Such an ungrateful electorate ...

The winners, it is often said, get to write the history. Yet in the aftermath of the defeat of the Howard Government on Saturday, November 24, it is a series of senior figures from the Coalition who have been particularly quick to try and define the meaning of the result.

According to the Liberal view, a splendid government has just been tossed away by an ungrateful electorate that was idly bored. It is an attitude that shows an astonishing contempt for the intelligence and the democratic deliberation of the electorate. The Liberals would have us believe that a more than 5.5 per cent swing against them was just a fidgety public choosing a new prime minister as if it was a decision to spend a reinvigorating weekend at the beach.

While Howard’s concession speech on election night has been regarded by some commentators as showing a certain unexpected graciousness, the collective hubris of many of his former lieutenants has been marked. Tony Abbott said he had served in a “good government” and that the “Howard era” was “a golden age” that people would look back on “with considerable nostalgia and affection”, while Helen Coonan modestly declared herself to have been part of “a very great government”. Peter Costello too has already engaged in a number of eulogies following his own political funeral, in which he has reeled off what he regards as the virtues of the former government.

So if they were so good, why did they lose? The essence of the 2007 election result, if the Liberal mythologising is to be believed, is that the Australian electorate was happy with the government and pleased with the new policy initiatives, but was a bit bored by the leadership. According to Costello:

… the problem was that we were going for a fifth term. We'd been in office 11 years. … along came Mr Rudd and said, oh well I'll be a little fresher. He didn't put forward any substantive policy differences in my view, and we could have muted that appeal of Labor if we'd had a fresher face …

Costello’s views on these matters are obviously self-serving, implying that the result might have been different had the transition from Howard to himself occurred, but the former Treasurer was not alone in his opinion. Alexander Downer said in an interview that:

Well, I think, look, the honest truth is we've been there for a very long time, 11½ years. After a while people do start to get that sense that they'd like a change. … I think at the end of the day, people just thought it was time for a change.

According to the Liberal view of the world Howard was exchanged for Rudd by an electorate not exactly dissatisfied, just a little restless.

It is clear that even in their downfall, the Liberals are still applying the same exclusionary view of society that has so characterised the government of the last 11½ years.

The Howard administration always proceeded on the basis of the dog whistle and when figures like Costello and Downer refer to “the people”, we know that there are lots of sections of Australian society whom they are implicitly excluding. Employees whose lives had been undermined by WorkChoices; voters for whom their country not ratifying Kyoto was a matter of genuine shame; or citizens who remembered Iraq, Tampa, AWB or Kids Overboard.

These were all Australian people and despite the Liberal myth-making, they were waiting with the only “baseball bat” that the Australian system of government recognises: casting their vote against the government.

In their insistence that they were not dumped in anger, the Liberals are coming across like rejected suitors, lying to themselves to cope with the pain of rejection. “They still love us”, Costello, Downer and Co. seem to be saying of the electorate, “they just don’t want to be with us right now”.

Some among the former Howard ministry seem to believe that there is a meaningful distinction between voting against the government on the one hand and voting against the government when you are “Really Angry” on the other. In support of this distinction, senior Liberals have been lining up to say, despite the actual result of the election, how everything they have done all year has been. Two days after the election, Downer said:

… through the course of this year, 2007, we'd pursued a lot of initiatives which on an individual basis were very popular. The Murray Darling Basin $10 million initiative … The Indigenous intervention in the Northern Territory, the Budget itself, we fixed up the Hicks issue which had been a bit of a problem politically.

Costello offered an almost identical list a couple of nights later.

Looking back, there were two problems for the Liberals with these various initiatives. The first was that no matter how popular such announcements may have been, they did not repair the electoral damage done by WorkChoices or the failure to act on climate change. Second, far from enhancing the reputation of the Howard Government, it is strongly arguable that the policy announcements listed by Downer and Costello actually served to heighten the credibility gap that had started to gape before the government: that sense that the incumbent would have done virtually anything to hold on to power or to stifle critics.

Downer’s language is revealing: it is not that the Howard Government actually gave two hoots about the injustices associated with the treatment of David Hicks but that it “had been a bit of a problem politically”.

WorkChoices represented a covenant of true policy faith among Howard’s inner circle, but you can’t say the same of many other doings of the Government. The bottom line is that a government that had put the boot in to Indigenous rights, starved public education, denied climate change and gone missing on the environment for more than a decade could not expect to gain credibility by suddenly conceding that all of these issues were problems in the last year before an election.

Costello’s final budget also did nothing to restore the lost credibility. As Paul Kelly highlighted on November 10:

Given the demand pressures in the economy, the Government should have run bigger surpluses but decided such a path was unsustainable in political terms. So it redistributed into households, thereby fuelling the upward interest rate cycle.

Again the same pattern: the desire to remain popular determined policy, but only served to widen the credibility gap. Budget giveaways might have been popular with the recipients … but wait a minute, wasn’t this the mob who claimed to be the experts at keeping interest rates low?

Tossed out of office, the Liberals still don’t get it. The problem facing Howard was not the simple elapse of time per se, but the reality that the electorate had learned that in many ways, small and large, his government could not be trusted.

On November 24, the Howard administration was pushed in to the yawning abyss of their own credibility gap by an electorate grown weary of the tricky disingenuousness. It is ironic that as the Liberals confront defeat, rather than engaging in much honest self-appraisal they seem determined to continue with the same kind of spin that helped to bring them undone in the first place.

The Liberals have not got the message: they were dumped not because the electorate was bored, but because the government was no longer trusted by a majority of the voters.