The irrational slide to Rudd

Nemo surdior est quam is qui non audiet - no man is more deaf than he who will not hear. Or so Janet Albrechtsen believes.

Last Friday, conservative commentator, Janet Albrechtsen, let fly with her thoughts on John Howard and his reluctance to surrender the office of Prime Ministership in favour of one Peter Costello (The Australian, September 7, 2007).

For the last six months the media has portrayed Labor's looming landslide as virtually a fait accompli.

Fairfax Media is keen on it, running an A.C. Nielsen poll on Monday, September 10, foreshadowing the annihilation of the Liberal Party. Crikey! runs story after story about the Liberal Party’s death throes. The socialists in every state and territory are bursting their bladders with glee. And now, some conservatives are barking madly, hoisting the white flag and running with their tail between their legs. Quite a sad sight really.

Yes, Ms Albrechtsen, current polling is indeed a shock for conservatives (including me) but your petulance regarding John Howard’s grip on the nation’s highest office is frankly unwarranted, undignified and more to the point, misreads the evidence.

Where Ms Albrechtsen sees symptoms, such as recent (bad) polling, just like a graduate med student with sweet little medical experience, she draws the wrong diagnosis and ponies up the wrong prescription.

The recommendation for a baton change from Howard to Costello as the cure-all for the Grand Old Party (GOP) of Australian politics is flawed for three reasons.

First, her claim is unsupported by public polling, where Howard consistently outpolls Pierre. And a hand over to Pierre assumes that he is more popular than say Alex, Malcolm, Tony or Brendan. Is that true? And what about the very bright, high achieving and telegenic Julie Bishop? Surely there is more vigour and more marketability in a Tony Abbott-Julie Bishop tag team, than there is in a Peter Costello and whoever-he-chooses as his No. 2? That said, poll after poll after poll indicate that no Liberal is more effective or popular than Howard. Not one.

Second, Liberals (not to mention socialists) are all too aware that Pierre (as leader) will be more vulnerable (than Howard) to a smear campaign by the ALP, given (on the stump) he’s a less skilled opponent than Howard, less in touch with the battlers, and oh-so-easy to paint as a popinjay. Ditto Alex, ditto Malcolm.

Third, Ms Albrechtsen’s suggestion that Tony Blair’s passing of the baton to Gordon Brown should be emulated by John Howard, is truly laughable, as it spotlights how badly she misunderstood not just what Blair did, but when he did it. What part of “Blair was not on the eve of an election when he and his vulgar, loud mouthed, leftist wife moved out of No. 10” don’t you understand Ms Albrechtsen?

The truth is that Rudd’s electoral appeal is a product of five factors:

• the ALP’s gross exaggeration of the impact of WorkChoices;
• the media’s lust for new personalities on which to comment;
• the media’s inability or unwillingness to remind the public just how badly the socialists mismanaged the economy when they were in power under Keating, and earlier than that, under Whitlam;
• the harvest of not reminding the public of Labor’s incompetence has fed the fantasy that the economy can run just fine under the socialist yoke as it has for 11 years under the masterful stewardship of Howard and Costello; and
• the sleeper issue of course has been Rudd’s stunning ability to silence all those in his party whose comments could shatter the ALP’s “moderate” facade. Witness Muslim apologists like Tanya Plibersek and Julia Irwin who have been missing in action. Witness Shadow Environment spokesman Peter Garrett, who seems to have developed laryngitis. Ugly unionists have conveniently had their tongues removed. Note also the skill shown by the ALP in containing the anticipated rage of their natural constituency, the great unwashed, who it was believed would cause untold damage and run riot through the streets of Sydney during APEC. While credit is due to New South Wales Police Commissioner Andy Scipione let’s not forget the hard yakka of the ALP machine men in demanding their protesting comrades behave well and not give succour to the Liberals by acting wildly and being arrested for being good Bolsheviks.

As baying for partition within the GOP persists, with Howard loyalists being subjected to repulsive howls from panic stricken cognac drinking conservatives, the only sure thing is that such distractions merely weaken the government.

While the government is weak, any attempt to focus on a Sino-sycophantic Rudd administration as a peril to our national security will prove ineffective and futile. And this is a separate issue to the GOP running advertisements warning of the dangers of a Rudd-Swan government in Canberra as nothing but a quisling of socialist administrations in every single state and territory.

Unfortunately, it seems that the public is determined to elect a bunch of amateurs whose aggregate experience in office, knowledge of economics and achievements to date are so scant they can be summarised on the back of a shop-a-docket. The public’s asinine judgment was illustrated on the ABC radio’s World Today program of September 11 when voters in the PM’s Sydney seat of Bennelong agreed that as Prime Minister, Howard has indeed been “brilliant”, yet they actively consider voting for Rudd.

Compare the economic prosperity under Howard to the banana republicanism of Labor’s Paul Keating. Think back to the 1970s, to Rex Conner’s Pakistani loans scandal. Rex proudly served under Labor icon, Gough Whitlam.

The gravitation towards Rudd demonstrates an irrationality steeped in ignorance that flies in the face of logic. And that’s surely the point.

The public has not been reminded of Labor’s abysmal economic track record. The public needs to be reminded of Kevin Rudd’s and Wayne Swan’s gross inexperience. And it’s time they were.

* * * * * * * * *

Given the irrational slide to Rudd in the polls, it’s timely to ask if such national electoral suicide has ever befallen another people. And if so, what lessons can be drawn?

As luck would have it, similar electoral stupidity was on show some 62 years ago. The United Kingdom General Election of July 1945 was very significant indeed. Between 1940 and 1945 Winston Churchill was probably the most popular British prime minister of all time. Between 1996 and 2006 John Winston Howard was more popular than Vegemite in Australian kitchens.

In May 1945 Churchill’s approval rating in the opinion polls, which had never fallen below 78 per cent, was parked in the low 80s. With few exceptions, politicians and commentators confidently predicted that he would lead the Conservatives to victory at the July general election.

Until late 2006, most commentators declared that Howard would wipe the floor with any Socialist: Latham, Crean or Beazley. Whoever the Socialists would throw up would fall over under the weight of the Howard locomotive.

In the event, Churchill led the Conservatives to one of their greatest ever defeats. Many hold that Labour’s brilliance was in convincing the electorate that the very qualities that had made him a great leader in war made him unsuited to domestic politics in peacetime.

Now many fear that John Winston Howard will suffer the same fate. That his economic success is being sold as a mere commodity, capable of being cloned by anyone, and not unique to the managerial skills of Howard and Costello.

John Howard inherited an awful economic mess from the French clock collecting and Armani clothes horse, Mr Paul Keating. There were skyrocketing interest rates; stratospheric national debt; high unemployment; “the recession we had to have” and Australia’s non existent standing in Asia, thanks to Keating’s inability to hold his venom in check.

Howard’s energy and wisdom coupled with his innate belief in Australia’s Protestant work ethic turned convention upside down and showed that he in fact could make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. And what a grand purse he made!

Low inflation, high wages and a 33-year low rate of unemployment. And that’s before we look at our very high simultaneous standing with Washington, Beijing, New Delhi, Tokyo and Moscow.

To understand what’s going on, let's look back to 1945.

Britain’s general election of July 1945, held just two months after VE Day, resulted in the shock election defeat of the Conservatives led by Winston Churchill and the landslide victory of the socialists under Labour’s Clement Attlee.

The result of the election was baffling, given the heroic status of Winston Churchill. Voters swallowed Labour’s lies foolishly believing that the Labour Party was better able to rebuild the country following the war than the Conservatives could. Churchill and the Conservatives were also considered to have run a poor campaign in comparison to Labour. Negative advertising by Churchill, it is claimed, also hurt the Conservative cause. In one instance Churchill accused Labour of seeking to use Gestapo tactics in order to impose socialism on Britain. This quip backfired very badly.

Like snake oil salesman, Clement Atlee’s Labour Party offered blue sky. The Party promised the world: full employment, universal health service (the NHS), and a womb-to-grave welfare state. British Labour marketed its reforms under the utopian slogan “let us face the future”.

Interestingly, Labour focused on what the polls told the party was its greatest asset: the policy of social reform. Whereas the polls showed only one in 20 Britons considered the policy of international security to be important: the Conservatives were araldited to that policy above all else.

With the war drawing to an end by 1945 and Churchill's personal popularity staying, Conservatives sat listless, confident of victory by just turning up on the day. Labour, aware of Churchill’s popularity, especially within his own party, urged the public to distinguish between Churchill and his party. Labour painted the Conservatives as no more than appeasers, based on their behaviour in the 1930s. This scurrilous tactic worked and we’ll no doubt see Rudd ape this strategy of dividing the Liberals from its leader, John Howard, when the polls start to move against the ALP.

In February 1945, four months from the election, British Labour was 18 per cent ahead of the Tories. Many felt that these were early days and that the war hero was unbeatable, as David Lloyd George had been in 1918.

The Conservatives built their campaign around Churchill’s personality, marketing him as the prime minister who was not only a warlord, but also a constructive peacetime statesman.

Whether the Liberals portray John Howard as a one-man band, or market him as “the name you know, from the team you can trust”, will make a world of difference to the outcome of the election.

In 2007, ironically it is the ALP that is building its case on its leader’s personality. Not surprising really. It’s easier to explain away his zero ministerial experience than it is to explain away his entire team’s miniscule governmental experience and nil commercial achievements, isn’t it?

In 1951, six long years after British Labour had replaced Churchill in government, Labour was erased from office. By Churchill.

Several issues were responsible for the end of socialism in 1951, but chief among these was what was called “the rising cost of living”, or what we today refer to as “economic competence”.

Britain suffered for its naïve embrace of socialism, thinking that Churchill’s best days were behind him. And that Clement Attlee was Winston Churchill lite. And for that indulgence Britain paid dearly.

In 1945, rather than sitting back, the Conservatives should have reminded the public of Labour’s woeful economic credentials, last visible under Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. But they didn’t focus on it.

For those conservatives who have forgotten: it is John Howard who won four elections on the trot. Not the Liberal Party and certainly not the Member for Higgins. And as for the white ants in the party who think they know best … here’s some breaking news: some of you cannot even be counted on holding your own seats, yet have the gall to pass unsolicited commentary.

It is John Howard who has shown the capacity to best connect to working Australians, and not Peter Costello or anyone else of the front bench.

Any talk of leadership change merely emboldens the socialists and robs the Liberals of their most effective voice on the hustings.

Memo to Ms Albrechtsen and cowardly conservatives: to paraphrase an old Liberal election slogan “if the answer’s Prime Minister Pierre Popinjay”, then it must have been one very, very stupid question.