Lazarus PM Prepares To Do It Again

by George Megalogenis - The Australian

How many comebacks can leaders have? Between them, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating won two elections from the position of underdog - 1990 and 1993. John Howard is aiming for a record fourth-straight escape.

Each election year catches the Prime Minister unprepared as the voters greet him with an opinion poll so bad that it seems to prophesise his doom.

With the Howard Government, the midterm blues have always been part of the bargain. There is no chicken-and-egg mystery to it. A period of complacency comes first, then the political recovery.

The bit that Labor could never quite work out was why Howard became so strong in the campaign itself, after appearing gone just a few months earlier. The simple answer is he backflipped, he bribed, then he changed the public conversation. It was the last move that caught Labor out each time.

Howard dealt with the issues that troubled him by taking them off the table. On each occasion, Labor seemed to be dumbstruck by Howard's gall. The Opposition still wanted to talk about what had ailed Howard earlier in the year. Then, with Howard re-elected, Labor indulged in the delusion that Howard had not just conned the nation, but that the voters would hold him accountable for it.

The point Labor missed was that the electorate always got its revenge; that's what the backflips and bribes were about.

With each election-year policy change, Howard shed a layer of his ideological skin. The GST in practice is just another indirect tax, no better, no worse than the wholesale sales tax it replaced. And the revenue from it goes to the Labor states.

The income tax and welfare system that Howard tried to skew towards single-income couples has, in recent years, directed more cash to working mothers.

Even the border protection policy that remade politics in 2001 was modified in 2004 and again in 2005. Last year, Howard tried to pull back some of those concessions after the Indonesians objected to the granting of asylum to 42 Papuans. But a handful of rebels in the Coalition party room were enough to thwart him, a loss for Howard that was inconceivable at the apex of the boatpeople scares in 2001, when then Opposition leader Kim Beazley was painted as a ditherer for first agreeing, then opposing the legislation to turn back the Tampa.

Howard won in 1998, 2001 and 2004 because the cycle of contrition and redefinition made Labor the issue, and because Labor was too daft to turn the spotlight back on to the Government.

Yet this year may turn out differently, for two reasons.

First, climate change isn't an issue that can be fixed with a backflip or bribe. It is nine-tenths emotion and one-tenth selective fact. The voters want Howard to be a believer, just like they are. But to them, he sounds like an accountant who is still trying to calculate what Australia can get away with while the globe sizzles.

The PM had hoped that last month's announcement of a $10 billion, 10-year plan to take over the Murray-Darling river system from the states would assure the community that he had gone green enough. Yet this week's Newspoll had the Coalition trailing Labor by nine points on the primary vote (38 per cent to 47 per cent), and 12 points after the distribution of preferences (44 per cent to 56 per cent).

This repeats the pattern of last year, when the Government failed to get a bounce from the $9billion a year budget tax cuts.

The second difference, surprisingly, is the state of the economy.

Howard's poll numbers have never been this weak when the economy has been so healthy.

When Labor last enjoyed a double-digit lead on the two-party vote in early 2001, the reason was easy to discern. The Australian Bureau of Statistics had just announced the economy was on the edge of recession, and that the culprit was the GST-induced slump in the property market.

But the economy today is in its best shape since the full employment 1960s. Our unemployment rate has just dropped a fraction below that of the US, to 4.5 per cent in January, a record unthinkable before Howard took office in 1996. Interest rates also appear to be on hold for the foreseeable future, and the next move may well be down, according to financial market economists. And yet the Government is facing a landslide loss, if Newspoll is to be believed.

It is important to correct a popular misconception at this juncture.

Howard didn't fall this far behind Latham in 2004. In fact, it took Latham three months to establish a sizeable lead over the Government, and half as much time again to lose it. Latham's best result came after Howard folded on parliamentary superannuation in March 2004. But even then, the gap on the primary vote was just five points, 46 per cent to 41 per cent.

Hindsight tells us that Newspoll had overestimated Labor's two-party vote throughout 2004. The correct number at the height of Latham-mania was an advantage of eight points in Labor's favour, 54 per cent to 46 per cent. Rudd surpassed that score in his first Newspoll last December - 55 per cent to 45 per cent - and his numbers have only risen since.

Granted, Rudd has only been in the job for a political nanosecond. But he is better placed than any of his predecessors because Howard is weaker. Howard's satisfaction rating has not been above 50 per cent since last March. Throughout the Latham experiment, Howard consistently enjoyed the confidence of more than half the electorate, according to Newspoll.

What has shifted since last March are interest rates: they rose three times, in May, August and November. And the Work Choices reform came into force.

Howard told his party room this week there was no need to panic, the Coalition had been behind before and won.

Also, Australians don't toss out a government unless they lose confidence in it, a precondition he says does not apply now.

But he admitted the Coalition had a huge fight on its hands. Perhaps the most telling point he made in the meeting was that public opinion had shifted on David Hicks, the Adelaide-born recruit of al-Qa'ida who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay for five years without trial. He is genuinely grumpy with the US for failing to give Hicks his day in court.

It is conceivable that Howard will ask the Americans to return Hicks to Australia - possibly in August, the month before US president George W. Bush makes the trip to Sydney for the APEC meeting.

Alternatively, there could be a plea bargain that would count Hicks's five years in detention as part of a deal to reduce his final sentence. This option has already been flagged by senior ministers, although it presumes that the Bush administration and Hicks's legal team will suddenly convert to the religion of pragmatism.

Either way, the Howard comeback manual suggests that Hicks will be off the front pages when voters shuffle into the polling booths later this year.

Hicks provides a clue that national security may not have the same resonance for Howard as it did in 2001 and 2004.

But the Left should take a chill pill. A terrorist attack in Australia this year, or on an Australian embassy or on our tourists overseas, would no doubt change the equation here.

Macabre though that thought may seem, politics does turn on real fears, as well as imagined scares.

Howard's best bet, though, is for the mundane to break his way. An interest rate cut immediately after a giveaway May budget, and-or some craziness on the Labor side.

Or perhaps the drought could break? However, the public hysteria on climate change could well interpret flooding rains as more proof that the weather has gone nuts.

If history is any guide at all to Howard's true predicament at the moment, don't look to 1998, 2001 or 2004, but to 1996, when he toppled Keating's Labor government. Back then, the economy was also growing with a political catch - interest rates had also risen three times before the Opposition changed leaders.

The 1996 election result happened to mirror the first Newspoll taken after Howard reclaimed the Liberal leadership at the start of 1995.

A decade on, Howard's analysis of his win in 1996 is instructive.

"My assessment was that once the Liberal Party had demonstrated to the electorate that it had retrieved its solidity and it could be reasonably competent in government, and they had a leader they felt reasonably confident about, they would vote for it," he said in an interview for The Longest Decade conducted in August 2005.

"I remember, and this is, I think, quoted in the Pamela Williams's book (The Victory) too, I remember seeing Paul Kelly at a cafe in Hunters Hill on the night before the election and he showed me the Newspoll, and I made the comment to him it was basically the same as it had been about a month after I came back to the leadership - that we went ahead, and we never fell behind. I think we were behind on one occasion, but that was probably a bit of a roguepoll."

Rudd may be tempted to think the same thing today, that this election is his to lose, even more so than it is Howard's to win.