Quarterly Essay 25 Bipolar Nation

How to Win the 2007 Election

Peter Hartcher

• Publisher: Quarterly Essay
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781921825248
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Bipolar Nation, Peter Hartcher discusses the fantasies and realities at the heart of our politics. When our political leaders look at us, what do they see? What are the hopes, fears and dreams of the Australian electorate, and how might they be turned to election winning advantage? What, most fundamentally, do we want in a prime minister?In this scintillating and original essay, Peter Hartcher investigates today's "bipolar nation", where Australians are more economically secure, yet existentially as anxious as ever. He explains how the Lucky Country and the Frightened Country will be the two grand themes of the election year, and discusses how John Howard will set out to craft an election winning strategy on that basis. He revisits Donald Horne's Lucky Country, looks at the legacy of Paul Keating, and analyses Kevin Rudd's many layered effort to out-manoeuvre the Prime Minister.'The Lucky Country finally started to make its own luck, and Howard has taken out a political monopoly on it. The Frightened Country still harbours dark anxieties, some old and some new. Howard, the necromancer of our national psyche, conjures our fears to frighten us, and then offers to banish them again to soothe us. He understands the Bipolar Nation.' —Peter Hartcher, ipolar Nation 'Hartcher tells us in his essay Bipolar Nation that Howard is playing the 2007 election like a shrewd game of bridge. Labor can put down as many policy aces as it likes between now and polling day, but if Howard wins in the end it will be because he holds all the trump cards.' —Andrew Charlton'Peter Hartcher's essay is as elegant and erudite as its author.' —Bill BowtellPeter Hartcher is the political editor and international editor for the Sydney Morning Herald. He has won both the Gold Walkley award for journalism and the Citibank award for business reporting. His books include Bubble Man: Alan Greenspan and the Missing 7 Trillion Dollars and To the Bitter End: the Dramatic Story Behind the Fall of John Howard and the Rise of Kevin Rudd.

BIPOLAR
NATION

How to Win the
2007 Election

Peter Hartcher

A type of market research called the projective technique, long applied in the consumer products field, is now coming to be used in politics. It’s supposed to be a way of delving beneath consumers’ surface responses to get to their deeper, unarticulated feelings. They are asked to “project” their feelings for one thing onto another.

So, for example, in the prelude to the last US presidential election, market researchers asked Americans to think about their presidential candidates as cars. If George W. Bush were a car, what make would he be? The most common answer was that he’d be a Ford. And his opponent, Senator John Kerry? He’d be a BMW.

What does it mean? A Ford is nothing glamorous. But it is genuine local product, familiar and reliable. A BMW is expensive and high-performance. But it is foreign, elitist and European. Suspiciously European. It’s no surprise, on this analysis, that Bush went on to win the 2004 election.

In Australia, Tim Grau of the public-affairs consultancy Springboard conducted a similar exercise in 2005. He asked voters in focus groups to think of our national leaders as dogs. If John Howard were a dog, what breed would he be?

The most common answers were fox terrier, bulldog and Jack Russell terrier. What does this mean? “Our research has consistently found that strong and successful political leaders are characterised by voters as ‘worker’ dogs,” reported Grau, “the type you would have for protection or to do work around the home or property”. They are small, agile and aggressive.

Asked the same question about Peter Costello, voters most commonly replied that he’d be a labrador or cocker spaniel. These, said Grau, are the sorts of breeds you might like to play with in the backyard, but not the sorts of dogs you would trust to protect your house and family.

When it came to the former Opposition leader Kim Beazley, by far the most common reaction was Saint Bernard, followed by Great Dane. These breeds are supposed to be likeable and loyal; the bad news is that they are also seen as big, cuddly, slow and dopey – not the types you’d trust with the protection of the family home.

Although Grau once worked for the Labor Party, his findings carry a favourable implication for Howard – voters see him as the ideal breed for leadership.

What about Kevin Rudd? He was not included in the exercise, conducted when he was merely a frontbencher. In early 2007, voters were still forming their impressions of the new Labor leader. Rudd has the qualities that he needs to emerge as a strong, viable alternative prime minister – he is more terrier than labrador – but the open question is whether the electorate will see him that way.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, and Rudd has used his well. Within three months of replacing Beazley, the new Opposition leader’s approval rating was a very strong 60 per cent, double Beazley’s terminal performance and a full twenty points ahead of Howard’s rating according to Newspoll. He had also lifted Labor’s share of the primary vote by a remarkable seven or eight percentage points and put it in a commanding position.

Rudd casts Australia’s choice as one between a stale government and a refreshed Labor Party; between a government of market fundamentalists and a Labor Party of social fairness; between a Prime Minister who runs the country on hour-by-hour political spin and a Labor leader of steady long-term purpose.

Rudd has drawn several constituencies. First are the disheartened voters who had drifted leftwards, away from Labor to the Greens and elsewhere. They have taken heart from Rudd’s ideological eloquence. Their hope in Labor has been rekindled by his clarity and idealism in setting out a social-democratic alternative to what Rudd has called “Howard’s Brutopia”.

This group of recovering Labor voters had given up on Beazley as just a windy reiteration of Howardism and they are intrigued by Rudd’s promise to be “an alternative, not an echo”. In a privatised era when it seems no one will defend the role of the state in society, Rudd is not afraid to say that the resources of the state should be mobilised in the systematic support of the vulnerable. He has argued strongly for more public investment in education as a key public good. And his own life story seems to tell us that he really means it. He has told of how his family was evicted from its tenant farm when his father died. And of how he was able to work his way from a poor start in rural Queensland into Australia’s diplomatic service thanks to Whitlam’s gift of free university education.

It must be said that Rudd’s articulate intellectualism titillates some on the left. When Howard gave his ideologically triumphant address to a Quadrant dinner in October last year celebrating the death of “philo-communism” and the struggle against “political correctness”, there was a quiescent silence from Beazley. It seemed there would be no reply from Labor until, a month later, Rudd published an intellectual response in The Monthly. “Ideas matter”, a Rudd refrain, appeals to an educated elite which delights in seeing politics waged not only in sound-grabs but also as a contest of ideology.

Another group of voters from the political right is interested in his unapologetic Christianity and his critique of Howard from a conservative standpoint. Rudd accuses Howard of betraying the Liberals’ Menzian tradition and of crossing the line, going “a bridge too far” in pursuit of an extremist neo-liberal agenda, notably with his WorkChoices laws. Howard, says Rudd, has broken the “social contract” that has held Australia together for a century.

It is striking that the Australian political tradition he has chosen to champion in this cause is not that of any Labor leader, but that of the patrician Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party and John Howard’s declared hero. Rudd associates himself with Menzies’ “responsible conservatism and social liberalism”, portraying Howard as a traitor to the traditions of his own party. Rudd wants to drive a wedge between two planks of conservative thinking, characterising Howard as a neo-liberal, neo-conservative fundamentalist who has betrayed the social conservatism of the Menzian mainstream. Rudd will restore it and “recover the middle ground”.

I was so struck by this unabashed embrace of the Liberals’ founder that I asked the new Labor leader if he was Australia’s modern Menzies. Rudd did not seek to disavow him. He said Menzies, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century British conservative Benjamin Disraeli, understood that there was a social contract, “a set of obligations binding those who have power to those who have none”.

Menzies came from that tradition. Menzies engaged in other forms of destructive legislation, which I don’t need to elaborate, but Menzies came from that tradition. Menzies would be turning in his grave to see the fabric of the current industrial relations legislation. Howard is stepping radically outside the longstanding liberal mainstream tradition in this country.

Thirdly, Rudd has drawn the interest of the political centre. This is partly out of simple relief that he is not Kim Beazley. Sometime last year, through the mysterious osmotic process by which millions of people arrive at the same conclusion at around the same time, Australians simply closed their ears to Beazley. A Nicholson animation in the last week of Beazley’s tenure showed him talking the leg off a wooden stool. Rudd, with his deputy, Julia Gillard, arrived fresh. However briefly, the collective ear opened. Rudd won our attention.

It is partly because many had watched Rudd in his five years as Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman and been impressed with his calm but relentless prosecutorial pursuit of John Howard and Alexander Downer across the deserts of Iraq, through the cells of Guantánamo, down the hallways of the White House and between the silos of the AWB.

It is partly because we see that Rudd is not just the latest product to fall from the conveyor of the clanking Labor machine, but his own man. He has never worked in a union or as a party apparatchik. He does not owe his ascendancy to a faction. He is one of the few federal Labor MPs who does not enjoy the patronage of a major union. And he is not the product of a Labor family dynasty. So when he formed his frontbench, the factions were shut out of the decision of whom he would choose. And when he took the leadership, he announced that he would no longer attend meetings of his faction, the Right. This makes Rudd unique in the annals of modern Labor.

It is partly because Rudd emerged as a strong voice speaking for a concerned mainstream on the urgent new priority of global warming. This issue moved from the periphery to the centre of Australian politics so quickly and decisively that Howard has had to scramble to try to keep up. While the Prime Minister has been unconvincingly attempting to reposition himself from sceptic to saviour, Rudd has been a clear and articulate advocate. Howard’s famous political antennae failed him on global warming, and Rudd was ready while Howard fumbled.

It is partly because, although Rudd has been a tough critic of the government, he seems to offer more than the customary oppositionism. He isn’t seen to be just whining about the government. He seems to offer an optimistic alternative. This is where the shrewd and expensive Labor decision to help shape public perceptions of Rudd with an early TV ad campaign paid off. With the verdant Queensland bush behind him and the twang of a steel-stringed guitar accompanying him, Rudd began with a folksy, “This is the part of country Australia where my parents raised me.” He had a call to abandon complacency: “Some call us the lucky country, but I believe you make your own luck. We can’t just hope that the resources boom lasts forever.” He had a positive plan for our kids’ future that he contrasted with Howard’s WorkChoices: “Australia must now plan for an education revolution boosting early childhood, schools, tech colleges, universities – and insisting on higher standards so that Australia can take on the world through the best trained people, not by cutting wages and conditions.”

It is partly because we might even see in Kevin Rudd a younger version of what we saw in John Howard. A politician, yes, but an ordinary-looking bloke who talks sensibly to common concerns about mainstream issues. He is not alien to the mainstream, like Paul Keating, and he doesn’t seem in any way erratic, like Mark Latham. He even has Howard’s glasses and grey hair.

So, arriving fresh, and apparently drawing support from the left, right and centre of the electorate, Rudd built very strong support very quickly, according to the polls. The most extraordinary poll finding was the 12 February 2007 report that Kevin Rudd had built the highest approval rating of any Opposition leader in the thirty-five years of the ACNielsen. His approval rating of 64 per cent was almost messianic. It made him more popular than Bob Hawke at his folk-hero peak just before he swept Malcolm Fraser from power in 1983.

This, of course, is the very definition of a honeymoon. If you take the polls as a statement of voting intention, you are seriously misled. For Rudd Labor to lead the government by 56 per cent to 44 per cent on a two-party preferred basis – the February Newspoll result – means that, statistically, the Coalition’s odds of winning are less than one in 10,000, according to the probability analysis of Andrew Leigh, an economist and poll-watcher at the Australian National University. He thinks that the odds offered at the online betting agency Centrebet on the same day, 6 February 2007, are a better indicator of the electoral outlook – they showed a Labor win paying $1.90, meaning that Labor had a 49 per cent chance of victory.

What the polls were really telling us was that Rudd has our attention. Remember that Mark Latham had a similarly strong poll rating during his honeymoon, yet he delivered Labor its worst election result in seventy years. The polls are a snapshot, not a predictor. Now that Rudd has the nation’s attention, we will watch and listen and draw our conclusions in the months ahead. Walter Mondale, US vice-president under Jimmy Carter, once remarked that “political image is like mixing cement; when it’s wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there is almost nothing you can do to reshape it.” For Rudd, the cement is still wet early in election year 2007.

Tim Grau is not the first person to compare a federal leader to a canine. Jeff Kennett once disparaged Peter Costello as having “all the attributes of a dog – except loyalty”. Categorising our national leaders as varieties of dog is irreverent, cheeky, and that’s why audiences love to hear about it – greying industrialists and grave-faced economists every bit as much as flip undergraduates and the anxious unemployed. In talks that I give to various audiences on national politics, it never fails to raise a gleeful laugh. We delight in taking down our leaders. They are all just a pack of dogs, as one big investor put it to me. The more we belittle our leaders, the more we enjoy ourselves.

The historian John Hirst believes that Australian egalitarianism explains this phenomenon: “So that all men can be equal, politicians have to be dishonoured.” He traces our national disdain for our politicians to the 1850s, when London decided to allow the Australian colonies to give the vote to a much broader segment of the population. “Respect for Parliament evaporated very quickly” with the arrival of this more democratic era, writes Hirst in his book Sense & Nonsense in Australian History.

He recounts the story of how the NSW chief justice in 1861 shared a joke about politicians with a criminal on trial in his court, the highest and lowest reaches of society conspiring to make fun of their elected leaders. The accused, on trial for escaping from gaol, was worried that the chief justice might not have an open mind in his case because he had been the same judge who had sent him to gaol on the original charge. He wanted a new judge to hear his case. The chief justice, said the accused, might have “prejudicial feelings” against him. The judge misheard and, thinking that the crook had spoken of “political feelings”, enquired: “Why should I have political feelings against you? Are you a member of Parliament?” The crook replied: “Not yet.”

Although a member of a reviled group, a leader’s standing is nevertheless vital, especially if that leader happens to be prime minister. Fascinating new research by Professor Ian McAllister of the Australian National University has shown that every extra percentage point in a prime minister’s ap...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• BIPOLAR NATION: HOW TO WIN THE 2007 ELECTION