What’s the Coalition doing right?

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.