• Home
• /
• Opinion

No end to ‘ordinary bloke’ Howard’s winning streak

Howard’s team, the MPs in the Liberal Party, know one reason he keeps winning elections --- he has kept the economy growing and encouraged the idea that money is the key to happiness. In London the Financial Times recently had an editorial with the headline "Lucky Australia." The editorial began: "What can you say about an economy that is a textbook case of good policies, well executed?"

The editorial was brought to the attention of Australians via one of their respected newspaper columnists who pointed out that while Australians are complaining about the latest rise in home mortgage interest rates, the world sees Australia as an economy that has cruised effortlessly through the Asian crisis and then the US recession and is now in its 15th year of continuous growth.

The international praise for Howard comes as Parliament resumes this week after a long winter break. The Liberal Party MPs know one new fact that Howard, who turned 67 last month, will stay to fight the next election. That recent announcement was met joyously by three quarters of Liberal MPs and by most of the business community. The most disappointed person in the nation is Howard’s deputy, Treasurer Peter Costello, who has been biting his fingernails for years, hoping his boss would retire. It was recently revealed that Howard made a verbal deal 12 years ago that he would serve only two terms as Prime Minister before handing over power to Costello.

When it came to light via a "leak" to a senior journalist, Costello promptly said he wanted a "smooth transition" of power. His small band of supporters were hoping Howard would resign at the end of this year, to give Costello a decent chance of establishing himself in the nation’s top job before the next federal election, due towards the end of next year.

However it was very unlikely that Howard would voluntarily walk away now with his health remarkably good and having no interests outside politics. He has cultivated the image of an energetic leader by inviting the television cameras to follow him on his dawn walks, in Australia and on overseas trips. He combined that image of a "power walker" with his strategy of always "toughing it out" to emphasise that he is doggedly focused on his job. In the short term he seems unassailable, but it wasn’t always so. He was the Liberal Party’s third choice as leader after the party’s defeat at the 1993 election by Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating.

To win the 1996 election, Howard promised he would "never, ever" introduce a goods and services tax. When he got into power, voters discovered he had "core" and "non-core" promises. He made the 1998 election into a referendum on the GST, knowing that his landslide win in the previous election meant there was unlikely to be a big enough swing to unseat him. After that he tapped into and reinforced Australians’ prejudices. "Under Howard, we [Australians] have become less compassionate, less tolerant and more uninhibited in the expression of ethnic and religious prejudice," respected social commentator Hugh Mackay says.

Yet Howard’s reputation with Australian voters still rests more on respect than any other single factor, Mackay says. "We may not like him; we may find it hard to know when he is telling the truth; yet we respect him. The key to Howard’s appeal lies in his very lack of charisma. His appearance of ordinariness is perhaps his greatest political asset." Indeed, Australians are accustomed to seeing television footage of their Prime Minister looking like a roofing nail as he visits rural areas wearing a flat-brimmed hat jammed on his head. They should get prepared to seeing a lot more of this energetic "ordinary" leader as he begins now to campaign for the next election.

Ross Peake is a Canberra-based political analyst