excerpts from poll dancing, mungo`s latest tomeOne morning in his tenth year as prime minister, John Winston Howard awoke in the master bedroom of Kirribilli House to realise that he had become not only omnipotent but invincible. His demolition of Labor’s young pretender, Mark Latham, had probably put the next election beyond the reach of any opponent, let alone one as accommodating as his serial victim, Kim Beazley. The result had also made his leadership virtually unchallengeable. Peter Costello’s occasional forays could and would be dismissed as mere showmanship, in keeping with his dilettante approach to politics. Tony Abbott had long ceased to be a threat, and Brendan Nelson was clearly destined for the role of bridesmaid, if that. The only one who went close to matching him in megalomania, Malcolm Turnbull, was a full political generation away. Howard’s courtiers in the parliament and in the media were now assuring him that he could, and should, go on for years – even for another decade, which would put him in reach of the hitherto unattainable record of Sir Robert Menzies, once the immortal nonpareil but now perhaps no more than a John the Baptist heralding the coming of the Messiah. It was no longer a question of the Howard Years; we were now talking about the Howard Age, the Howard Epoch. Future historians would see 1996 as the new Year Zero, the time when it truly all began. .................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. I had always been somewhat ambivalent about Rudd – as, it seemed, had the bulk of the population. While polls showed that only 10 per cent actively disliked him (an all-time low, his supporters shrilled gleefully), 49 per cent had no opinion of any kind. In other words, the man was virtually unknown less than a year before he would ask the people to elect him as their head of government. This was not a good start. Nor was what was known of him particularly encouraging. A former Queensland government apparatchik, he was one of Kim Beazley’s backing chorus of roosters, as Mark Latham called them. Indeed, Latham had been particularly harsh on Rudd in his notorious diary, describing him as personally untrustworthy and an American lackey. Latham believed that Heavy Kevvie, as he had derisively christened his foreign affairs spokesman, was barely fit to oversee Labor’s Pacific Islands policy, let alone to take on the top job. This view was widely shared by the anti-Beazley forces, led by Simon Crean and Julia Gillard – now, incredibly, in harness with Rudd, a man she would previously have moved suburbs to avoid. It was true that through 2006 Rudd had progressively distanced himself from the other roosters (Stephen Smith, Wayne Swan and Steve Conroy) and marked out a more independent path, in preparation, it now appeared, for his tilt at the leadership. But for many, this only made his coup against Beazley more distasteful, particularly as it took an alliance with his former enemies to bring it off. On the policy side, no one denied Rudd’s competence in his own field; in fact, he was almost too good at it. The fact that he had been a professional diplomat – speaking Mandarin Chinese, among other languages – suggested interests far more esoteric than those of the ordinary voter. Then there was his Christianity. Like Howard, he was nominally a middle-of-the-road Anglican, although he had descended to that position from the heights of Roman Catholicism, while Howard had risen to it from the depths of Methodism. But unlike Howard, Rudd paraded his beliefs more openly than some of his colleagues felt was decent. The parallel was less with the prime minister than with his flaky health minister, Tony Abbott, known variously as the Mad Monk and Captain Catholic. In blunt terms, Rudd was not what would conventionally be seen as leadership material, at least in the Australian tradition. The view in the Billinudgel was that he was a wussy, smart-arse God-botherer, and Howard would eat him alive. One of my lefty friends had sworn he could never vote for a Labor Party led by Rudd: it would make him feel smarmy. And yet, and yet... ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................... In 2007 the stakes were higher than ever, because of WorkChoices. For the labour movement as a whole and for the trade unions in particular, WorkChoices represented Armageddon. It was never meant to happen; only after Labor strategists’ extraordinary incompetence in drawing up their Senate preference lists, delivering control of the upper house to an incredulous but delighted prime minister, did it become a possibility. As a result, the Howard government put the legislation together in a rush, to bed it down well before the next election. It was an untidy package, bristling with unsorted detail and unintended consequences. While it had not produced the industrial devastation that critics had predicted (and hoped for), it still had the feel of a work in progress. If Labor could win in 2007, it would be possible to undo most of it without a great deal of political or social trauma. But if Labor lost, WorkChoices would become entrenched and industrial relations would be changed forever. The heavies were prepared to take any risk to avoid that happening, even one as bizarre as the odd couple they had just installed. The optimists in the party said that the differences between Rudd and Gillard were not a hindrance, but a virtue: each would appeal to a particular set of voters. Rudd would draw the conservatives, Gillard the radicals; Rudd’s appeal to middle-class males would be complemented by Gillard’s attraction for working-class females. (Taken to its logical extreme, the argument suggested that Rudd would win over the myopic and Gillard the redheads.) Seductive as it was, it ignored the obvious corollary: for many swinging voters, a liking for one of the pair might be more than offset by a loathing of the other. In any case, the partnership, while celebrated like a Packer family wedding, could well turn out to be just as unstable. While the first few days saw the happy couple practically hand in hand, the harsh reality of politics decrees that there can only ever be one leader: election campaigns are not made for double acts. Gillard seemed to understand this, at least early on; she spoke only when spoken to and generally played the role of dutiful helpmeet to perfection. But none of those who knew her well, or even casually, imagined that she could keep it up for the best part of a year. All the tacticians could sensibly hope for was that when she did assert herself, it would be in reasonable harmony with her leader – which, given her record, was far from certain. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................ The central [issue] was always going to be The Economy, Stupid, and Rudd knew it; he and his brains trust, and especially his chief policy co-ordinator, Lindsay Tanner, believed that the most damaging mistake made by all Rudd’s predecessors had been to desert the field, leaving Howard to propagate the lie that Labor could not be trusted to manage the economy – that interest rates would be higher, unemployment worse and the entire country would sink into a slough of despond. It wasn’t true, of course, and a cursory glance at the Hawke–Keating years would prove it wasn’t true; but Beazley, the only one who had been leader for long enough to get the real story across, had never really tried. Rudd was determined to use what time he had to give it a shot. Typically, he came at it from an unexpected angle. Perhaps influenced by George Megalogenis’s thoughtful book The Longest Decade, Rudd began by praising Howard with faint damns: the current government had generally not done a bad job in following up the great economic reforms of the Labor governments from 1983 to 1996. Obviously Howard lacked the daring and imagination of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and some of his ideas had been a bit off the track, but by and large he deserved at least a pass mark for effort. Until, that is, his current term, when with WorkChoices he had (wait for it) Gone a Bridge Too Far. From being a modest but well-intentioned reformer, Howard had become an economic fundamentalist, a nutter who treated human beings as commodities and was interested only in the bottom line. .......................................................................................................................................................................................................................... [By Christmas 2006] Kevin Rudd was still the centre of political attention – which, John Howard had warned his followers, would inevitably be the case for his first few weeks as Opposition leader. This was no doubt the reason for Howard’s own behaviour during the silly season being rather more indulgent than usual. Apart from innumerable appearances at the cricket, he turned up unexpectedly on the program of the ultra-right-wing shock-jock Stan Zemanek sounding tired and emotional. He had heard Stan was crook, he gargled, and he wanted his old mate to know that "we’re rooting for you". Presumably he was using the word in its American sense, but it is still probable that Janette sent him to sleep in the spare room that night. He sobered up in time to deliver a New Year’s message to the nation, a function usually reserved for our Acting Head of State, Major-General Governor-General Thingo. There had been reports that the viceroy was getting a little pissed off about being constantly upstaged, and even more so that no one seemed to be taking his efforts on behalf of the nation as seriously as they should. In an effort to cheer him up, I submitted a Gilbertian ditty:
Unaccountably, I still didn’t feature in the Australia Day honours list. Ah, well. Perhaps 2007 just wasn’t my year. And perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t going to be John Howard’s, either. Physically he was just dandy, according to his annual personal interview with acolyte Piers Akerman. While this year’s effort was not quite so homoer-tic as usual, Akerman still found his man "bursting with enthusiasm and energy", even if his messages for the New Year were a bit of an anti-climax: feminism is dead, and drink tap water. And there was some encouragement for the government: the psephologist Malcolm Mackerras’s first prediction was for a Labor win, making such an outcome most unlikely. But no longer completely out of the question, for a quick appraisal of the year ahead revealed that it was not only the Opposition that had changed. The whole playing field seemed to have shifted.
These are extracts from Poll Dancing: The Story of the 2007 Election by Mungo MacCallum, Black Inc. RRP $24.95
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