Australia opts for changeless change

The rest of Rudd's campaign rested on a swathe of asinine banalities. Rudd promised an "education revolution", that his government would look "forward with fairness" and "take the pressure off working families".

Indeed, his campaign was centred around the fact that his first name rhymed with seven (see www.kevin07.com.au). Howard, on the other hand, made the egregious error of telling Australians that they had "never been better off", perhaps apeing British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's very successful "you've never had it so good" election campaign of 1959. Although Howard's reminder was undeniably correct, Labor successfully cast it as further evidence of increasing aloofness. The emotive "Aussie battlers" remain sacred, and Australia's compulsory voting system ensures they always vote.

The incoming government's resemblance to the outgoing, in substance and style, may be Howard's greatest triumph. Despite the rhetoric, faced with economic reality Rudd will not re-impose a Byzantine straightjacket of labour regulations on Australian businesses. On the big questions of immigration, defence, foreign affairs, fiscal and Aboriginal policy, Labor will mimic the Howard government.

Indeed, Labor adopted Howard's proposed A$34 billion tax cuts in their substantive entirety during the campaign, promised budget surpluses, and even proposes to abolish the 35 per cent income tax band! Rudd routinely reminded Australians "I'm an economic conservative"; previous Labor leaders would have turned in their graves. Conservatives regularly lambasted Rudd for his political philosophy of "Me-tooism".

Points of difference stem from Rudd's necessary sop to the socially chic quarters of the Labor party, for whom conspicuous compassion trumps logical and empirical analysis. Rudd immediately signed the Kyoto protocol, leaving the United States as the only non-signatory. Rudd's Australia will also sign the absurd and unhelpful 2007 United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous People, which the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada had alone refused to sign. Australia will quietly gain a Minister of Social Inclusion (your guess is as good as mine), and the race-obsessed Department of Multicultural Affairs will be re-established.

Finally, Rudd has vaguely promised to reduce Australia's involvement in Iraq. I hope this disappointing proposal to desert our "great friend and ally" (as Rudd describes it), the United States, in a difficult time is quietly forgotten. Australia is the only country to have fought with the US in every war since World War I.

Howard, a scourge of political correctness, has a cultural legacy to match his economic one. In particular, Howard encouraged an Australian history based on reasonable interpretations of objectively verifiable events, particularly in relation to British settlement of Australia and relations with Aboriginal people.

Keith Windschuttle and other conservatives were appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Windschuttle's book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002), perhaps the most important and famous Australian historical work in the last 25 years, highlighted the egregious and blatant bias of many in the Australian historical profession. Australia's former Governor-General, Sir William Deane, had even publicly apologised for a racist "massacre" of Aborigines in 1930 which was shown to have never happened.

Rudd knows that his success is partly based on Australians' belief that he will maintain the cultural legacy of Howard. The last Labor government, under Paul Keating, was ejected precisely because typical Australians were sick of his government's and his latte cheer squad's elitist, blinkered view of Australian history. Indeed, trendy, culturally relativist positions will not sit well with Rudd, who grew up on a dairy farm in outback Queensland and whose Anglican Christianity is well known. On election night, Rudd pointedly noted, "[John Howard and I] share a common pride in this great nation of ours, Australia".

Assuming the new Labor government wants to remain in office for more than one term, Howard's influence in economic policy and culture will remain prevalent. Labor's tax cuts and promised budget surpluses will severely constrain any latent spendthrift tendencies. It will be interesting to see how the Rudd government faces Australia's more serious policy issues: whether to expand its small population of 21 million, and how to resolve the fraught constitutional relationship between the federal government and the Australian states.

I will put aside the old battles of the past, between business and unions, between growth and the environment, the old and tired battles between federal and state, between public and private, it's time for a new page to be written in Australia's history. Kevin Rudd, victory speech, November 24, 2007.

It is impossible to put these "battles" aside. They will always exist. But by creating the excitement and the image of change, perhaps the new right-wing Labor government under Kevin Rudd will better be able to continue Howard's program of economic liberalisation and emphasis on personal responsibility than his beleaguered, if correct, conservative one. After all, it's what occurs that counts, not what we call ourselves - that's only important for the modern Left.