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Bipolar nation: how to win the 2007 election

By Peter Hartcher - posted Friday, 23 March 2007


It’s a fundamentally flawed strategy. The Labor Party has given up the middle-class, middle-ground, sole-employer, self-employed, small-business voter that Bob Hawke and I generated for it. That’s why Kim Beazley got a majority of votes in 1998 but not a majority of seats - because he couldn’t get the distribution [of votes in the seats where they were needed to win government] because the Labor Party had already run away from our record …

There’s a decade lost and the brand fades. People don’t tie up the policies with the outcome. A decade of prosperity is a structural benefit for the Liberal Party even though the Liberal Party didn’t create it in the first place. And of course every time the Labor Party tried to win in 1998, 2001 and the last election, 2004, the further it got away from the internationalising model of the Labor government, 1983-96, the less well it did.

After the gut-punch of the 2004 result, Labor realised its error. It decided to rehabilitate Keating. “We have decided to bring him in from the cold,” Kim Beazley told me in August 2006. In doing this, Labor decided to confront the problem of its credibility on economic policy.

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Since the 2004 election, it has recognised the economy as the central political battleground. It has acknowledged the country is in a rare period of extended prosperity. And after being airbrushed out of Labor family photos for almost a decade, Uncle Paul is now back in the frame. Kim Beazley - before his departure - and his finance frontbenchers, Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith, three of the men who had earlier sought to hold Keating at arm’s length, began publicly to acknowledge his legacy.

Kevin Rudd has continued to try to recover Labor’s standing. In a speech to the Business Council of Australia in January, he contrasted Howard’s economic performance with Keating’s: “If Australia now had the same terms of trade as we did when Paul Keating was in office, the current account deficit would be 10 per cent of GDP - enough to put us on constant watch from the IMF.” And he dismissed the government’s claim of fiscal responsibility: “Riding the tax windfall from a resources boom to budget surplus, is easy, not tough.”

For the preceding decade, Labor had been particularly spooked by the peak 17 per cent mortgage rate that banks charged during the Keating era. The government used this to crushing effect against the ALP; indeed, it used it so relentlessly that it became reflexive. It was the stock response to any Labor complaint about government economic policy. I call it the government’s Spinal Tap defence.

In the cult movie This Is Spinal Tap, a spoof documentary on the life of a failing heavy metal band, the group’s guitarist takes us on a tour of his collection of prized musical instruments.

After showing off his favourite electric guitar - the one with the flame painted on it - the long-haired, gum-chewing Cockney Nigel Tufnel brings us to his favourite amplifier. “It’s very, very special because if you can see” - drawing attention to the calibrations on the knobs on the face of the amplifier - “the numbers all go to eleven.” A normal volume knob is marked from zero to ten, but Nigel’s favourite goes up to eleven.

The reporter wants to know if this unique calibration makes the amplifier louder.

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Nigel (triumphantly): Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it? It’s not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff … you know what we do?

Reporter: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

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This is an edited extract from Quarterly Essay 25 - Bipolar Nation: How to Win the 2007 Election by Peter Hartcher, $14.95.



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About the Author

Peter Hartcher is one of Australia’s leading journalists.
He is the political and international editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and was until 2004 the Washington bureau chief of the Australian Financial Review. In 1996, he received the Gold Walkley Award. He is the author of The Ministry and Bubble Man: Alan Greenspan and the Missing 7 Trillion Dollars, which has been published around the world and translated into several languages.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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