Such an ungrateful electorate ...

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.