Howard's end

Election day grimace ... John Howard leaves a polling booth near Sydney after casting his vote.

Photo: AFP

December 28, 2007

Kevin Rudd ensured a humiliating denouement to John Howard’s political career, writes Tony Wright.

It was the year that John Howard, Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister, started losing, continued losing and ended losing more than anyone might have predicted - his prime ministership, his government and his own seat of Bennelong.

A new leader of the Australian Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, won everything.

In an era in which Australian election campaigns have become overwhelmingly presidential, almost the entire year was dominated by these two men.

By the time Howard finally announced a six-week election campaign to climax at the ballot boxes on November 24, it was a relief to many Aaustralians, because the nation had been subjected to an unofficial election campaign that had stretched over most of the year. Rudd had been Labor leader for less than a month when the calendar clicked to New Year's Day 2007 - the latest in a line of leaders Labor had chosen and rejected in a fruitless attempt to unseat Howard's Coalition Government.

Few observers believed Rudd had the time or the political horsepower to make significant inroads into the Howard Government's lead. After Mark Latham's loss at the 2004 election, Labor had to win a minimum of 16 seats to win government, assuming it lost none. The ALP had begun the term a shambles after Latham stormed out of the leadership soon after the 2004 election, quit the party and published his poisonous diaries.

And here was Rudd, little known to many voters, expected to get the party back into the game in under 12 months.

Tto the mounting disbelief and eventual horror of Howard and his Coalition, Rudd proved a hit with voters from the start. His predecessor, Kim Beazley, had started to improve Labor's position in the published polls, but the willingness of Labor to replace him made clear that the majority of the party did not believe he could wear down Howard.

Rudd, it suddenly seemed, was the Labor leader voters had been waiting for. He was 18 years younger than Howard, was something of an intellectual who spoke Mandarin, and had devoted part of his life to international affairs and the other part to hard-nosed bureaucratic management. He was unlike any previous Labor leader. His wife, Therese Rein, was a multi-millionaire businesswoman, and although Rudd professed to be from a poor rural background, he spoke with the accent of the educated class and declared himself an economic conservative.

A loner and committed Christian, he was not much personally liked by many of his Labor colleagues, but it proved a benefit. He was free to plot his own course and demand discipline without being forced to do the bidding of the party's old factions, because he was Labor's last chance. And when it turned out he had the mysterious ability to connect with voters across the spectrum, his colleagues gave him all the latitude he demanded.

Furthermore, he had hammered out an understanding with the left's Julia Gillard: she would be his deputy. Together, they made a formidable team, pulling together the different strands of the party, attracting young voters and harnessing both men and women to the Labor cause.

Importantly, Howard had already presented Labor - and thus Rudd - with two gifts that would turn out to be priceless.

When Howard defeated Latham in 2004, the victory was so great it granted the Government control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Howard warned his colleagues about hubris and using government power in the Ssenate unwisely, and then could not resist pushing through radical industrial relations reforms - a package he called WworkChoices, which decisively shifted the workplace balance from workers to bosses.

It proved an easy target for a concerted attack by the ACTU, and quickly became unpopular across the community, including in the key demographic known as "Howard's battlers" - aspirational voters who had switched allegiances years previously from Labor to Howard's Coalition.

Howard's second gift to Rudd was his continuing refusal to hand over the reins of power to his Treasurer, Peter Costello - who was exactly the same age as Rudd. Costello had waited impatiently for years, but according to those closest to Howard, the ageing prime minister had decided that he would finally bow to the need for generational change in 2006.

At the last minute, he baulked, apparently because he felt Costello and his supporters had pushed too hard.

Thus, Howard, burdened by the increasingly unpopular WorkChoices, apparently out of new ideas - and lagging way behind a community upsurge in concern about climate change and Australia's role in the continuing war in Iraq - found himself up against a younger contender who claimed to be brimming with fresh ideas and who the electorate quickly showed itself ready to embrace.

In fact, Rudd was in no hurry to detail a fresh agenda. He vowed to abolish WorkChoices, declared himself the champion of an education revolution, made clear he would sign the Kyoto Protocol in an effort to get Australia back into the international debate about climate change, and said he would withdraw Australia's combat troops from Iraq.

But he had obviously studied Howard's strategy of 1995 and 1996, when Howard had become Liberal leader with little more than a year to defeat the Keating Government. Howard had happily risked being called a "policy-free zone" and had simply established himself as an alternative to Keating by making vague statements about Liberal policy, refusing to engage or oppose when Keating introduced policies that were potentially popular, and promising to turn back the tide on "political correctness". Essentially, Howard had allowed voter disenchantment with Keating to do much of his work.

Rudd employed very similar tactics in 2007. He infuriated the Howard Government by agreeing with large slabs of Coalition policy - to the point that he became known as "little Lord Echo", and was accused throughout the year of "me-tooism". It suited Rudd to be accused of agreeing with the Howard Government on economic issues, because the Government had always scored high points with the electorate on economic management. Rudd simply helped himself to a slice of this approval, and used it to underline his claim to economic conservatism.

The strategy worked a dream. Newspaper poll after newspaper poll confirmed that Labor maintained a handy lead over the Government. Indeed, with the inevitable exceptions of the occasional poll spike or dip, the trend of all polls charted a steady 7 to 10-point gap between Rudd's Labor and Howard's Coalition on a two-party preferred basis. The trend set in around March and hardly budged, clear to election day.

The Government spent the first part of the year relying on the belief that Peter Costello's May Budget would throw Rudd Labor out of the saddle. Indeed, when it finally appeared, the Budget was hailed by commentators as a brilliant piece of work that lavished tax cuts and spending on virtually all sectors of Australian society while delivering a healthy $10.6 billion surplus and remaining affordable and responsible.

It failed to throw Labor off its stride. expected poll bounce for the Government did not eventuate, and Rudd and his shadow treasurer, Wayne Swan, even praised sections of Costello's work.

On June 21, Howard and his Indigenous Aaffairs Minister, Mal Brough, declared Australia could no longer ignore the shame of sexual abuse against children in indigenous communities. They ordered an unprecedented intervention by medical teams, the military and federal law into the Northern Tterritory's Aboriginal communities. Despite unease in some Labor hearts, Rudd professed support for the intervention.

In August, a sensational newspaper article accused Rudd of having visited a New York strip club while drunk four years previously. There was no discernible voter backlash - not even from the conservative Christian community that Rudd had so carefully wooed. Some observers believed he had actually gained credibility among young males who had considered him too much of a "goody two-shoes", and others felt the Government had lost by media speculation that a Liberal "dirt unit" was behind the story.

By September, Howard knew he was in so much trouble that he asked trusted lieutenant Alexander Downer to consult fellow Cabinet ministers about his standing as leader. When Downer reported back that the majority thought the situation was so dire that Howard ought to consider standing aside for Costello, Howard refused to go.

In desperation, Howard announced that he would remain prime minister for some unspecified time after the election, then hand over to Costello. It was a tactic designed to offer voters the best of both worlds, but it was a giant mistake. Howard had made himself a lame duck, and Costello remained widely unpopular.

Clockwise from bottom left: New Lliberal leader Brendan Nelson and his deputy Julie Bishop (picture: Glen McCurayne); Spooner’s view; Tandberg’s view The election campaign - a tightly controlled, cynical exercise in contrived photo opportunities and little serious policy illumination on behalf of both the Labor Party and the Government - thus became something of a formality, even though Rudd Labor needed one of the biggest swings in political history to win. Government suffered the ignominy of an interest-rate rise (the sixth since the previous election) smack in the middle of the campaign.

A peculiar feature of elections is that the official party campaign launches do not occur until close to the end of the campaign (it allows the parties to bill most of the cost to taxpayers). Here was the final denouement. Howard held his campaign launch first, and promised a massive $9 billion, most of it to families with school-age children. Having started the campaign by promising tax cuts of $34 billion, this last-minute spending campaign was breathtaking. It also proved worrying to voters concerned about public money fuelling higher inflation and forcing even more interest-rate increases.

Rudd played it cool. Three days later, he made a virtue out of spending promises worth less than a quarter of Howard's.

And so, on November 24, Kevin Rudd led Labor back to government after almost 12 years in the wilderness.

The voters sent the message that had been percolating for a year: they were tired of Howard and his era, despite record economic growth, plummeting unemployment and relatively low interest rates.

As the year headed to its end, Rudd had presided over his second Cabinet meeting, his ministers were working overtime and bureaucrats were cancelling holidays.

John Howard and his wife Janette had returned to their suburban home in Sydney, Peter Costello was preparing to leave politics - along with Downer - and the Liberal Party had elected Dr Brendan Nelson, a former Labor man, as its new leader.

What a year.


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