This piece was first published in yesterday’s Sun Herald.
G’day. Last week, John Howard’s game plan to retain office was revealed, and what a wild ride it will be. It’s a carbon copy of his triumph in 2001, also after being written off early in the election year.
The wildcard is that the nation’s mood seems to have changed, so it’s a moot point whether the same plan can work twice.
There are three components to Howard’s war game:
1. Clear the decks
In 2001, Howard’s backbenchers said voters thought the Government “mean, tricky and out of touch”. Howard quickly apologised to voters for slugging them with an extra petrol levy in breach of his GST promise, and to prove his contrition abolished automatic indexation of the levy, costing billions.
In 2004, after he couldn’t budge voters in their determination to stop him from winding back Medicare, he found hundreds of millions more to beef it up. He even extended Medicare to health professionals who aren’t doctors and nicked a slice of Labor’s plan to resurrect the dental health program Howard abolished when he came to office.
2. Garner a key constituency
In 2001, Howard’s budget threw money, services, and tax cuts at our elderly, thus introducing age-based discrimination into our progressive tax system. There was no mention of the Government’s dire warnings of the increasing financial burden of our ageing population. At the election, over 55s flocked to Howard, the only age group which preferred him as Prime Minister.
In 2003, he is aggressively wooing the Catholic vote. He announced this year he would deliver lots more money to Catholic schools, and now proposes an amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act to exempt the church from its obligation not to discriminate against women by giving financial subsidies only to male students.
Howard’s also made it clear he’ll run strongly on his generous funding to independent schools, thus encouraging more religious schools at the expense of secular state schools.
3. Find a wedge
In 2001, Howard’s exploitation of Tampa broke Labor’s back. The teacher discrimination issue is a potential wedge this year, although his ditching of the Liberal’s long-held opposition to reverse discrimination is a sleeper.
Howard threw this up not only to woo the church, but to put Latham back in his box.
But now the teachers’ problem is out there for debate, and most people don’t seem to buy the line that teaching discriminates against men, especially since there are more male than female school principals!
Web diarist Peter Funnell wrote: “Once there were teachers’ scholarships offered by the Federal Government across every state and territory. It was a terrific system, reflecting the importance of maintaining and encouraging people into teaching. In its place today is an ever increasing HECS debt.
“Once, teaching was acknowledged as a highly respected occupation in the community. Sadly, the students they teach aspire to more glamorous and better paid occupations. Teaching does not pay well, not for the qualifications required and the debt they now incur to get them.
“If the minister wants to make a ‘positive’ whole-of-nation contribution to the teaching profession, reintroduce the scholarship system.”
David Eastwood suggested the preponderance of female teachers might be due to the discrimination against them in other jobs, especially on working hours: “Teaching offers females a better pay/status/conditions trade-off than they can get elsewhere in the workforce, so they flock to it. If this is true, our anti-discrimination regime is simply not working.”
Another wedge Howard is playing with is homosexual rights. He’s copycatting a wedge George Bush is trying in the US presidential election. Unfortunately for Howard, there’s no public outcry at the ACT’s recent law giving homosexual couples the right to seek to adopt a child. But he’s working on it – talking up the issue on radio in the expectation that his attack dogs in the media will stir the pot, and gaining the support of his ACT Liberal colleagues to overturn the law.
So let’s sit back and watch John Howard do whatever it takes to stay in power “for all of us”. And let’s see if Mark Latham can not only avoid Howard’s traps and set a few for Howard, but put policy muscle on his vision for a kinder, more ethical and more egalitarian Australia.