Tampa in Tasmania... and the devil we know

Howard comfortably wins his fourth election on the trot with an increased majority delivered by a swing of about three per cent to the Coalition. More alarmingly, he sits one Senate spot away from total control of both houses of the Federal Parliament. He’ll be the first Prime Minister since Malcolm Fraser to rule without the checks and balances of the Senate.

Labor’s primary vote has gone backward under L-plate Latham, reducing its much vaunted preference deal with the Greens to electoral irrelevance. The Democrats vote has collapsed, as expected, sweeping three of its Senators, including Aden Ridgeway out of a job come July. One Nation is gone, its three per cent share of the primary vote transferring directly across to Howard.

The result will have a profound effect on the political landscape over the next three years and on post-mortem Sunday everyone was trying to come to terms with what happened. The winners are grinning, the losing spin doctors are spinning. I could sense it slipping away from Labor in the final week of the campaign, especially after Tampa in Tassie. There are many reasons for the defeat.

It is clear, that in a buoyant economy a vast number of Australians would have gone to the polls with one clear thought: if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Then there was the hugely negative L-plate Latham/Liverpool council campaign and the nagging doubts about interest rates under Labor. No matter that Howard has about as much control over interest rates as he has over the weather. The devil you know... But the sucker punch of the campaign must surely have been delivered by Howard in Tasmania.

The contrasting images of Latham saving trees not jobs and Howard being glad handed by hundreds of burly loggers for putting jobs ahead of trees must have sent a chill through every blue collar worker in the country. It was a perfect Howard wedge. Tampa in Tassie. For Latham it was surely the tactical blunder of the campaign. He could have offered three billion bucks to retrain the timber workers. It would not have mattered a dot.

Marry the images of Howard and his new-found friends from the forest to that of loyal Labor foot soldier Dick Adams getting stuck into Leader Latham on election eve to save his political skin. Adams did hold on. Two of his colleagues lost their seats. Labor picked up none of the seats it hoped the strategy would deliver on the mainland. His sledging of Latham for sacrificing Tassie jobs and seats for Greens mainland preferences may well have kept him in the House of Reps but it has much deeper significance for those who must now chart why Labor failed to tip out a government seeking a fourth term.

Surely one of the big lessons of the last federal election campaign was that the record rise in the Greens primary vote came from core Labor Party supporters disenchanted with its silence on humans rights issues and refugees. The new record primary vote recorded by the Greens in this election has clearly come at the expense of Labor’s primary vote.

Labor performed worse, under a new leader, than in 2001, with its primary vote crashing below 40 per cent.

I got stuck into Howard in the last issue of National Indigenous Times for not once mentioning Aboriginal Affairs in his campaign policy launch. Neither did Latham.

Despite all his talk about the ladder of opportunity he was totally silent on core issues such as Aboriginal Affairs throughout the six-week campaign. I took Howard to task and wondered how so much could be spent on health without a mention of Indigenous Australians. It was a theme taken up in the mainstream media at the beginning of the final week of the campaign by Mark Metherell from the Sydney Morning Herald. His article began by asking if there had ever been a federal election where so many billions of dollars had been thrown at health care with so little attention given to the plight of our sickest citizens?

Metherell pointed out that Indigenous Australians, whose health - or rather illness and death rates - remain at third-world levels, had picked up the odd million from both parties. But nothing to match the billions tossed to older, largely non-Indigenous people. There are not too many Indigenous voters in that group, by the way, because they tend to die before they can pick up the age pension and self-funded retirement is unlikely to happen for most, he told his readers. But the Indigenous community outnumber the 287,000 self-funded retirees who will get a $200 annual utilities bonus if the Coalition is re-elected, he continued.

Mark Latham promised to spend $3 billion to give those aged 75 and over priority access to hospital treatment. Amid the spending frenzy, the shameful state of Indigenous health goes largely unmentioned.

We know why this is so. The Indigenous vote was not going to decide this election outcome.

Despite a decade of uninterrupted rising national prosperity, the original Australians continue to suffer woeful disadvantages on every socio-economic measure. On some health indicators, like longevity, they are going backwards compared with the rest of society. The disturbing apartheid in health outcomes is demonstrated by the statistics: Life expectancy for Indigenous males is 56, compared with 77 for the rest; it is 63 and 83 respectively for women. Indigenous babies are four times more likely to die before their first birthday. Suicide rates are nearly three times non-Indigenous levels.

Apart from the obligatory mention of Indigenous programmes, neither side is offering a credible plan to deal with the huge problems facing Indigenous Australians in infant mortality and diseases ranging from blindness to cardiovascular conditions, diabetes and sexually transmitted disease. Yet neither Latham nor John Howard felt it necessary to announce personally their parties’ Indigenous policies.

The chaos in Indigenous leadership that triggered the demise of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission has produced an advocacy vacuum in this campaign. That neither side of politics is prepared to give priority to this health crisis is explicable in political terms, but not in terms of rational decency, financial priorities, or ignorance.

The Australian Council of Social Service says there is no shortage of evidence, including reviews by the Productivity Commission and the Commonwealth Grants Commission, pointing to the failure of mainstream services to protect Indigenous health and wellbeing. The National Health and Medical Research Council has made the study of Indigenous health a priority, and numerous medical organisations and authorities, not least the 2003 Australian of the Year, Fiona Stanley, have crusaded on Indigenous infant illness.

We now import 1,000 doctors a year to ensure ready medical attention for the majority, but cannot produce a better health service for our sickest citizens.

Much of this has to do with what is being called the politics of entitlement, that is those who have the voter clout get the cash. Do most really believe that spending $1 billion more on handouts and increased services to older Australians, or spending $3 billion to give them first dibs on already strained hospital services, comes ahead of a credible national campaign to lift the longevity of 400,000 Australians? As a nation we should feel entitled to something better.

Hear Hear.

Let’s face it, the political vacuum in the Indigenous leadership suits the leadership group in both major political parties and mainstream articles such as the one written by Metherell are few and far between. Let’s not forget it was Latham who sought credit in the run up to the campaign for announcing the abolition of ATSIC before Howard. Curiously there was no consultation with Aboriginal people yet the Labor Party’s policy pledged to replace it with another elected body based upon a consultative process with the very people ignored in the formulation of the policy.

It displayed a stunning ignorance of Aboriginal Affairs and simply gave Howard the opportunity to move on his long-held desire to wind back self determination and destroy ATSIC, ignoring the expert advice from his own Government appointed review into the organisation and top level advice from within the federal bureaucracy. The electoral cost for Latham’s Labor on ATSIC was always going to be worse than for Howard.

Ditto jobs v forests, again cynically and skillfully manipulated by Howard. It is now odds on the ATSIC kill bill will be one of the first pieces of legislation to be run up the flagpole in the new Senate, if not before. I suspect we will have not have to wait too long to see Howard’s hand picked National Indigenous Council being publicly announced. They have been selected and, for obvious reasons, an announcement withheld until the end of the campaign.

Governments throughout the world have grappled with the disastrous consequences of colonialism for the Indigenous peoples, particularly the catastrophic impact on health and welfare. All have tried a suite of policies from benign neglect to forced assimilation and limited self determination. Evidence-based research from around the world, including Australia, clearly shows sustained improvements are only recorded when Aboriginal people are able to control their own affairs.

Howard has now secured a special place in Australian political history but has done so after 8 ½ years of disengagement from Aboriginal Australia. He now has a chance to re-engage. One would hope he might see this term as the time to do it.

Labor ought to do the same.