Howard may be warning of madness and chaos if Labor is elected, but it appears no one who’s not inclined to anyway believes him. Newspoll tells the usual story this morning – very little movement in voting intentions. Over at The Government Gazette, they appear to have given up on the preferred PM theorem, perhaps consoling themselves with the success of their stop Costello campaign (not that he ever started), aside from his longstanding fan Glenn Milne, who’s beating a fairly dead drum on this one. Howard’s obviously frustrated at Rudd’s strategy of constantly eliding the differences with the government, the latest episode in this saga being Tasmanian forest policy. He shouldn’t be surprised, at any rate. It was the exact game plan he used in 1996.
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Has anyone else seen the photo on the GG website today? Howard with a pair of Indian 457 visa workers, his body language betrays him.
I saw that too, Dave. It looked as though someone had told him they had leprosy. Maybe it was worse – they had 457 visas?
Terrorists!
Maybe they were doctors pretending to be workers? Cunning plot – they may have also had sim cards about their person.
I cracked up when I saw that photo Dave. It looks like he’s about to say, ‘Ahhh, you’re one of those brown people I’ve heard so much about’. Classic
Mark, yes the stance by KD is exactly like JWH in 1996…. keep all the bits the voters like but change the PM who is on the nose.
No I don’t think it is their skin colour he is worried or concerned about. It is the artless and truthful way they illustrate current labour market policy. He knows this, and he knows the ‘punters’ are starting to get the hang of how all this is supposed to work. All that effort to incorporate the Hansonites, and now, look at this, the very embodiment of their primal screaming, with nary a phony culture war to be seen as cover.
Oh dear oh dear.
It’s one thing to try and get the ‘Dr’s wives’ vote back with this living proof of his ‘difference cred’. It’s quite another to open up that other little scab, just down the ladder, still aspirational, but feeling a little, well, nervous.
He has been wedged, beautifully, and the eyes have it.
I just went over to the GG site expecting something with the PM and some foreign looking people and the big pic is of Howard on the floor. He’d apparently fallen over on the way in to a radio interview.
Anybody can fall over, but it’s not a terribly statesman like thing to do and not an awfully good image for a 68 year old trying to convince the electorate he’s as full of beans as ever.
He’s still got a couple of days left as a sprightly 67 year old, Lyn!
Just watched 10 news (Perth) and he’s at least got one fan in the shape of an attention-starved, long forgotten, Big Brother contestant.
I thought the below piece about John Quiggin’s paper on the role of government as risk manager was fantastic and goes some way to explaining why Howard’s on the nose. Worth it’s own post and discussion.
Link
The full paper can be found here .
I’m going to have a read of Quiggin’s paper, kymbos and put up a post tomorrow.
http://vx.autonomous.org/mp3/vxdub/victor_xray_government_in_competence.mp3
Maek Says:
Wait a minute! Didnt Howard spend much of the 1996 election campaign exaggerating the differences b/w the ALP, supposedly beholden to cultural “special interests”, and the LN/P, which was going to govern “for all of us”?
Greg Barns recalls the KulturKampf mood of the time:
When Howard was elected to office in 1996 he was determined to end what he saw as a division between taxpayer-funded special interests and privileged groups on the one hand and the disempowered mainstream voter on the other.
In June 1995, Howard…said there “is a frustrated mainstream in Australia today which sees government decisions increasingly driven by the noisy, self-interested clamour of powerful vested interests with scant regard for the national interest.
Many Australians in the mainstream feel utterly powerless to compete with such groups, who seem to have the ear completely of the government on major issues.”
Howard’s solution was to ensure that under a Coalition government, Aboriginal, multicultural and even artistic policies would be “assessed against the national interest and the sentiments of mainstream Australia”.
Of course the LN/P did offer a “small target” on “core” policy matters. This did help to smear any other ideological differences b/w the ALP and the LN/P. But even this distinction turned out to be a bit slippery, as youd expect.
Howard more or less adopted the pose of “everything you like about Labor’s policy will stay the same”, Jack, and yes, he did differentiate himself in the area you mention, but Rudd is also differentiating himself from Howard in other ways than on policy detail.
The other part of the strategy was to release truckloads of information on a daily basis once the 1996 election campaign officially started so that nobody could possibly digest what was actually in the policy documents.
Heaven forbid, he’d be like Jerry Ford, couldn’t walk and fart at the same time without falling down!
This from Kelly today is amusing and another version of the preferred PM theorem.
Love the term ‘examined in isolation’. Whatever that means but it does seem to be the deciding factor in the GG’s Cheerleading tactics.
Mark on 24 July 2007 at 9:28 pm
If the Rudd difference is a matter of personal style rather than policy substance I am having a hard time picking it. John Kevin “Rudd-ard” is our current and future PM.
So far as policy convergence goes, the ALP-LN/P differences are becoming vanishingly small, on both fiscal, cultural and now ecological matters.
Of course, if you were silly enough to take seriously the deluded rantings and ravings of a certain unmentionable blogger/commenter inhabiting his own private universe then you would have know this several years ago.
Government Gazette’s inspiration.
THe LN/P would be mad to change leaders this close to the election. Four years ago, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington wrote that it is a mistake to play party politics based on leadership polls.
BTW, more than a year ago a certain deluded commenter/blogger put up a bit of money on Howard seeing off the Costello leadership challenge. It would have been a bad idea in and of itself. And everyone knows that Costello is “all tip, no berg”.
It worked a treat just prior to the last Queensland election,why wouldn’t it be the same federally?