttress his political position, rather than show a bit of national leadership.
In Britain, for all of the things that just don’t seem to work (the trains, the flood defences, the food supply) the Government is held in reasonably high regard, and is seen as positive and inclusive. Sentiment is working for the government here. And if the ALP does even a half decent job of convincing the Australian electorate it is inclusive, that it will try to address some of the divisive issues that Howard has done nothing to fix, they will win handsomely.
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Today, I’m wallowing in my success (or at least near success) in predicting Ryan. Please indulge me – apart from picking Beattie in Queensland before he called the poll this is my first right call in too many years reporting politics. I’m off to the outer Sydney seat of Hughes tomorrow for a marginal seat profile. Back Thursday.
JASON DOUST
Ryan does Florida. Debbie does Dallas. Mainstream politics does Australia. We all get screwed by economic fundamentalists. These people are the last hardline dogmatists, the untrue believers. Our politicians are good fighters, but does anyone want brawlers in power? Unlike our politician’s hollow words, your article is well thought out and reflects what so many of us are thinking. As for me, I’m voting Green.
CECILIA HANNON in Queensland.
I just want to say well done – if that’s appropriate – for such an accurate prediction on Ryan.
I started tuning into your thoughts on Ryan about 2-3 weeks ago and then when I saw you on LateLine 2 Fridays ago ( with Michael Duffy) I really started to take notice because at the same time I had my good mate Michael Lavarch (former Labor attorney-General, who lost the Brisbane seat of Dixon in 1996) chewing my ear off for weeks with gloom and doom about Ryan. Lavarchie is a professional pessimist.
Anyway, you and Lavarchie were spot on and I’ll only be listening to you two for the rest of the year! Bugger those polls!
MIKE BOWERS, Fairfax political photographer, in New York
Good prediction on Ryan mate, a bit of distance from the wolf pack in Canberra gives you better insight maybe? Margo, I have always believed that Australian voters in the leadup to an election will say one thing to a polster, and when comes the crunch at the ballot box I believe they feel vindicated in giving their preferred party a scare through the polls and vote the same way they always have.
When it comes down to it I feel a majority of them can’t bring themselves to change.It’s very Australian, being able to mouth off at an issue but doing little about it! I think this is why so often we get it totally wrong in the media. Remember 93???? Keating said he knew he’d win it, but you could see he was as surprised as us. Poor old Hewie.
DAVID DAVIS
Congratulations for being closer to the mark on Ryan than anyone else. Your reasons for going against the herd and the screaming polls made sense to me. If the herd and the polls had been right, Labor would now be sitting in Ryan with a substantial winning majority.
Clearly that is not the reality. The media gets it wrong again.
I had my doubts. My reasoning was partly like yours. I just couldn’t believe the required number of Liberals would turn to the extent the polls and the media were saying. In Web Diary today, you say that in the last two state elections and in Ryan, the media got it wrong. If I had the time and the resources, I would love to trawl through some history and show how quite a few times in the past few years this very same thing has happened.
There is the old cliche of the pollies, “the only poll which matters is the one on election day”. It may be a cliche but I now believe it.
The irritating thing is that after everyone gets it wrong, they merely brush it aside, failing to admit the error. It is brushed aside as “oh, yeah but everything changed in the last 48 hours”.
Oh really?? Is that how it works??
So on Wednesday, Newspoll predicts a Labor landslide in Ryan and by Saturday in the real poll it becomes a cliffhanger. How does this happen? Maybe the polls should be thought of as just a small tool in the overall analysis. I’d rather read Margo Kingston’s take on it!!
The polls and the headlines said in the week before the last federal election that Howard was destined for the political scrap heap. They said no one could win promising a new tax. It had not been done anywhere in the history of Western democracy. They clearly predicted a Beazley win.
Then when Howard got in with a reduced majority we were treated with the “it all changed in the past 48 hours of the campaign” line and the classic “oh but he held onto some key marginals and the swing wasn’t even”. Why wouldn’t they focus on the key marginals and why would the establishment assume an even swing over a MASSIVE and incredibly DIVERSE country?
This thing isn’t over yet. John Howard should not be underestimated.
The other key point is the “credible alternative”. Is there one? I think Kim has a lot of work to do and it will take more than joking around and a personal make over.
FIONA ROTHWELL in London on the view from there.
The drama for Australians over here will be keeping ourselves informed of the goings-on of John, Kim, Meg/Natasha and everyone else who dons a jumper for the event.
Without being able to tune in to the box each night and find out who said
what where and what was he/she wearing when he/she said it, we will be
relying on the web pages of the Australian news agencies to fill us in.
Australian politics doesn’t get much press space. Over the last month, Australia has featured only in stories where we are shown to be lesser mortals (losing the cricket, losing Don Bradman, losing the rugby). I did find an article on one reputable UK news agency web site at the time of the last Australian federal election which stated that the average turn-out rate is usually over 95%, which was “only exceeded by the mock-elections of countries under Communist rule”.
The article went on to say that Australia has compulsory voting and the penalty for failing to vote is AUD$50 (in UK currency, about 3 pence) but that Australians don’t complain about the fact that they have to vote even though doing so can be quite inconvenient. Odd thing to say I thought – suggesting perhaps that the UK wouldn’t dare impose upon its subjects to go
out of their way to vote for the country’s decision-maker.
I had never really turned my mind to the fact that Australia may be seen as some sort of communist society in making its citizens attend at voting booths and mark a few boxes.
Of the Australians I know over here, the majority are very well informed and consider it a ritual of sorts to log on to the SMH on a daily basis to get a fix of home. I have no doubt that they will cast an informed vote and debate will ensue over warmish (despite the cold weather) pints of beer in dingy pubs all over this fair city. Of the various comments I have been privy too, the problem posed was this: the regrettable thing about Howard being voted out of the top office is that ineffectual Beazley is the alternative. “What’s a good Labor voter supposed to do?” was the lament. What indeed.