Australian Politics

It is little appreciated just how much power and influence are wielded by a successful Liberal prime minister, success being measured entirely by electoral victory. Whereas a Labor prime minister has a caucus, factions, the ACTU, a not always co-operative national executive and a sometimes fractious national conference to exert countervailing influence, a conservative leader is remarkably unfettered. The party, and indeed the government, becomes an extension of him, a mere appendage.

Australian elections are not what they used to be. The policy debates have been reduced to ten-second audio grabs. The big public rallies have been replaced with pre-packaged and scripted set-piece television events. According to the majority of the contributors to this account of the 2004 election, the passions that Australian voters once carried to the polling booth have been swapped for something much more prosaic. At the last election, our vote was apparently determined largely by interest rates and by mortgage costs. It seems that voters are now less animated by ‘It’s Time’ and more by ‘It’s Mine’.

At the dinner to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Quadrant magazine in October 2006, John Howard gave one of the most revealing speeches of his prime ministership. Celebrating with the magazine the victory of democracy over communism, he went on to denounce a whole range of left-wing sins. He attacked the New Left counterculture, where it had become the ‘height of intellectual sophistication to believe that people in the West were no less oppressed than people under the yoke of communist dictatorship’. Moreover, ‘it had become de rigueur in intellectual circles to regard Australian history as little more than a litany of sexism, racism and class warfare’. Fortunately, a ‘few brave individuals’ took a ‘stand against the orthodoxies of the day’; Howard congratulated Quadrant for defending both Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle ‘against the posses of political correctness’. Nowhere were ‘the fangs of the left’ so visible as in the character assassination of Geoffrey Blainey. Despite some progress, the ‘soft left’ still ‘holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia’s universities by virtue of its long march through the institutions’. Howard then likened the current struggle against Islamic terrorism to the Cold War, and criticised opponents of the war in Iraq ‘who now talk as if Iraq was some island of Islamic tranquillity before 2003’. Although there was some criticism of the speech in the media, the most notable aspect was the chorus of compliments that amplified its main themes. Greg Sheridan applauded the way the prime minister had ‘rightly bemoaned the continuing dominance of the soft Left’ (Australian, 7 October 2006). Michael Duffy thought it was ‘probably the most ideologically impressive [speech] ever made by the Prime Minister’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 2006). Piers Akerman approved the way ‘Howard is not going to let those who lacked his and Quadrant’s commitments to those ideals [i.e. intellectual freedom and liberal democracy] forget where they stood … To peals of laughter, he quoted George Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool”’ (Daily Telegraph, 5 October 2006). Miranda Devine thought this address, recalling ‘50 years of the left’s worst excesses’, ‘was a speech to cement the “real” John Howard’s place in history and his role in the culture wars, through which he has steered Australia resolutely and irrevocably in his ten years in office, much to the chagrin of his detractors’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 2006). Janet Albrechtsen rejoiced that, ‘[o]nce again, Howard seems to be embracing an electorate willing to confront old orthodoxies. And the remarkable thing is that after 10 long years in power, Howard the conservative is still a front-foot reformer, challenging the status quo. As with his previous battles in the culture wars, education reform will demand a marked shift in the way Howard is ultimately judged by history: not as merely an economic steward but as a crusader in the ideas war’ (Australian, 25 October 2006).

Gough Whitlam was sometimes naughty. Descending in a crowded lift from a conference attended by a number of state parliamentary delegates, he looked down on his fellow passengers and growled ‘pissant state politicians’. It was the sort of remark he liked to get off his chest. In a more deliberative mood, Whitlam, in his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture, wrote of state parliamentarians in the following terms: ‘Much can be achieved by Labor members of the state parliaments in effectuating Labor’s aims of more effective powers for the national parliament and for local government. Their role is to bring about their own dissolution.’ These remarks reflect a widespread dissatisfaction with Australia’s ‘colonial’ constitution and with the division of powers between the three tiers of government. The Whitlam government favoured increased powers and responsibilities for both Canberra and local government.