Labor, unlike their opponents, have a fundamental strength. They have abandoned ideology.
I'll qualify that rather dramatic and attention grabbing statement by making the point in a more boring but accurate way. Howard is still harping on cold war notions that progressive parties are bad at managing economies and weak on security. Labor, on the other hand, has accepted that ideology is vastly inferior to reality, and have opted for a dose of reality with Mark Latham.
We could well get tax cuts for those under $52k, a coast guard to improve our border protection beyond the band-aid Pacific "Solution", and a homeland security department under this guy. If these policies are effectively communicated during the campaign, Howard will be in real trouble.
So who is Latham, and why have the Government had such a difficult time trying to pin him down?
Their real problem is that they're trying to use the tired old weapons of left vs. right politics. You know, Labor governments are Whitlamesque budget deficit/high interest rate affairs - ignoring for a moment that John Howard, as Treasurer, also presided over a similarly poisonous economic cocktail and that in his case it was without the Hawke/Keating excuse of shockwaves from massive economic reform and financial deregulation.
The problem is, you can't pin Latham down in this way. He really does represent a generational shift to a set if values beyond old adversarial politics. In his book The Enabling State, Latham has likened the old Left vs. Right partisans to the Japanese soldiers that were left on Pacific islands after the end of World War 2 to fight out the war, even though the cause had not just been lost, but utterly and irrevocably RESOLVED.
In this, and his other books, Latham argues that free markets work well - most of the time. They don't work so well in areas like healthcare, defence or law enforcement, but pretty much everyone now, worldwide, accepts that there is some need for intervention and/or regulation in those areas.
To Latham, the State should neither stand aside nor act as nanny - it should ensure access to the tools people need to get ahead. It's the old saying - give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for life. The ladder of opportunity stuff, although it sounds corny (and I want to wince every time Latham does that hand over hand action) is very, very real. Mark Latham really believes in the ladder of opportunity - more reminiscent, perhaps, of Menzies than Whitlam - and will implement it given half a chance.
What worries the Libs, I think, is that once someone like that gets into power, the Liberals could be in opposition for the next 20 years. Recall Ross Cameron, the now threatened member for Parramatta whose seat borders Latham's Werriwa, cautioned the Liberal cabinet not to take Latham lightly. Ross is a perceptive guy intelligent enough to realise from the outset that the mainstream Liberal party had seriously underestimated Mark Latham.
In trying to move the party toward his own hard-right positions, and accommodate Pauline Hanson, Howard has left it open at its Liberal core. Howard and Costello attempted to paint Latham as some sort of radical - a new Whitlam, but Ross Cameron, representative of the conservative end of the old Liberal core, knew this characterisation was basically dumb right from the outset, and tried to warn them. He was shut down by Costello saying something along the lines of "We don't generally compliment our opponents".
Mark Latham is clearly something we haven't seen before on the Australian political scene. Ideologically, he's probably more in tune with a moderate American politician, Republican or Democrat, with a defined set of principles about fairness, liberty and prosperity, but willing to look at all options to achieve them. Like most Australian non-politicians, he is a pragmatist and an idealist at the same time.
There are, therefore, three reasons why I think we might just see a liberal victory.
1. The interest rate scare will fail for two fundamental reasons.
First, the reality is that no government, Labor, Liberal or Calathumpian, will repeat the mistakes that the Hawke/Keating government made in the late 1980s. The financial markets aren't even pricing the possibility of higher interest rates under a possible Labor government into their equations. Engaged people know this. Howard is assuming that people in marginal seats aren't engaged. That's quite an assumption, as the facts behind the myth aren't that complex. Labor can easily expose them, if the media doesn't do it for them. If Howard is discredited on this issue, it'll underscore the "lying rodent" stuff on a crucial economic issue.
Second, Howard has pulled the interest rate scare too early in a six-week campaign. It'll wear off. Toward the end of the campaign, furthermore, there will likely be talk of a likely rate rise anyway, which will make Howard look bad. The longer the scare campaign on interest rates continues, the higher the probability that someone will expose Howard on it.
2. John Howard, in neglecting to provide tax relief to those on less than 50k, has provided Latham with an excellent opportunity to both look like a Labor leader concerned with the everyday struggles of working battlers AND a traditional liberal trying to ensure that hard work is rewarded. Latham looks like both a Liberal leader and a Labor leader at the same time. That's the opposite of a wedge. What do we call it - Weld Politics?
3. Honesty matters. We are living in an extremely dangerous world, and Howard's lies were extremely serious. They were over critical matters of national security - specifically, border protection and our involvement in a war. This has provided the ALP with the capacity to completely discredit Howard on national security over his dishonesty without the need to present a radically different course of action.
4. Labor had something very large in the bag in terms of its tax and family policy, framed in the language of fairness, incentive and opportunity. Real liberal values.
There may well be a liberal victory at this election.
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Webdiarist David Green works in the IT industry for a medium sized Australian company. He's married with one child and a mortgage and lives in the Western Sydney seat of Greenway. He's been active with the small l liberal Reid Group. "By all accounts I'm just the sort of chap that in a normal world would have probably been voting Liberal by now, but due to the last few years there is no way that will ever happen. Even if they COULD lay claim to the economic fortunes that this country now finds itself in, the instant they started basically committing child abuse through the psychological deprivation of children in detention to win the votes at the moronic end of the electorate they lost my vote for all eternity. I've been reading Latham's stuff for a few years now - I think his 'Civilising Global Capital' was the first political book I ever read. The notion of fusing together the best aspects of free market economics with social democracy's community spirit intrigued me from the start. I'm not sure if I'd call Latham a true liberal - some of his more communitarian notions may preclude that. But with his commitment to centrist rationalism, moderation, and the empowerment of individuals and communities alike, he's a darn site closer than the mob that are in power now."
