THE SEEDS OF MISTRUST

I wrote this about a year ago but given the election today I think it's relevant even if it is a tidge out of date. Plus I've got man-flu so leave me alone.

The seeds of mistrust

Every sun that sets brings us a day closer to the demise of John Howard and further away from wherever we were on the second day in March in 1996 when he scrambled over the battered, exhausted carcass of Paul Keating and into the Lodge. On that day the Australian public put a beige blot on the national copybook, which has since seeped through the pages and eaten away the varnish on the table top. In less than 30 days he’ll celebrate 11 years in office. He is not finished yet. We are to blame.

In what is an extremely competitive field, John Howard is easily the least inspirational leader the country has ever seen. An office clerk in the office of the Prime Minister.

Howard is like the socially awkward treasurer of a suburban cricket club. The stalwart that lingers self-consciously around the change rooms on practice nights and turns up to all the home games with a thermos and a folding chair, waiting patiently for the tea break when he can corner someone for a chat and a ginger snap. Apparently Australian voters like that sort of thing. He is our second most successful Prime Minister.

And why not? Charisma has been something of a liability in Australian politics. We don’t really trust it. The eloquent Gough Whitlam was big on social inclusion and cultural development but he was so financially incompetent no one really cared when Sir John Kerr brought down the curtain on his programme of cultural enlightenment.

Bob Hawke was a cracking raconteur and a lively drinking partner but in the 80s bugger all people could actually afford to meet him in the bar. With interest rates running at over 15 per cent most were too stretched holding off foreclosure to scratch together the price of a schooner.

Paul Keating, for all his acerbic wit, could only manage one election victory against an opponent in John Hewson who created a policy platform so complicated no one could understand it, including, as he proved under the withering gaze of Ray Martin, himself.

Whitlam may have had vision, Hawke charisma and Keating drive but Howard has expediency and the cunning of a professional survivor. No one has ever been able to read the Australian public more deftly. And so we end up governed by a bald man with a hearing aid and a little brother’s keenness to join in the games of the bigger boys.

He is also the most pragmatic politician of the modern era. At a time when the ideological differences between left and right on most issues are farcically narrow he has created the prototype for the modern leader. His ability to claim and hold the middle ground is unsurpassed in the last ten years.

In the western world leading a political party and even more so leading a country has become less about providing leadership in a traditional, inspirational sense and more about being a giant fairground mirror, absorbing, magnifying and then reflecting a refracted version of the public opinion back at the public. A decision isn’t made without asking; “how will the public react to that?” or “will the punters agree?”

That a leader might actually put forward a genuine list of well thought out and simply explained ideological principals and attempt to inspire people to adopt that point of view is an idea from a bygone era.

Ideological differences remain between the major parties, but these differences are rarely the chosen battleground for any confrontation. The disposable nature of the media and the rise of the opinion pollster has made the existence of any kind of detailed policy platform something of an embarrassing little secret, which all parties share but no one really wants to talk about. Publicly debating issues of policy has become as likely as two sexual partners who have shared an STD meeting on a bus to shout detailed accusations of infidelity at each other across the aisle.

So the national political debate is wound down to nothing more than single issue head butting. What the issue is is hardly the point provided it can be presented in the most basic black and white terms.

This isn’t John Howard’s fault - the structure of the popular Australian media doesn’t allow for a more developed analysis – but he has been the most successful at exploiting the situation. He is a master manipulator of the media agenda. He also reads the Australian public mood better than most and has extremely good pollsters, which means that more often than not he’s first to the middle ground, leaving his opponents little opportunity to oppose his stance with anything stronger than mealy mouthed semantics. Simon Crean discovered that to his peril, Mark Latham to his demise and Kim Beasley first to his frustration and eventually to his ruin.

What marks John Howard out as a danger is not that he dominates the debate but that he does so seemingly without principle. His failure to genuinely distance himself from Pauline Hanson, his manipulation of the Tampa and the lies of Children Overboard amount to nothing but a shameless appeal to the darker aspects of the Australian psyche.

That a seam of isolationism and xenophobia exists in Australia is no surprise. It exists in every country in the world and is no bigger problem in Australia than anywhere else. But it is one thing to acknowledge its existence and completely another to tap into it in order to gain and keep power, which is exactly the trough we’ve found John Howard snuffling through for the past decade.

Whether he genuinely believes the promotion of multicultural migration puts Australia in danger of becoming un-Australian is irrelevant (although given past statements and the fact he was born in 1939 and probably spent the first six years of his life having the fear of south-bound Asiatic hoards threatening the Christian shores of Australia drummed into him it’s a fair chance he at least empathises with the view). He has manipulated the belief in others. And Australia is a worse place for it.

No one goes on forever and as surely as his predecessors were eventually forced to stand aside, he too will retire to his fat pension and unlimited free air travel. He will fall but it won’t be for the right reasons. It won’t be because he made Australia a more hostile place to live. Old age will claim him, or the ill wind of economic chill. The latter would be an absolute disaster.

The damage he will leave behind will take a long time to repair and could prove irreparable if interest rates start to climb and the bottom falls out of the housing market. The true extent of the damage might only be revealed when the unemployment queues start growing and people start looking around for someone to blame.

In an affluent society there’s less need to look over your shoulder and fear what you don’t know, yet in a time of unrivalled prosperity John Howard has taught us how to hate and fear each other anyway. How much more will we hate and fear each other when desperation and hardship germinate the seeds of mistrust he has planted?

Dale Atkinson