“…and where are we now? Thoughts on the 2004 election”

by Robert Manne

Presented at the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s Sambell Oration

on Wed Oct 20, 2004 at Central Hall,

Australian Catholic University, 20 Brunswick St Fitzroy.

Shortly after the November 2001 election I gave a talk which I called: “Where are we now?” The “we” here was deliberately ambiguous, referring both to and to the kind of audience I knew would attend on that night—the left-liberal intelligentsia. When I was asked to provide a topic for tonight’s lecture, which I knew would occur shortly after the 2004 election, somewhat mischievously I suggested the title: “…And where are we now?” The “we” here has an identical ambiguity. Of course the title chosen allowed me to speak about a Labor victory if that were to occur. However as I believed it was almost certain that Labor would be defeated, I imagined that I would be speaking about the meaning of the defeat, as unhappily from my point of view I now am. For those who are enthusiastic about the victory of the Howard government I can only offer my apologies in advance. At least what follows will allow them to think about the interpretation of someone who regards the trajectory of Australia since 1996 with undisguised alarm.

The talk I gave following the 2001 election began with the following words: “I doubt whether there has been any election in Australia since 1975 more dismaying for the left-of-centre intelligentsia than the one which we have just been through.” These words are even more

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 1 applicable to the victory of 2004. One stunning defeat of the hopes of the left-liberal intelligentsia can be regarded as an unhappy accident. Two such defeats in the space of three years cannot be. The election of 2004 represents both an intellectual challenge for the left-liberal intelligentsia and perhaps even more a call to seriousness. Without sentiment or rancour or exaggeration, we need to try to discover what has happened to Australia Only on the basis of

getting somewhere with this analysis will it be possible at some later time to approach the most fundamental of all the political questions: what is to be done?

I

In the quarter century before the election of the Howard government in March 1996,

Australians experienced two peaceful social revolutions which, in combination, reshaped profoundly their long-established way of life. Without some general understanding of the nature of these revolutions what happened in the Howard years is, I believe, impossible to grasp.

The first revolution, which originated in the early 1970s, involved the repudiation of those settled attitudes to ethnicity and race – concerning the White Australia Policy, indigenous dispossession, and migrant assimilation to the Anglo-Celtic norm – which had basically remained unquestioned since the federation of the British settler colonies and the creation of the

Australian nation-state.

During the 1980s, before this cultural transformation had time to be fully digested,

Australia passed through a second revolution no less threatening to the settled way of life than the first. This revolution was located in the economic rather than the cultural sphere. It involved the unleashing of the neo-liberal principle of the free market. Under its influence, in the Hawke and Keating years, the dollar was floated; the financial system was deregulated; state-owned businesses were progressively privatised; the centralised arbitration system was weakened; and,

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 2 most fundamentally of all, border protection for manufacturing industry was progressively abandoned.

It is extremely significant to my analysis that both revolutions were inspired and supported, initially at least, only by the country’s cultural and economic elites – that is to say the affluent and the well-educated. A chasm opened up between these “elites” and the “ordinary people”.

The left-leaning parts of the elites (academics, teachers, public servants, journalists, artists and so on) embraced with enthusiasm the broadening of Australia’s ethnic identity and the transcendance of the old politics of race. The right-leaning parts of the elites (economists, managers, entrepreneurs and so on) welcomed the destruction of the interventionist, regulatory and protectionist aspects of the Australian political economy, along free market lines. By and large, by contrast, very many “ordinary Australians” – in regard to Asian immigration, multiculturalism and Aboriginal rights, on the one hand, and in regard to privatisation, deregulation and free trade, on the other –felt puzzled at best and, at worst, decidedly sour.

No political leader in recent times was more committed to both dimensions of the post-Menzies transformation of Australia than Paul Keating. No Prime Minister in Australian history has governed more obviously from the vantage point of the economic and the cultural elites than he. This provides the most vital clue to his landslide electoral defeat of March 1996.

Perhaps the most interesting single fact about this election was the discovery that manual workers were scarcely more likely to have voted Labor than non-manual workers in 1996.

For my analysis the most consequential aspect of the 1996 election was the story of Pauline

Hanson, the Liberal Party candidate in Oxley, Queensland’s safest Labor Party seat. Before the election Hanson had written a letter to a local newspaper complaining about the money being showered on Aborigines and the racist feelings this provoked. When her Labor opponent brought the letter to national attention she was speedily disendorsed by Liberal Party

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 3 headquarters. Hanson subsequently won Oxley with an anti-Labor swing of 21%, the largest in the land.

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In September 1996 Hanson delivered her maiden speech. She spoke of the money that was being wasted on Aborigines; of the High Court’s Mabo judgment as promoting “separatism” and the breaking up of Australia. She also called for the abolition of “the policy of multiculturalism”. She warned that Australia was being “swamped” by Asians. Pauline Hanson also attacked the economic rationalist policies of recent years. She claimed to speak on behalf of commonsense and the forgotten “mainstream”.

For many Australians Hanson became an instant political heroine. Whenever she visited country towns or suburban shopping malls large numbers turned out to cheer her progress or shake her hand. She seemed to represent “the people” against out-of-touch politicians and “the battlers” against the selfishness and the condescension of “the elites”. There was something in her demeanour that excited both curiosity and sympathy. Her defiance, her sullenness, the fact that when she was interviewed she seemed often on the edge of tears, was somehow felt to be appropriate in a woman who was battling almost single-handedly to defend a threatened way of life. In my view the emergence of Hanson is best explained by reference to the fissure between the viewpoint of the elites and the mainstream, especially in the cultural sphere.

For several months the Prime Minister refused to discuss, let alone condemn, either her political impact or her ideas. Howard’s response to a parliamentary speech about Australia being swamped by Asians and about Aboriginals as undeserving recipients of special favours from the state was not to deplore the dangers of new racism. Indeed it was, rather, to welcome the return of an era of free speech.

How was Howard’s conspicuous silence on the Hanson front to be explained? Was it, as he claimed, because he did not want to inflate her importance by a Prime Ministerial response?

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 4 Was it because the battlers’ Prime Minister did not wish to engage in dispute with the battlers’ new champion? Or was it because at least in some of the opinions she voiced – about multiculturalism, the Aboriginal industry, political correctness and the intolerance of the elites - the world views of Pauline Hanson and John Howard overlapped? No-one could be sure.

In the Queensland poll of June 13 1998, One Nation gained 23% of the vote and 11 seats.

On the days following this election its meaning gradually sank in. Almost one in every four

Queenslanders had voted for Pauline Hanson. In the federal election of 1998 One Nation also did extremely well – 930,000 votes for the Representatives (8.4%) and 1,000,000 for the Senate

(9%), although with regard to capturing seats it failed.

During the Howard second term the implications of the elite-mainstream divide and of

Howard’s absorption into his thinking of the meaning of Hansonism gradually became clear.

One obvious early instance of the first process was the republic referendum campaign which took place in October and November 1999. The ARM mobilised famous members of the nation’s pro-republic glitterati. Far more cleverly the monarchists decided to play upon the popular distrust of the politicians and the “elites”. In the end, as anticipated, the referendum proposal failed decisively – 45% to 55%. It did not win a majority in a single state. The most reliable indicator of support for the referendum was, probably, levels of education and wealth.

Another indicator was distance from the state’s capital city. In the seats of Sydney and

Melbourne, the republic referendum enjoyed 70% support. In backwoods New South Wales and

Victoria, there were areas of support only a little above 25%. In the republic referendum the existence in Australia of two distinct nations was glimpsed.

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In Howard’s second term, the “two nations” problem moved to the centre of the political stage. In October 1999 boats of asylum seekers from the Middle East or Central Asia began arriving on Australian territory. The Howard government from the first moment treated these

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 5 asylum seekers with suspicion and undisguised hostility. They were consistently described as both wealthy and insolent. Not once did Howard or Ruddock express sympathy for or show understanding of the often terrifying political conditions from which those from Iraq,

Afghanistan or Iran had fled.

In the history of the Howard government no issue more sharply divided opinion in

Australia – between those who were increasingly coming to be called “the elites” and “the mainstream” – than the government’s treatment of asylum seekers. Ministers of religion, artists, academics, journalists, welfare agencies, virtually every association of doctors and psychiatrists, opposed the manner in which asylum seekers were being treated. Opposed is really not the right word. For many of these people the government was behaving, in regard to asylum seekers, with a level of cruelty and indifference they had once assumed no Australian government ever would.

John Howard’s Australia was becoming unrecognisable to them.

Among the mainstream, however, support for the Howard government’s policy was extremely solid. Once again, support is really not an adequate word. In July 2001 Hugh Mackay reported on the mood of his focus groups.

Some of the most ugly and vicious outpourings of hatred had occurred in discussion of boat

people/illegal immigrants … so strong are the passions aroused by fear of illegal

immigrants and of Australia being “swamped by Asians” that such matters have the

potential to overwhelm factors like the GST in the coming federal election campaign.

In the first six months of 2001 it appeared as if the Howard government was almost certain to be defeated in the general election due later in the year. In March 2001 an A. C. Nielsen poll measured support for the Beazley at 59% and for the Howard government at 41%.

Since Nielsen had begun polling no government had ever recorded a worse result. No-one should deny the Prime Minister’s fighting qualities. Through a variety of populist offerings in the economic sphere, he began to clamber up the impossibly steep electoral cliff face. In the history

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 6 of Australian pork barrelling—at least until the election of 2004-- there have rarely been so many barrels or so many varieties of pork.

In August 2001 more asylum seekers reached Australian territory than in any previous month. An Indonesian fishing boat overloaded with asylum seekers was now rescued by a

Norwegian cargo vessel, MV Tampa. This rescue changed the course of Australian political history. During the standoff that developed between the Howard government and the captain of the Tampa, anti-asylum seeker feeling in Australia exploded. On August 28 the Herald Sun asked its readers whether these Afghans should be allowed to land. 615 thought they should;

13,572 thought they should not.

After mild initial resistance Labor soon fell into line. No other possibility existed. If Labor had opposed government action after Tampa it would have faced not a certain election defeat but an electoral catastrophe. Two weeks after Tampa, John Howard travelled to the United States.

He was, as it happens, in Washington on September 11. The victory of the Howard government in the coming federal election was no longer in doubt. After Tampa Newspoll showed a 5% swing to the Coalition and, after September 11, an additional 5%. Border protection was even more prominent than the war on terror in the 2001 campaign. Indeed, the Howard government used the war on terror to underline the significance of its new tough line on asylum seekers.

Howard’s post-Tampa asylum seeker policy provided the solution to a riddle that had vexed the major parties over the past thirty years. Throughout that period the attitudes of the

“elites” and the “mainstream” had remained divided over the two great revolutions which had transformed Australian life. Until the defeat of the Keating government, both Labor and the

Coalition had offered broad support for both these revolutions. With the Howard government this bipartisan consensus collapsed. Howard, of course, supported the continuation of the neo-liberal economic transformation. However, with increasing confidence, his government turned its back on the ongoing process of cultural transformation. The Howard government had

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 7 closed down the debate about ethnic identity and multiculturalism. It had helped bury the prospect of the republic. By 2000 it had killed off the quest for Aboriginal reconciliation. John

Howard dismissed concern with such matters as “navel gazing”.

None of the issues in Howard’s cultural “rollback” campaign had great electoral salience.

As he seems to have instinctively understood, an extremely tough border protection policy aimed against the ultimate “other”, the unwanted Muslim asylum seeker, might. With the policy he at first improvised with Tampa and then systematically implemented from that time, Howard found the issue where he could, simultaneously, gazump One Nation and destabilise a Labor Party caught between its traditional working class voters and its post-Whitlam professional middle class support base. A transition from old style Australian liberalism to a kind of populist conservatism was implicit in Howard’s cultural agenda. With Tampa it became explicit. Not only did Howard create a new kind of Liberal Party; a different kind of political culture had been born.

It is important to make clear what I mean by the term populist conservatism. In part the term refers to a politics based on an appeal to the gut instincts of the electorate. In part it describes a politics where the most important means of communication between the Prime

Minister and the people is commercial talkback radio—Alan Jones, John Laws, Neil Mitchell— and the television sound bite of the evening news. In part it refers to a politics where the inconvenient views of experts and the opinions of the left-liberal intelligentsia are systematically bypassed. And in part it describes a politics where the breakdown of relations between the government of Australia and the country’s creative intelligentsia is unambiguous and complete.

Although attentive to the interests of the powerful business corporations and sensitive to the demands of small business, Howard’s populist conservatism was integrally linked to suburban and rural Australia, in part through the conspicuous repudiation of the “progressive” cultural agenda and in part through the careful choice of parliamentarians and even Ministers—like Joe

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 8 Hockey or Jackie Kelly—who were more genuinely representative of middle Australia than

Coalition members had been in the days of Menzies and Fraser.

II

Being in Washington at the time of September 11 was for Howard a critical moment in his personal and political life. Howard never tired of saying thereafter that with September 11 the world had changed. So had he. His imagination was now fully mobilised for participation in what the Bush administration soon called “the war on terror”.

Following September 11 and the decision to go to war against the protectors of Al Qaeda, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a group of American neoconservative high government officials and ideologues worked successfully to convince President George W. Bush to make an invasion of Iraq the second main phase of the war on terror. In every twist and turn of the road to war Australia followed loyally one step, or sometimes twelve hours, behind the countries Sir

Robert Menzies had once famously called Australia’s great and powerful friends. In preparation for the invasion, the Americans and the British spoke of the nightmare of weapons of mass destruction falling into Islamist terrorist hands. This also provided the most fundamental reason for Australian involvement in the build-up to war. In order to justify military action, in the absence of any Iraqi provocation, the Americans developed a new strategic doctrine, suitable to the age of terror, which justified what were called pre-emptive strikes against so called “rogue states”. Although this doctrine undermined the most basic rule of international law, it received from the Howard government instant and uncritical endorsement. In dossiers and speeches the

Americans and British leaders produced detailed intelligence information concerning the vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons Iraq possessed and of its advanced nuclear weapons plans. Downer and John Howard repeated in parliament pseudo-precise details of a similar kind. Howard was the pioneer of a new mimetic style for Australian foreign policy.

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 9 Before the invasion of Iraq Howard had, time and again, argued that the aim of the allies was not regime change but disarmament. Following the invasion no weapons of mass destruction were found. No-one seemed to care. Under Howard, Australia had been involved in an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, without a UN mandate, to disarm the country of weapons it did not possess. Following the invasion Iraq descended into an indescribable chaos, from which it seemed highly unlikely to emerge. Both the Bush administration and the Blair government suffered seriously as a consequence of Iraq. The Howard government, by contrast, experienced no political difficulty at all.

Why? In part this was because of the general quiescence of the Australian media, and the continuing pro-war position of the extremely influential Murdoch press. In part it was because of the government’s policy of intimidating the ABC. In part it was because the massive failures of intelligence were not seen as an Australian responsibility but attributed to the secret services of Australia’s great and powerful friends. In part it was because Australia lost no troops in Iraq.

Most importantly of all, however, it was because of the unchallenged mastery Howard had maintained over the Labor Opposition since he had solved the riddle of Australian politics with his conservative populist solution, in the period between Tampa and the election of November 10

2001.

During Howard’s third term—particularly because of policy breakdown over Iraq and the emergence of a new issue which came to be called truth in government-- the style of government became increasingly authoritarian. Throughout the Howard years party discipline was so tight that there was not even one open dissenting voice on issues as problematic as the use of military force to drive asylum seekers from Australia or Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq.

Discipline was also imposed on public servants. When asked to explain why he had not revealed to an internal government inquiry the fact that he had told the Prime Minister before the

November 2001 election that no-one in Defence believed the story about children overboard,

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 10 with admirable honesty Mike Scrafton pointed out that he had children to support and a mortgage to pay. When the head of the Federal police, Mick Keelty uttered an innocuous remark about the likelihood that Australia’s involvement in the war in Iraq had increased the chance of a terrorist attack, a successful campaign to compel Keelty’s public recantation was initiated at once. And when an inquiry into pre-war intelligence on Iraq was commissioned, in order to keep in step with the United States and the United Kingdom, the person chosen, Phillip Flood, was a government insider who loyally produced the confidently anticipated exonerating report..

In such an atmosphere those anxious about the decline of standards of honesty in government were relatively easily marginalised. The children overboard whistleblower, Mike

Scrafton, was in part discredited in the public mind by the government’s dwelling on a trivial inaccuracy in his account of his conversation with Prime Minister. The group of forty three

Army chiefs and former diplomats, who with considerable courage expressed powerful criticism both of the invasion of Iraq in particular and the mendacity of the government in general, were ridiculed simply because they had retired. Two weeks before the election news emerged that the most senior government intelligence expert on weapons of mass destruction, Dr Bob Matthews, had, astonishingly enough, been prevented by his superiors in the DSTO from sending his assessment of the fraudulence of the Anglo-American case to the government. In frustration, he had sent his views to the Prime Minister on the eve of the invasion. Matthews learned indirectly that prosecution under the Crimes Act was being considered. He lost his security clearance.

Although he gave evidence about his letter to the Prime Minister and his informed pre-invasion views to the Flood inquiry, when it final report was published discussion of the Matthews incident was suppressed. In Britain a case like Matthews’ would, even now, threaten the survival of the Blair government. In Howard’s Australia it did not even cause a stir. Because of the combined effect of creeping authoritarianism and mendacity public opinion gradually fell asleep.

III

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 11 Given Howard’s unchallenged mastery of the Opposition during his third term something had to give. It seems to me no accident that when eventually Labor decided to replace its failed leader, Simon Crean, the ALP was faced with a choice between the two most “conservative” leaders in the history of the party—Kim Beazley and .

This claim needs to be amplified. If Beazley and Latham are both conservative Labor leaders they are so in two quite different ways. The essence of Beazley’s conservatism was caution. He was temperamentally averse to the taking of risks. Latham’s conservatism was different. Although by nature a risk taker, he was the first Labor leader of modern times who was altogether out of sympathy with both the transformative post-1970s cultural agenda and with its primary bearers—the left-liberal elites. Like Howard and Ruddock, Latham was profoundly unsympathetic to the plight of the asylum seekers. Like Howard, he barely wanted to think about the idea of multiculturalism. Like Howard, he was interested exclusively in

“practical reconciliation”. Latham took no real interest in the re-imagining of Australia’s place in the Asia-Pacific region. Although he was a genuine republican, his interest was in the populist model—of a directly elected President—and not in the elite “minimalist” model of a

President created by the nomination of the Prime Minister and elected by a two-thirds vote of parliament. On matters of crime and the war on terror Latham thought and spoke no less toughly than the Prime Minister. He identified with the suburbs and with the “aspirational” middle classes. He despised equally old money and privilege and the left-leaning elites. For Latham,

Phillip Adams, the emblematic figurehead of the pro-Labor left intelligentsia, had no place inside the ALP.

In this reading Latham represents the first serious Labor attempt to find a way of responding to Howard’s populist conservatism. Under Latham Labor has done so with what might be called a social-democratic or welfare populism of its own. It tried to win this election with a generous, and at times almost Whitlamesque tax and welfare program—fiscal breaks for

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 12 low income families, the defence of Medicare bulk billing, significant new spending on child- care and education, a small government-financed dental program and the offer of free and immediate hospital care for all citizens above the age of seventy-five. There can be no doubt the

Howard sensed the potential danger in Labor’s welfare populism. Hence his uncharacteristic election extravagances which neutralised Labor’s spending program. Hence his transformation of the election campaign into a multi-billion dollar auction for the people’s vote.

It is not difficult to explain the Coalition victory. Australia is at present a two-thirds society. The majority are affluent as never before in history; the minority—globalization’s losers—are doing it tough. Yet for very many of the prosperous, material wellbeing is not linked to existential security. The new wealth of middle Australia is felt to be precarious, tied to unprecedented levels of personal debt, mainly in the form of mortgages on homes. If in the near future property prices fall or if interest rates rise, for middle Australia the consequences will be dire. Because of the turbulence associated with the period of Whitlam and even with that of

Hawke and Keating, Labor is still regarded as a less reliable economic management team than the Coalition. As most people do not understand economics, and cannot even pretend to understand why interest rates rise or fall, it was not difficult for the Coalition to strike fear into the electorate with claims about the risk of interest rate rises under Labor.

In politics fear is usually a more potent emotion than hope. Howard is a great manipulator of people’s fears. The last election’s fear campaign--of being overrun by asylum seekers--was entirely bogus. This election’s fear campaign--of interest rate rises under Labor-- might have been unfair but was also based on something which is genuinely potentially ruinous for middle

Australia, and, therefore, entirely real. Fear of Labor was, moreover, particularly effective on this occasion. Unlike ultra-cautious Beazley, Latham is not only inexperienced but is also clearly not the kind of politician who is afraid to take a risk. The last thing mortgage holders want is a Prime Minister who appears a buccaneer. The interest rate scare strengthened the

Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 13 Coalition’s hold over the great Australian mortgage belt. Some of Labor’s once safest seats, in migrant and lower income suburbs, will rank as marginal in the next election.

Of the issues which matter profoundly to the left-liberal intelligentsia but which, in general, do not matter to the mainstream--reconciliation, the republic, justice for refugees, Iraq, the environment—in this election only the environment played a role, in the discussion of the logging of old growth forests in Tasmania. And here, because of the almost sublime cunning of the Prime Minister, Latham’s principled stand, as it turned out, did the Labor Party’s electoral prospects very considerable harm. Labor since the 1960s has been torn between its old working class base, parts of which have moved towards the Coalition and One Nation since 1996, and the professional left-liberal intelligentsia which has moved towards the Labor Party since the time of

Whitlam. By pretending to be against all old growth logging during the campaign, and by threatening to outflank Labor on the left with an anti-logging policy, Howard was able to lure

Latham into an anti-logging policy that not only helped Labor lose two seats in Tasmania but also to remind many blue collar voters on the mainland of what they had most feared, particularly since the time of Keating, namely that Labor had been captured, even under Latham, by the left-liberal middle class and had abandoned the traditional working class.

An unpleasant thought seems inescapable. The more successful the left-liberal intelligentsia is in winning the Labor Party over to its point of view, the more easy is it for the

Coalition not only to increase its influence in the suburban mortgage belt but also to drive a wedge between the two halves of Labor and to use the division thus created to great electoral effect. Are the social justice and environmental interests of the left-liberal intelligentsia now incompatible with the ambition of seeing Labor return to power? Is that really where “we” are now?

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Brotherhood of St Laurence’s 2004 Sambell Oration Page 14 Robert Manne is Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. Many of the ideas contained in this lecture have been outlined previously in chapters and newspaper columns published during 2004.

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