What’s the Coalition doing right?

Sometimes losing isn’t all your own fault.

I’m going to break Don Watson’s rules for speechwriters now by using a sporting analogy. Last year, after three thumping Grand Final victories the seemingly unbeatable Brisbane Lions lost to Port Adelaide. Had the Lions actually done that much wrong?

Same coach, same team, same remorseless attitude. And even more experience and confidence.

The answer to the loss probably lies with the other team. Perhaps Port Adelaide had just improved more: evolved some new tactics; developed some new muscle and skills.

So perhaps turning to politics we should be looking at what the Coalition is doing differently and more effectively and Labor hasn’t yet caught up with. Here is an alternative explanation of Labor’s failure to defeat John Howard.

John Howard and his conservative allies have transformed the electoral game itself - sometimes in ways Labor has barely comprehended, never mind developed an effective strategy to counter. Labor’s not the only one at fault. The failure of analysis belongs equally to the political media and the broad anti-Coalition movement, which for this purpose we’ll call the “centre-left”.

It’s my belief that Labor’s problems stem from the fact that it continues to pursue a political strategy in many ways developed during the 1980s. This is the idea of pursuing consensus and co-operation above all else; always looking to the middle ground; always appealing to the centre; always rejecting the extremes. The only thing Labor is consistently extreme about these days is its moderation.

In recent years these Hawke-era strategies have evolved into the “triangulation” strategies at which Bill Clinton was so adept - always finding a middle way between the two extremes of any argument, and always searching for non-controversial issues, like reading books to children, that don’t cost much money and everyone can agree is a good thing.

Labor’s strategy abides by the old gentleman’s agreements - the unwritten rules that have stood since Robert Menzies’ time:

• you don’t talk about race;
• you don’t politicise national security or the armed forces;
• you respect multiculturalism and keep off the subject of immigration; and
• you tell the truth.

As strategies go, this is admirable, and - superficially at least, very democratic. What could be more democratic than trying to appeal to everyone on every issue, be honest and try to bring out the best instincts in voters?

But John Howard is playing a different - and arguably less admirable - strategy. He’s interested in winning.

Now, the media generally will say “Duh!” … “Told you!”

In their world view, John Winston Howard is just another typical politician - a Machiavellian whose every calculation can be understood by asking one question: “How do I stay in power?” This is only half right and it lacks really rigorous analysis.

Yes, John Howard is a Machiavellian, but a "new" Machiavellian. He’s a man with a purpose. He wants to transform the country according to a consistent conservative philosophy. And to do it, he has imported into Australia a new type of neo-conservative politics that has five features. Let me go through them.

First, unlike Labor, John Howard recognises that unattached, swinging voters are everywhere in the political spectrum, not just in the moderate centre. As traditional political loyalties based on class dissipate - as the sociologists and right-wing critics tell us - John Howard is trying to appeal to people all over the political spectrum who hold strong personal views on often divisive issues.

He wants these people to put aside their economic interests - non-mortgage-related ones like minimum wages, Medicare and public education - and vote for conservative values. It usually involves pegging out a position on a topic which intellectuals say involves complex moral and legal issues, but which the man or woman in the street (or, more accurately, in a focus group) sees as black and white - particularly race, immigration, abortion, homosexuality, parenthood and national security

Second, John Howard has set out to consciously re-shape the electorate itself. There’s a favourite conservative line, lifted out of context from the German playwright Berthold Brecht, which has a socialist politician saying “the people are wrong, therefore we’ll elect another people”. This, in a sense it what John Howard has done.

Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Lyle Allen from Monash University have shown Labor is losing the “white working-class vote”. My disagreement with the Monash team isn’t with their numbers but with the questions they are asking. Rather than ask how a largely powerless Labor Opposition has failed to keep its white working-class base, why not ask how an all-powerful prime minister has convinced the same white working-class voters that he’s “one of them”?

In my opinion, the increasing ethnic partitioning of the electorate isn’t so much a matter of unintended Labor failure as of planned Howard Government triumph. Part of John Howard’s political legacy will be his success in dividing Australians along ethnic lines. He is the first Australian politician in half a century to succeed in making appeals to ethnicity politically acceptable.

Students of politics recognise what John Howard has done - he’s copied the successful southern strategy used by Richard Nixon to polarise the electorate along ethnic lines and grab the bigger share. In the 1960s Nixon’s Republicans attacked the black civil rights movement and its educated northern supporters as a way of detaching southern white blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party. The electoral map of the US today - with the red (Republican) states covering the south and the mid-west and the blue (Democratic) states largely confined to the more liberal and cosmopolitan east and west coasts - had its origins in Nixon’s campaigns.

At every turn, John Howard has been at pains to identify himself with Australians of English-speaking backgrounds and distance himself from others. In 1996 he made a big issue of opposing reconciliation and multiculturalism. In 1998 he shamelessly chased the Hansonite vote, arguing that people should be free to vent their opposition to immigration. And then there’s the Tampa election of 2001 ...

These days, in search of the Pentecostal Christian vote, he can barely open his mouth without talking up the importance of Judaeo-Christian values to the Australian way of life. These are powerful, divisive signals to voters.

What the Monash researchers have missed is that the ethnic sub-dividing of the Australian electorate has come about not so much through Labor failure but through a massive re-engineering of the national psyche, led by Prime Minister Howard. It’s now OK to dislike people who are different, especially Muslims.

From this perspective, Labor’s major electoral failing lies in part in refusing to practise the successful politics of soft racism: something perhaps for its supporters to be proud of.

Third, John Howard has remade the political establishment. One by one, he’s knocking away the props that held up Australia’s more liberal-minded political establishment.

He’s stacked the board of the ABC. He’s appointed divisive right-wingers to the High Court. (These days the prerequisite for appointment to that or any other Commonwealth body is to get published in Quadrant.) He’s continually denigrating the Fairfax Press and the arts community.

Think about the voluntary student unionism legislation. Why do you think a federal government would worry about what students are up to? It’s not just because Brendan Nelson wants to impress conservatives on his backbench as part of his campaign to become deputy leader to Peter Costello. It’s because they see student unionism as a training ground for future anti-Coalition political leaders.

On TV today you’ll see advertisments for the new “Super Choice” reforms. These reforms are only partly about giving people more choice in what super fund they want. They’re also about destroying the industry super funds that are controlled by the union movement - robbing the labour movement of future influence over investment decisions.

It is long-range politics aimed at reshaping the political system over a couple of decades.

John Howard’s fourth innovation is that nothing is out of bounds: not race, not sexuality, not national security.

Look at how he has politicised use of the military and the Anzac legend. This is absolutely unprecedented. When he sent troops to East Timor in 1999 John Howard learned a valuable lesson: identification with young Australian soldiers, living and dead, is a universal antidote to public criticism, a way to demonstrate strength, and a sure fire way to increase your standing in the Newspoll.

And it’s a good way also of appealing to the predominantly blue collar mums and dads of the young men and women sent overseas.

And the fifth and final of John Howard’s innovations is surrounding himself with powerful media allies to ram home his message, especially where it counts - on talk back radio and in the tabloids. Labor’s supporters bang away at the broadsheets and on the ABC, but few hear their message.

This is important, because it affects our democracy in serious ways. As an adviser to three Labor leaders, I observed that it was incredibly difficult for the policies Labor released to create enough sustained coverage to filter down to the average voter.

John Howard has the powerful levers of government at his disposal to influence public opinion, but he has something more - a strong forward pack of media supporters willing to pick up a policy or message, smash through the opposing team’s defences and touch it down under the uprights.

John Howard’s strong support in the media, carefully crafted through a hard-fought culture war, has given him media hegemony - as Gramsci would have recognised. Labor, by contrast, has few friends in the media. There are many commentators on the left in Australia, but many dislike Kim Beazley and Labor as much as John Howard and the Coalition.

It seems almost every left-wing commentator in the country writes regularly that Kim Beazley is too weak to be prime minister and that there are no differences between Labor and the Coalition.

The asylum seeker issue is a good example. Howard’s harsh message about asylum seekers was carried out to his heartland by the shock jocks and the tabloids. When Labor countered with a far more compassionate alternative - which was in fact a defacto abolition of mandatory detention under Simon Crean’s leadership - left-wing supporters of Labor never found out because all left-wing commentators could do was attack Labor for “not going far enough”. I might add that Crean opposed the Iraq War too - but few would know.

So our question “What”s wrong with the Labor party?” could more accurately be put as “What’s wrong with the Australian left in general?”

Howard - the new Machiavelli

These five innovations of John Howard have a purpose, something totally underestimated by the mainstream media, who see only the old, not the new, Machiavelli. That purpose is the transformation of the nation: the overturning of the revolution in values that occurred in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

So the Liberal Party under John Howard isn't just ruthless; it encompasses ruthless revolutionaries. And through a combination of calculation and determination, they’ve transformed the values and priorities of voters and the rules of the electoral game.

Let me quote what Hugh Mackay has found in his social research:

… For the last few years it’s been a story of people really disengaging from the national agenda. Being less concerned about social and political issues. Being less charitable, being more prejudiced, less compassionate. And that doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of Australia that we have been and that’s a disturbing thing to have to report at this stage of my career.

Doing the right thing. Seeking consensus. Being moderate on all issues. Being in the centre. Today these things just seem to lack all conviction. Not being jingoistic seems unpatriotic. Labor just doesn’t get it, the political landscape seems totally transformed.

These changes, combined with the great sociological transformations that have occurred in recent decades have made Labor look like a Jurassic-era dinosaur in a Cretaceous age. The climate is colder and less hospitable.

For Labor the Howard era has been like one of those huge extinction events. If you like disaster films, you’ll know what I mean.

Watched by the first black president of the United States - Morgan Freeman - a giant fiery comet plunges through the earth’s atmosphere and crashes into the Gulf of Mexico, with the impact of a thousand-million Hiroshimas, throwing up a cloud of dust that blacks out the sky and plunges the planet into a new ice age. Only the well-adapted survive. You evolve or you perish.

As those of you who have studied science will know, there is, of course, another explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs. That is the evolution of a new type of mammal - the rodent. This theory says the dinosaurs died out because rats began eating their eggs and their young, destroying the next generation in their nests.

I’ll leave it to you to determine which metaphor best suits John Howard - the fiery comet that promotes the survival of the fittest, or the humble rodent, gnawing away at future generations of potential Labor talent.

But the point remains.

Under these circumstances I think it’s amazing Labor has held it together as well as it has. But to get stronger it needs to adapt. Labor needs two things to become dominant again.

The first is a bit of luck. If only that comet’s orbit had been off by a thousand miles - nothing in terms of planetary space - we might still have the T-Rex instead of just the alligator. And the second is, it needs to adapt and evolve. It needs to move away from its ponderous and predictable strategies. It needs to hatch smarter offspring and put them into parliament. It needs better tactics. And it needs friends where it counts in the media.

Otherwise it may turn into one of those grazing herbivores instead of a creature able to dominate its environment and change the face of the political landscape once again.