Getting the Meta Politics right.

If you type the words "Pamela Anderson" into a search engine you’ll find a lot of porn sites. But if you type in "John Howard" you won’t find any compassion sites. "Pamela Anderson" and "sex" go together. So if you are running a porn site they are two of the terms you will probably add to the key words in your meta tags – those invisible pieces of text that search engines use. "John Howard" and "compassion" don’t.

Why is this important? Because the Liberal Party is in the process of making over John Howard as a more voter-friendly type of a guy, but electors already have a strong visceral view of Howard’s character. It will be a difficult task to change that view.

The Liberals seem determined to do so. This signals a tectonic shift in Liberal Party tactics. Before Malcolm Fraser it was common wisdom that elections were won by capturing the middle ground. Then came Fraser and the "Kemp thesis"(named after Fraser’s speech writer and now the Federal Education Minister, Dr David Kemp) that elections were won by highlighting the differences between you and your opponent.

A similar approach deliever Reagan government in America and made Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister in Great Britain. They also suited the times as a revolution in economic management pushed back the edges of the welfare state.

Now we are enjoying the economic dividends of that revolution and the international trend is back to the centre. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have made the journey from the left, while at least the rhetoric of "Compassionate Conservative" George Bush suggests that he has made the journey from the right. Perhaps the Liberal move is a reaction to those trends. Or it might stem from uniquely Australian conditions.

The latest move by Howard to change image occurred on Wednesday when he delivered the Menzies Lecture - Perspectives on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Issues.

Reconciliation is a difficult issue for Howard because so many of the people passionately supporting it are his enemies and will use it as a weapon against him. An interesting light on this is the insistence that the Howard Government say "sorry". I deliberately put the word "sorry" in inverted commas because the Government has apologised. It expressed "regret" and the form of words was brokered by Democrat Senator Aden Ridgeway. To say that it won’t apologise is disingenuous.

Yet, what was written in the sky above the Reconciliation March across the Sydney Harbour Bridge? The word "Sorry". Why was it there? One reason would have been to highlight the charge that the PM won’t use the word. This was not an act of reconciliation, but of aggression.

When Nelson Mandela recently visited Australia he was asked what was different between Reconciliation in South Africa and Australia. Mandela evaded the question, pointing out that the two situations were significantly different. It is a pity that Mandela did not point to one of the stunning differences – that in South Africa reconciliation did not mean having to say you were "sorry". This demonstrates that while many of us, including me, think an apology is a necessary ingredient, many genuine people have disagreed in other attempts at reconciliation.

In the Menzies Lecture Howard stresses the practical steps that have been taken to address Aboriginal disadvantage over the past 30 years: a $2.3 billion annual budget – "a record for any government"; Indigenous home ownership up from 25 per cent to 33 per cent; infant mortality cut from 20 times to 4 times the national rate; Aboriginal enrolments in higher education up by 60 per cent in the 1990s; and 15 per cent of the continent Aboriginal owned and controlled.

The role of so-called practical reconciliation in repairing the government’s reputation is interesting. It has the potential to play to two different audiences. The blue-collar conservatives who deserted Labor, flocked to Howard in ’96 and are the back-bone of One Nation and its offspring, are very antagonistic to the academic. Experience rather than analysis is the peak of knowing for them. Reconciliation for these people can look highly theoretical and therefore unreal and phoney. Practical reconciliation is much more likely to satisfy them.

Not that there isn’t a respectable intellectual aspect to practical reconciliation. Religious practice has long recognised two ways of approaching god. One is the way of the theologian, an approach through knowledge and intellectual exploration. The other is the way of the doer. Not seeking to understand, but to become holy by going through the religious ritual and practice. This is embodied in the debate between Protestant and Catholic as to whether it is faith or good works that saves.

Interestingly, the Protestant Howard seems, in the case of Reconciliation, to have eschewed faith and belief in favour of good works. However there is a false dichotomy between faith and good works. Right actions done for wrong reasons can actually feedback so that right actions retrain thoughts. By walking the walk, you can subconsciously begin to talk the talk, and believe it.

So Howard has a position on Reconciliation that is rhetorically flexible with appeal to both the academic and the anti-academic. The question is whether the public’s perception of him as uncaring is so strong that he is barred from effectively expressing and promulgating that position.

The same is true of one of the other areas where moves are being made to soften Howard’s image – welfare. Traditionally, Conservative politicians have been seen as unsympathetic to the plight of the underprivileged – wanting to punish them for alleged failure rather than lifting them up. The McClure report, and the government’s response to it, is not in that mould. They acknowledge failings in the social security system, and in the market economy. In some ways they smack of New Dealism, and even distantly sound of Marxism. Some argue (see our Feature) that the doctrine of mutual obligation punishes the unemployed by forcing them to look for a job. An equally viable proposition is that the unemployed are actually being provided with a part-time job funded by government social security payments.

So Howard has material to work with that has elements that potentially appeal to a number of constituencies, the question again is: will his current community perception allow him to?

One of Howard’s risks is that he can say acceptable things that may be undercut by his presentation. Since the last election he has been more relaxed than before, possibly because he has proved himself by winning an election with the huge handicap of the GST. He also seems to acknowledge that political life has limits and that his reaches its limit somewhere in the next term of Parliament. That must provide tremendous relief – knowing that as far as his career and reputation are concerned most of the threats to them are now in the past.

Despite being more relaxed, he still appears wooden. On television he looks like a marionette with a woodblock mouth moving up and down, but no smile. Radio, without the visual, is even worse. He continually says "Aaah …" in a way that suggests impatience with the interviewer and an implication of superiority. The verbal and the visual are large impediments to the Howard makeover.

So too are the team dynamics within the Liberal Party. It now seems to be accepted that Peter Costello will succeed to the leadership when Howard stands down. In the Hawke/Keating Government it was Keating who did the heavy lifting for the Government in campaigns. This allowed for a two-pronged campaign. Hawke could appeal for Australians to unite at the same time that Keating set group against group. It worked well for Hawke. It was Keating’s downfall when he came to fill the role of Prime Minister. Costello is the hard man of the government but wants to avoid Keating’s problem so he too is taking steps to soften his image.

What happens in an election? Howard is quite capable of making the hits. Does he find himself drawn back into a harsher role, and so squander the effort that has been put into softening his appeal? Or do the Liberals let government slip through their fingers because the entire leadership group wants to be loved by the electors.

Fortunately for them, Peter Reith may be there to fill the role. The telecard affair appears to have ended his realistic chance of the leadership. If he can accept this, then the government may still have one mastiff left with some bite.

The next Federal election is probably 12 months away. The economy is heading towards a cyclical downturn. Howard will not want to repeat Malcolm Fraser’s mistake in 1983 of calling an election which he lost to beat a recession rather than sit it out. So expect a late election, in line with the Prime Minister’s pronouncements. However, a downturn may also complicate the softening strategy. While the Liberals are moving away from tax reform and the economy generally as issues, if there is an economic downturn, then those issues will reassert themselves. The GST will also get the blame. In a situation like that it might well be a tough Prime Minister that people are looking for.

The Liberal Party has a lot of work to do to align the politics with the metapolitics. Despite the attempt at softening the Prime Minister’s image, I don’t think there will ever be a time when typing the phrase "John Howard" into a search engine will yield a list of compassion sites. After experimenting with the cuddly John Howard, don’t be surprised if the leader who does what needs to be done reappears.