New retrospective eternal verities

Updated September 29, 2010 12:21:26

Howard said sorry for six interest rate rises which weren't his fault. Costello said sorry for six interest rate rises which proved how well we were doing. Abbott said sorry for saying Bernie Banton was 'sick' but not 'pure of heart', for coming late, for not having nurses yet in the hospital he'd bought for a dollar. Joe Hockey said he'd quit his job if IR laws got worse (why didn't he last year when they were?). Peter Costello said he wouldn't. Julia Gillard said she'd quit, sign in blood, supply her mother as a hostage if she ever let unions have power over her. A former union leader, Brendan Nelson, continued unsacked in Howard's ministry. Malcolm Turnbull swore he didn't hate the pulp mill that might cost him his seat (whyever not?) but he did hate the approval process he'd lately approved. A former funder of logging, he continued unsacked in his ministry. John Howard has not yet called Maxine McKew 'a puppet of the unions' or 'a policy-free zone' nor given any reason not to vote for her. If he ever mentions her name, he loses votes and he doesn't.

Never has a larger distance yawned between things said and things meant. Howard says Rudd's 'me-too policies' would lead to economic catastrophe, which means his policies would too. He says no-one inexperienced in running an economy should be allowed to do so, a timely warning against his own appointment as Treasurer in 1977, and Paul Keating's in 1983, and Peter Costello's in 1986. He says go for experience over inexperience every time which means, I guess, never ever vote for Peter Debnam or Ted Baillieu or Bill Hodgman or Dr Flegg.

He doesn't say why experience in being wrong is useful (on WMD, on AWB, Gitmo, Woomera, Nauru, Hicks, Habib, Haneef, cutting and running from Afghanistan and then going back, promising 'months, not years' in Iraq, appointing in 2001 a defender of pederasts as Governor-General, spaying lesbians, opposing Kyoto and speeding the end of the world) and why being right on these things, as Labor has been, is no use at all.

The Right's big trick is to invent new rules of combat and pretend they were always there. If you're a student, and between addresses, you can't vote. If you've been in gaol, you can't vote. If the chad is still hanging, you haven't voted. You can bomb, kill, mutilate women and children so long as you do it inadvertently. You can invade a country that has secret weapons of mass destruction, Israel for instance. You can invade a country that doesn't have secret weapons of mass destruction if you think they do. You can think they do if that's your 'best available advice'. The best available advice is never, ever Hans Blix's. You can't hang people because it's wrong but if other cultures want to that's okay, just so long as they don't hang Australians. If you're an 'illegal combatant' we can torture you. And 'illegal combatant' is anyone the American President calls an illegal combatant. The Geneva Conventions have never heard of such a thing (it means 'bad person' really) but it sounds as if they should have.

The American President is above the law. So is Blackwater, a private security firm which can shoot anybody, even Americans in America, so long as they do it inadvertently. This is an ancient rule of combat we just thought up, like all the other rules we just thought up. We make up new retrospective eternal verities every day. No, I never comment on the polls. The word 'annihilation' just comes to me. To enquire what Costello and I say in private is a shocking impertinence. It's wrong to reveal what happens in Cabinet. This is a democracy.

David Hicks, likewise, can't talk about his life or he'll be 'profiting from his crimes', under a new rule that sounds like an old one. This means Chopper can't either, or Andrew Johns or Alan Jones or Alan Bond, or Primo Levi (a criminal under the laws of his day), or Rodney Adler, or John Elliott or the notorious traffic offender Hugh Grant. Nor, logically, since they likewise profit from crime, can any biographer of Ned Kelly or Lee Harvey Oswald or Errol Flynn or Caligula. Nor, if he ends up charged and convicted of war crimes in The Hague, can any biographer of Alexander Downer. It sounds like a good idea to say you can't profit from crime, but it isn't. It just sounds like a good idea.

It sounded like a good idea, too, to say I'll keep interest rates low, trust me, but it wasn't. It sounded like a good idea to say children went overboard, we've got photos, but it wasn't. It sounded like a good idea to declare war on the Taliban and an hour later call an election, but it wasn't, in the end.

Because as of Wednesday 7th November, barring a Rudd or McKew assassination (which, in these times, must not be discounted) it's not even close. Turnbull, Hockey, Costello, Nairn and Howard are gone, and Abbott vulnerable to any bumper sticker that says If you too like torturing Bernie Banton, vote Liberal. For the Liberal brand name is deeply soiled now and probably has no future, any more than the DLP, the UAP or the Communists. Try selling 'Liberal and proud of it' t-shirts on the Mosman ferry and see how you do. Try selling 'I'm a Liberal-lover' badges in Eastwood Mall. The adventure is over. It is an ex-parrot, it is no more.

This means nine seats in New South Wales, where house prices are the highest, will go to Labor: North Sydney, Wentworth, Bennelong, Lindsay, Macquarie, Macarthur, Eden-Monaro, Dobell, Robertson, Page. Seven in Queensland where Swan and Rudd, alumni of Nambour High, have local appeal as future dispensers of cash and water. Seven in Victoria where IR bites deepest. Two in Tasmania, union towns coming home to Labor with wood chips in their hair. One in the Northern Territory where Brough's interfering police are detested; Arse Prodders Without Borders I call them. Four in South Australia, where Mike Rann is famously admired. None in Western Australia. A Labor majority of thirty.

In 2001 I bet Gerard Henderson five hundred dollars that Howard would lose his seat, and paid up gloomily over long months while he gaily mocked me in his newsletter. I now offer him the same bet, for a thousand, plus what I owe him. Will he take it? Not a chance. For unlike John Howard, Gerard can count.

On Monday 19th November it will be thirty years exactly since Howard was first our federal Treasurer. For seventeen of those years he's been running Australia's economy, or ruling those who do. And on Wednesday November 7th he apologised for getting it wrong. 'Sorry about that,' he said. And after twice as many years in office as Lincoln, five times as many as JFK, three more than Winston Churchill, nine more than Julius Caesar, exactly as many as FDR or Napoleon, he's asked us for two more years, two more years, please - with a butler, a palace, a wine cellar, limitless foreign travel, limitless banquets, clean sheets, a three million dollar payout, a chauffeur for life - in which he can get it right, this time round. And thereby comfort, somehow, a couple of million people now besieged by the highest mortgage payments (in real terms, in sum) in our history. Three times what they were, in real terms, in sum, under Hawke. Forty percent of household income, it seems, and rising. Sorry about that.

He failed General Maths at the Leaving Certificate in 1957, and it shows. It shows more and more each day, with every petulant, stumbling half-truth he utters. It wasn't my fault, he says. It wasn't my fault. I passed General Maths really, but they got the marking wrong.

He should tiptoe, I think, very quietly away.

First posted November 08, 2007 14:00:00