History’s aced, now move on

Political journalist Laurie Oakes once observed that John Howard ‘has made every conceivable mistake an Australian politician can make, but he has made each of them only once’.

If Howard’s prime ministership comes to an end later this year, his fatal flaw won’t have been in replicating error. Rather, it will have been underestimating his opponents’ ability to learn from theirs.

Too often this year Howard has looked as if he’s fighting an election campaign against the Australian Labor Party of 2001 or 2004, rather than the ALP of 2007. Yet it, patently, has been living and learning too.

Oakes’s dictum came to mind the other day when it came to light that Labor’s star candidate in the PM’s seat of Bennelong, Maxine McKew, has chosen to rebuff the overtures of the “Not happy, John” movement. You know, that phalanx of Subaru owners with the little blue stickers on their rear bumpers registering their annoyance with the drift of Coalition policy since 1996.

Since - at least in the minds of the “Not happy, John” folks - that movement was credited with a shift away from the PM in Bennelong in 2004, this may seem like an odd judgment call by McKew.

Why ignore those who may win you votes? But in fact McKew’s decision follows a path consistent with every other action of Labor’s remarkably disciplined campaign team since December.

First they resisted the Government’s invitation to indulge in righteous outrage at the plight of a boatload of presumed Sri Lankan asylum-seekers early in the year. Then they refused to adopt Mohamed Haneef as a figure of pity and solicitation after the London and Glasgow attacks.

Since then Kevin Rudd has fastidiously resisted any and all of the various emotional enticements offered up to him by the fates and the Prime Minister.

Instead, he has focused on only those issues about which Labor wants to talk, rather than the issues the Government wants Labor to talk about or that annoyed ex-Liberals such as the “Not happy, John” crew wants it to talk about.

In 2001 the Government caught Labor on the hop over the Tampa asylum-seeker controversy.

Effectively Labor was trapped in a political no man’s land between supporters who regarded the internment of asylum-seekers as a national crime, and those whose main concern was with the integrity of immigration policy.

In 2004 Labor avoided many of its mistakes from 2001. But it then created some new ones of its own volition and effectively cancelled out the benefits of experience.

Mark Latham’s ill-conceived adventures in schooling policy and the Tasmanian forests resonated much better among Labor faithful than they did among the electorate more broadly.

And so in 2007 Labor has had, as it were, two successive sets of mistakes from which to learn.

It has had to learn how not to take the bait from its opponents but also how not to become the captive of its erstwhile friends.

The “Not happy, John” crew in a sense unites both of these sets of errors, tied together into a neat little political bundle.

As the PM’s recent biographers make clear, the chief players in the “Not happy, John” movement are mostly alienated former Liberals, fellow travellers of the old “wet” wing of the Liberal Party that was marginalised on Howard’s accession to the leadership.

Since 1996 they have become increasingly aggrieved, as much by the tone of the Government as by its substance. To them Howard represents a profound affront to traditional liberal ideals, both in the small-l and big-L meanings of that term. That’s why they hate him so viscerally, as a personality as much as a political figure.

But sticking pins in a voodoo doll of the PM is a parlour game for the politically impotent. It’s not where Labor needs to be.

Rather than reclaiming the soul of old-style liberalism, Labor’s job is to outline an image of social democracy that seems at once competent and relevant. Hence those unreturned phone calls to McKew.

And the determination of the McKew team to weed out the Howard haters among its volunteers and to use only those activists who are capable of remaining courteous, disciplined and positive.

After all, most Australians don’t hate Howard. (Whether they trust him is another matter.) Nor do they identify easily with voodoo doll politics and personal vilification.

But Labor’s learning process is not yet complete.

As every general knows, it’s important but insufficient to learn the lessons of the last war.

The danger is that you simply end up fighting the last war, albeit fighting it better than you did the first time.

Labor has cleared away its unloved policies and sidelined its more unattractive elements. It looks and sounds courteous, disciplined and positive, as the electorate has clearly observed. Yet it still has to put meat on some of those fine-sounding but frustratingly general policy proposals. Nor has it yet linked them up convincingly into some kind of vision of an Australia that is both aspirational and committed to the ethos of the fair go.

There is a danger that in becoming so precisely focused on avoiding political error, Labor may come to confuse political prudence with mere inaction. Field Marshal Rudd still has some fighting to do.