What’s the Coalition doing right?

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.