by John Howard
Fanatically anti-Israel, potentially costly to the council and quite outside the remit of a local municipality, this bizarre behaviour, when exposed, shone a light on the erratic nature of many Greens members. It certainly cost her the state seat, which, before being outed, she had stood a good chance of winning. Her attempts to deny saying what she had so clearly been recorded on television as saying only confounded her self-generated ridicule.
The Greens have begun, counterintuitive though it may seem, to decline. The Liberal Party can make certain that Adam Bandt, the Greens MP for Melbourne, is a oncer. They must preference the Labor Party ahead of him in his seat at the next federal election. This is because Greens policies are much worse than Labor ones. Ted Baillieu’s Liberals showed strength in doing just this in the Victorian election in November 2010. Very likely it made the crucial difference in his narrow win.
Just as the assumption by the Greens of the balance-of-power status has put them under pressure, so it has been with the Independents. A certain romanticism has always surrounded Independents. They were men and women of high principles, not beholden to party machines, there to selflessly serve the electorate. Often they had a particular affinity with the area they represented.
In my experience the two Independents who came closest to this ideal were Brian Harradine and Ted Mack (the former MP for North Sydney). Harradine was forced out of the Labor Party as a consequence of the great 1955 split; Mack was a genuine local activist. Almost all the others had histories of membership of a major party which ended because of a dispute over personal preferment.
Tony Windsor is a prime example of this. Foolishly, the National Party denied him preselection for the state seat of Tamworth in the early 1990s. He won the seat as an Independent, because he was a better candidate, and has maintained a personal hatred of the Nationals ever since. The animosity between him and the party of which he was once a member was very obvious to me when I was in parliament.
When it became apparent on election night 2010 that Windsor could determine who governed, I entertained little hope that he would back the Coalition.
Bob Katter was different; he had genuine policy arguments with the National Party when he left in July 2001. His refusal to support Labor showed much more respect for the wishes of his electorate than displayed by Rob Oakeshott or Windsor towards theirs.
Any sense the Australian people might have had in August 2010 that the pact made by the minority Labor Government with the Independents and Greens would deliver a nirvana of open, highly principled government has long since evaporated. The experiment with the new paradigm has failed. It has not delivered consensus-driven policy clarity but gridlock and confusion.
The Gillard Government appears to act frequently at the behest of its minority supporters. Its carbon tax plan, the government’s biggest initiative yet, carries all the hallmarks of co-authorship by the Greens, thus underscoring the prime minister’s lack of authority.
The politics of the global warming debate have shifted in a quite fundamental way against Julia Gillard.
She faces the task of persuading an increasingly sceptical electorate of the long-term need of a change which — despite her claims to the contrary — will entail pain, at least in the short term and probably for longer.
Her pitch to the electorate has a growing implausibility. The Australian people are told that a huge behavioural change is needed for our future economic security and the welfare of the planet — yet the average Australian won’t feel a thing; only the big polluters will pay.
None of the major economic reforms of the past 25 years have been realised in the circumstances now faced by the Gillard Government. Either the government had bipartisan support — the Hawke Government with floating the dollar and tariff reform — or the government had immense reserves of political capital to expend — the Howard Government with the GST and labour market reform. Gillard has neither of these.
For a combination of reasons, the electorate is less supportive of action on climate change now than it was three to four years ago. In Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare wrote of there being ‘a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune’ (Act III, scene iv). The floodtide of the climate-change debate in Australia was the first 18 months of the Rudd Government.
Now rarely recalled, there was bipartisan support for an emissions trading system (ETS) at the 2007 election, although the Liberal plan was always conditional on other nations moving in the same direction as Australia. That was a key condition, deliberately ignored by the Labor Party, when it contrasts my support for an ETS with Tony Abbott’s rejection of it.
I was and remain an agnostic on the climate-change issue. That agnosticism is strengthened every time a climate-change zealot declares that scientific debate should cease.
The ETS proposed by my government in 2007 sat comfortably with my own position. It was a market-based response, modest in its aspirations but easily calibrated to accommodate changed circumstances and, as described in Chapter 41, put together through high-level consultations between the government and business. The degree and pace of our implementing an ETS would be governed by the need to preserve the competitiveness of Australian industries by ensuring that Australia moved with, but not ahead of, other nations. The Gillard Government has ignored that essential precondition.
Public support for action on climate change was high at the 2007 election — although a great deal of it focused on the symbolic act of ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, which was completely painless. This support continued well into 2009.
To service his own political interests, Rudd should have moved more speedily in the early months of his prime ministership to bring in an ETS, thus taking advantage of favourable public opinion. Indeed, if he had enacted the policy the Coalition had taken to the 2007 election, the framework would have been there so that any additions desired by the government could have been readily proposed. It would have been very hard for the opposition to have voted against a policy that only several months earlier it had advocated to the electorate.
It was a mistake to have anointed Ross Garnaut as Labor’s climate-change guru — it didn’t need one. The Shergold Report, on which the Howard Government’s proposals were based, had already analysed the substance of the issue. Garnaut’s appointment inevitably delayed the government acting; that delay would prove fatal as the ground shifted under Rudd’s feet.
The Greens joined in blowing the opportunities of those early days. In the first sign of extremist over-reach, Bob Brown always wanted to go further than anyone else. That’s what his own constituents wanted and no doubt he believed in it, but the combined result of what both the ALP and Greens did in those first 18 months was to squander the opportunity presented by the optimum level of support for action on climate change within the Australian community at that time.
By contrast, now, in the second half of 2011, the mood is very different. Public enthusiasm has waned; the Government’s credibility is much lower; and some of the science has come under increasing challenge. The prospects for a global consensus have faded. The United States, China and India are not embracing either an ETS or carbon taxes. Canada, the developed country most like Australia in relation to the climate-change issue, has just delivered majority power to a government which has no intention of treading the path of the Gillard Government.
Compounding Gillard’s problem, the Opposition is now led by a man who has rallied public opinion against what he has successfully depicted as nothing more than a new tax and not a plus for the environment. This is a far cry from 2008, when a newly elected prime minister had the world at his feet on climate change.
Kevin Rudd would have won a double dissolution on the ETS early in 2010. This loss of nerve, compounded by his folly in deferring the ETS, finally dissipated the majority support he previously enjoyed on climate change. The Australian public thus faced a situation where their Prime Minister no longer thought an ETS urgent and their Opposition leader was
totally against it. Why, therefore, should the Australian people continue to give it a high priority? What is more, a so-called Global Financial Crisis had engulfed the world, obliterating the economic feel-good mood ready to indulge significant and, if necessary, costly action to reduce global warming. The spectre of increased costs to fight global warming was suddenly very unattractive in a world of financial turbulence, job insecurity and talk of recession.
Tony Abbott has been the political star of the period. Not only did he bring the Liberals back from the dead in the 2010 election, but he has had the Gillard Government on the defensive ever since. His rise has been spectacular; if he had stood for the Liberal Leadership in 2007 his vote would have been derisory.
Abbott has high intelligence, prodigious energy and a laser-like focus on the government’s weaknesses. He is also a good listener, both to his colleagues and the voting public — an indispensable quality for any successful leader.
Whenever I hear the Prime Minister attacking Tony Abbott for his claimed negativity, my mind wanders back to the afternoon of 9 May 1995, the day of the Keating Government’s last budget. The Finance Minister, Kim Beazley, rang me (as then Opposition leader) and said, ‘John, does the Opposition still support full privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank? We’ve got it in the budget tonight.’ I told him that it was still our policy.
The Keating Government was proposing the sale of the government’s remaining and controlling 50.1 per cent interest in the Commonwealth Bank. Beazley was nervous about the fate of the bank proposal; it was a big part of the budget and he knew that the Democrats, who held the balance of power in the Senate, were dead against it. The Keating Government needed the Coalition’s support to get it through.
Labor had no mandate for the sale of its remaining share in the bank. On the contrary, Ralph Willis, the Treasurer, had given written assurances that it would not happen. Yet his government was desperate for the money. Moreover, the less rigorous accounting rules then in place would allow the Government to take the proceeds of the sale straight to the bottom line. Without the bank sale, the 1995 budget would have been less convincing.
We stuck to our policy and waved the privatisation through the Senate, thus eschewing the opportunistic chance of embarrassing the Government, although at the expense of policy consistency.
Contrast this with Labor repeatedly opposing the privatisation of Telstra, despite the Coalition having a mandate for the sale of each and every bundle of Telstra shares, starting with the 30 per cent promised before the 1996 election. Labor, in government, privatised Qantas, Australian Airlines and, despite having promised not to, all of the Commonwealth Bank; yet in opposition it had no compunction in opposing similar action on Telstra despite our mandate to do so. It was not until the Coalition won control of the Senate in 2004 that the privatisation of Telstra was finalised.
That historical comparison demonstrates the blind negativity of Labor in opposition against the policy consistency of the Liberal and National parties when in opposition.
In earlier chapters I have written of five areas of great economic reform in the past 30 years: financial deregulation, tariff reduction, altering the taxation mix, privatisation and industrial relations. The reform initiatives of the Hawke and Keating governments in these areas enjoyed the support of the Liberal and National parties and, in some instances, that support was crucial to the Labor initiative being enacted into law.
In stark contrast, all of the Coalition’s reforms in those same areas were reached in spite of Labor’s sustained opposition, with the ALP never caring to remain consistent with positions it had taken in government.
The areas I have cited are but the most prominent examples of how differently the two sides of politics, over the years, have behaved in opposition. There are many other policy changes where the same comparison can be drawn.
I have dwelt again on this because of the constant mantra of the Prime Minister that Tony Abbott is too negative as an Opposition leader, especially on the carbon tax.
Julia Gillard was an enthusiastic participant in Labor’s negativity before 2007. Her first serious vote, after being elected in 1998, was cast against the introduction of the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate, despite that proposal having been an explicit element of the policies we took to the 1998 election.
There is another reason why her allegations of negativity against Tony Abbott over the carbon tax have no substance. Abbott has a double mandate for his current stance on climate change: both from his party as well as the electorate. He won the leadership of the Liberal Party because he took a different attitude on climate change from that of the former leader, Malcolm Turnbull. As a consequence, the Opposition withdrew its support for an ETS. And the electorate showed how it felt about this new alignment by denying Gillard a clear majority at the 2010 election.
Irrespective of the views one might have on climate change, there was more policy principle at stake in the Liberal Party’s change from Turnbull to Abbott than there was in Labor’s switch from Rudd to Gillard — which is, of course, why Gillard continues to have chronic difficulty in explaining why the switch occurred.
For Abbott to alter his stance on climate change would be a breach of faith with his own party as well as the electorate. Unlike Julia Gillard, his position on the carbon tax now is the same as it was before the last election. On the issues of both opposition negativity and candour with the electorate, the empress is without clothes.
The Liberals have dramatically recovered; no less remarkable — but unremarked — has been the remaking of the National Party, prematurely written off once too often.
The Northern Territory provided the first crack of light for the Coalition, where Labor only just hung on. Colin Barnett’s victory in Western Australia was a great fillip for the Liberals and his strong performance in government has given him much national respect. Barry O’Farrell’s landslide broke all the records. The Coalition now governs in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, with Queensland well within reach off the back of the attention-grabbing draft of Campbell Newman to lead the Opposition from outside Parliament. Labor in South Australia is rotting away. In Tasmania Labor is in hock to the Greens — not a pleasant place to be.
For close to twenty years the Nationals have seemed in terminal decline. Starting in 1996 with Sharman Stone winning John McEwen’s old seat of Murray (based on Shepparton) the Nationals lost precious rural seats to the Liberals (Farrer and Hume) and Independents (New England and Lyne). Bob Katter resigned from his old party and has since easily retained his seat of Kennedy. The former senator Julian McGauran quit the Nationals for the Liberals — which proved a fatal career move.
Confounding the despair of recent years, the Nationals are back in the game. In different, but very successful, ways the National Party has rallied. In WA it was done by a direct and parochial appeal to its core constituency; in NSW and Victoria through the traditional route of close coalition with the Liberals. Andrew Stoner and Peter Ryan are, respectively, the Deputy Premiers of NSW and Victoria. They are both highly competent, well connected to their rural electorates and alive to the imperative of a close alliance with the Liberals. Labor is their common enemy.
These gains have been achieved without any suggestion of merging with the Liberals. By contrast, in Queensland, crucible of the bitterest disputes of all between the Liberals and the Nationals, a merger was pursued. Crucially the merged entity — the LNP — has become the Queensland division of the Liberal Party of Australia.
The LNP is not a separate party, so the fear I had in 2006 that a merger of the two parties could result in a separate Queensland-based conservative party has not been realised. The LNP delivered magnificently at the 2010 federal election. Seven seats were won from Labor, by far the best result in Australia.
The masterstroke of conscripting Campbell Newman to the LNP leadership will very likely deliver government at the next Queensland election. The Newman ascendancy has the extra virtue of quietening
those Liberals in Queensland who continue to see the LNP as a Nationals takeover. Campbell Newman, genetically, is as Liberal as one can get — his parents, Kevin and Jocelyn, were both Liberal federal ministers.
As in other ways, Queensland was different when it came to relations between the Liberals and Nationals. Mainly because, unlike other mainland states, the majority of Queenslanders do not live in the capital city, the National Party at a state level has always been the senior partner. This has never been the case federally in Queensland. This dichotomy has been finally ended through the formation of the LNP.
Barnaby Joyce has played a key role in steadying and then consolidating National Party support. Badly under-rated and prematurely ridiculed by the media, Joyce is one of the most gifted retail politicians to enter federal parliament in the past decade. He has solidified the National Party base and not just in Queensland. He will enter the House of Representatives at the next election and in fairly short order take over leadership of the Nationals.
Contrary to the predictions of some Liberals, Barnaby Joyce is no coalition wrecker. He knows there is no future for the Nationals on their own. Joyce accepted what appeared to be a demotion from being finance spokesman, for the Opposition, to regional development, thus demonstrating that he is a better team player than many.
Tony Abbott’s adroit handling of this issue demonstrated his superior people skills. The ironic joke about this quality has become a reality.
One of Abbott’s quiet achievements was the abrupt end to talk of rifts between the Coalition parties. His relationship with Joyce has been central to this and bodes well for the future, if they make it to government.