“I’ve led a government that has taken this country from deep
debt to strong prosperity…. I’ve led a government that has
reformed the Australian economy and left it the envy of the
world….We bequeath to Labor a nation that is stronger and prouder
and more prosperous than it was 11 and a half years ago.”
— John Howard, concession speech, November 24, 2007.
THE POLITICAL CLICHE, “it’s the economy, stupid,” has forever lost
empirical relevance in Australia. John Howard’s conservative
government oversaw unrivalled economic success in its eleven and a
half years in office, yet was roundly defeated on Saturday.
Australian unemployment, at 4.2 per cent, is the lowest since the
first oil shock of 1973, and lower than in all G8 and major
European countries. Since 1996 Australian private sector wages have
risen by 48 per cent, faster than those in the United Kingdom,
United States, Europe and the OECD average. Inflation has remained
steady around 2.5 per cent, and interest rates relatively low.
Meanwhile, the Howard government effectively reduced public debt to
zero. Indeed, it has run consistent budget surpluses and set up a
massive investment fund to save for the demographic rainy day on
the horizon. Perceptions have reflected reality. Alan Greenspan’s
memoirs praise outgoing Australian Treasurer Peter Costello’s
fiscal foresight, and the IMF describes Australia’s recent
macroeconomic management as “exemplary.”
Yet, despite good economic times, the Australian electorate
resoundingly removed the incumbent government. Howard’s
Liberal-National coalition lost over a quarter of its seats in the
150-seat House of Representatives, where governments are formed.
Not only did the electorate remove the government, it personally
removed the Prime Minister from his Sydney seat of Bennelong, which
he had held continuously since 1974. John Howard, 68, has become
the only incumbent Australian Prime Minister since 1929 to lose his
own seat, to a prominent left-wing journalist and former employee
of the state-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Moreover,
Howard’s coalition lost its majority in the crucial 76-seat Senate,
which, modeled on the U.S, system, contains equal numbers of
representatives from the six Australian states, and wields almost
equal legislative power.
The leader of the Australian Labor Party, and incoming Prime
Minister, is the comparatively little-known Kevin Rudd, 50. He
entered parliament in 1998, following a career as a diplomat in
China and then a senior bureaucrat in the Queensland state
government. He impressed the electorate by addressing Chinese
President Hu Jintao in fluent Mandarin during the recent APEC
summit in Sydney. Elected Labor party leader in December 2006,
Rudd’s reserved demeanor and anodyne intonation contrast markedly
with previous Labor prime ministers. Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and
Gough Whitlam, Australia’s only other Labor prime ministers since
1949, all great orators, evinced a swashbuckling, larrikin style.
Rudd can seem a bureaucrat elevated beyond his station. In his
victory speech, Rudd characteristically recommended that his
supporters’ celebratory solace extend only to a “strong cup of tea”
and an “iced Vovo” (a traditional Australian biscuit).
Howard’s loss stems from poorly argued and implemented labor
reforms, and a very effective Labor campaign that characterized
them as extreme, and Howard as out of touch and drunk with power.
No Labor politician would open his mouth without referring to John
Howard’s “extreme industrial relations laws.” Rudd, however, would
“get the balance right.” Who wants to the get the balance wrong?
Labor’s campaign was very effective, and the government looked like
it was attacking the “Aussie battlers,” those working-class,
supposedly downtrodden Australians whose cultural conservatism had
kept Howard in government for so long. Working class suburban seats
fell to Labor in droves on Saturday. Howard’s loss had nothing to
do with Australia’s involvement in Iraq or its “failure” to sign
Kyoto.
Howard’s now-infamous “workchoices” laws were in fact extremely
reasonable. They tried to simplify perhaps the most complicated
labor market in the Western world, where 20 different minimum
conditions — from “cultural leave” to the exact length of
afternoon tea breaks — existed for different jobs, and were set
arbitrarily by courts. They released businesses with fewer than 100
employees from potentially having to prove a termination was not
“harsh, unjust or unreasonable.” They made it easier for people to
negotiate employment contracts directly with their employers.
THE REST OF RUDD’S campaign rested on a swathe of asinine
banalities. Rudd promised an “education revolution,” that his
government would look “forward with fairness” and “take the
pressure off working families.” Indeed, his campaign was centered
around the fact that his first name rhymed with seven (see www.kevin07.com.au). Howard, on the other hand, made
the egregious error of telling Australians that they had “never
been better off,” perhaps aping British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan’s very successful “you’ve never had it so good” election
campaign of 1959. Although Howard’s reminder was undeniably
correct, Labor successfully cast it as further evidence of
increasing aloofness. The emotive “Aussie battlers” remain sacred,
and Australia’s compulsory voting system ensures they always
vote.
The incoming government’s resemblance to the outgoing, in
substance and style, may be Howard’s greatest triumph. Despite the
rhetoric, faced with economic reality Rudd will not re-impose a
Byzantine straightjacket of labor regulations on Australian
businesses. On the big questions of immigration, defense, foreign
affairs, fiscal and aboriginal policy, Labor will mimic the Howard
government. Indeed, Labor adopted Howard’s proposed A$34 billion
tax cuts in their substantive entirety during the campaign,
promised budget surpluses, and even proposes to abolish the 35 per
cent income tax band! Rudd routinely reminded Australians “I’m an
economic conservative”; previous Labor leaders would have turned in
their graves. Conservatives regularly lambasted Rudd for his
political philosophy of “Me-tooism.”
Points of difference stem from Rudd’s necessary sop to the
socially chic quarters of the Labor party, for whom conspicuous
compassion trumps logical and empirical analysis. Rudd will
immediately sign the Kyoto protocol, leaving the United States as
the only non-signatory. Rudd’s Australia will also sign the absurd
and unhelpful 2007 United Nations Declaration on Rights of
Indigenous People, which the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and
Canada had alone refused to sign. Australia will quietly gain a
Minister of Social Inclusion (your guess is as good as mine), and
the race-obsessed Department of Multicultural Affairs will be
re-established. Finally, Rudd has vaguely promised to reduce
Australia’s involvement in Iraq. I hope this disappointing proposal
to desert our “great friend and ally” (as Rudd describes it), the
United States, in a difficult time is quietly forgotten. Australia
is the only country to have fought with the U.S. in every war since
the First World War.
Howard, a scourge of political correctness, has a cultural
legacy to match his economic one. In particular, Howard encouraged
an Australian history based on reasonable interpretations of
objectively verifiable events, particularly in relation to British
settlement of Australia and relations with Aboriginal people. Keith
Windschuttle and other conservatives were appointed to the board of
the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Windschuttle’s book,
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), perhaps the
most important and famous Australian historical work in the last 25
years, highlighted the egregious and blatant bias of many in the
Australian historical profession. Australia’s former
Governor-General, Sir William Deane, had even publicly apologized
for a racist “massacre” of aborigines in 1930 which was shown to
have never happened.
Rudd knows that his success is partly based on Australians’
belief that he will maintain the cultural legacy of Howard. The
last Labor government, under Paul Keating, was ejected precisely
because typical Australians were sick of his government’s and his
latte cheer squad’s elitist, blinkered view of Australian history.
Indeed, trendy, culturally relativist positions will not sit well
with Rudd, who grew up on a dairy farm in outback Queensland and
whose Anglican Christianity is well known. On election night, Rudd
pointedly noted, “[John Howard and I] share a common pride in this
great nation of ours, Australia”.
Assuming the new Labor government wants to remain in office for
more than one term, Howard’s influence in economic policy and
culture will remain prevalent. Labor’s tax cuts and promised budget
surpluses will severely constrain any latent spendthrift
tendencies. It will be interesting to see how the Rudd government
faces Australia’s more serious policy issues: whether to expand its
small population of 21 million, and how to resolve the fraught
constitutional relationship between the federal government and the
Australian states.
“I will put aside the old battles of the past,
between business and unions, between growth and the environment,
the old and tired battles between federal and state, between public
and private, it’s time for a new page to be written in Australia’s
history.”
— Kevin Rudd, victory speech, November 24, 2007.
It is impossible to put these “battles” aside. They will always
exist. But by creating the excitement and the image of change,
perhaps the new right-wing Labor government under Kevin Rudd will
better be able to continue Howard’s program of economic
liberalization and emphasis on personal responsibility than his
beleaguered, if correct, conservative one. After all, it’s what
occurs that counts, not what we call ourselves — that’s only
important for the modern Left.
