The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2, April±June 2008 Tintin in Australia: The Federal Election on 24 November 2007 MATT QVORTRUP Dame Edna Everage (comedian Berry Humphrey's creation of a housewife drag queen) opined that Australia was `not ready' for a `Prime Minister named Kevin'.1 The Australian votersÐor more than half of themÐthought otherwise. On 24 November 2007, a majority of 53.29 per cent of the two-party preferred vote chose the 50 year-old Kevin Rudd as the country's twenty-sixth prime minister at the expense of the 68 year-old incumbent John Winston Howard. The Liberal leader had presided over eleven years of uninterrupted growth. The new prime ministerÐa soft-spoken former diplomat and ¯uent Mandarin speaker (he studied the subject at the Australian National University)Ðliked to call himself `Kevin 07'. Cartoon artistsÐand the publicÐ called him `Tintin' because of his uncanny resemblance to the Belgian cartoonist HergeÂ's creation of a goody-twoshoes reporter. The background John Howard was Australia's second longest serving prime minister (the longest serving being his political idol and founder of the Liberal party, Sir Robert Menzies (1949±1963) ). Elected in 1996, when he ended thirteen years of Labor government (of ®rst Bob Hawke and subsequently Paul Keating), Howard arguably inherited a strong economy. A conservative by conviction and a populist by instinct, he e€ectively thwarted the ascendancy of Pauline Hanson's anti-immigrant One Nation Party by adopting the rhetoric, if not entirely the policies, of the xenophobic right. Immigration controls were introduced and tightened, and throughout Howard presented himself as not as a charismatic leader like his predecessorbut-one Bob Hawke or as a patrician like Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal prime minister (1977±1983), but as a man of the people, the son of a petrol-station owner from Earlwood in Sydney.2 Howard (derogatorily described as a `suburban solicitor' by Paul Keating) was the personi®cation of the petit bourgeois; the embodiment of Robert Menzies `the forgotten people'. And rather like Margaret Thatcher who lured `Essex man' to vote for the British Tories, the Liberal Australian Prime Minister won support of skilled workers, the so-called `Howard Battlers'.3 Rather than yielding to the partyinsiders, he succumbed to public pressure following the Port Arthur shooting in Tasmania in 1996 and introduced some of the world's tightest anti-gun laws. This was popular in the cities, but anything but in the rural areas where the National Party (the coalition's junior partner) reigns supreme. A contemporary account stated: `The introduction of gun controls was the [Howard] government's big success story with an approval rating of 74 per cent.'4 Yet for all his talk about `mateship' (he unsuccessfully tried to have the word added to the Constitution), Howard never succeeded in reducing an increasingly ethnically diverse Australia to a single concept. Yet it was impossible to question his cunning and his strategic genius. # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 269 True to form, Howard managed to turn the 1999 referendum on the abolition of the monarchy into a poll about trust in federal politicians. Rather than a vote for or against the proposed republic, he proposed than a future president should be chosen by Canberra politicians. As a leading constitutionalist observed: Regardless of the con®dence with which the convention delegates concluded their work, the model adopted in February [1999] was one many considered unlikely to succeed, given opinion polls had shown a high level of public support for a directly elected head of state rather than a parliamentary choice. The prime minister, it appeared, was rather relieved to be able to endorse the `bipartisan' model since as a monarchist he was unlikely to witness its success.5 In a country where referendums on constitutional changes have the same success rate as reheated sou‚eÂ, the outcome of the plebiscite was in reality a foregone conclusion. This was not the only area in which Howard managed to reverse longstanding trends. His unequivocal support for American President George Bush's `war on terror', his opposition to the Kyoto Agreement and the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 1998 were bold attempts to capitalise on strong political positions even when his mandate wasÐat bestÐwafer thin. Indeed, GST was introduced following the election in 1998, when the Coalition had been re-elected despite having polled fewer votes than the Australian Labour Party (ALP) (see Table 1). To be sure, John Howard did not reign supreme. Like Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, who was locked in a constant and often acrimonious battle with Gordon Brown, Howard too was openly challenged by his treasurer Peter Costello. (Incidentally, the same had been the case for Bob Hawke, who was ousted by Paul Keating.)6 Moreover, while Labour was spectacularly unsuccessful at the federal level, the ALP ruled all the Aus- Table 1: Results of Australian federal elections, 1996±2007 (ALP leaders in brackets) Year 1996 1998 2001 2004 2007 ALP 47.26 (Paul Keating) 50.98 (Kim Beazley) 49.05 (Kim Beazley) 47.26 (Mark Latham) 53.29 (Kevin Rudd) Coalition 53.63 49.02 50.95 52.74 46.71 Source: ABC NEWS and Australian Electoral Commission. tralian states for the better part of the `Howard era'. Furthermore, it was only in the last three years of his eleven-year reign that the Coalition had a majority in the Senate (a body chosen by proportional representation of the single transferable vote variety). Rather like Tony Blair, who beat a succession of Tory leaders (John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard), John Howard saw o€ a similar number of ALP leaders (Paul Keating, Kim Beazeley (twice), Simon Crean and Mark Latham). In 2004, the Labor party was believed to have chosen a leader who could match John Howard: the 43 year-old Mark Latham. Yet after a promising start, Latham's leadership imploded. Stories from his colourful past all but drowned his chances of winning the election. Following a period of illness, Latham resigned, and later published his exceptionally bitterÐand at times paranoidÐdiaries.7 Latham's predecessor Kim Beazley stepped in. By the end of 2006, all looked set for a third showdown between Beazley and Howard, with the latter the overwhelming favourite. This changed in late December, when the foreign a€airs spokesman Kevin successfully challenged Beazley for the leadership. Rudd's comparative youthfulness (he is born in 1957), combined with interest rate increases (which 270 M a t t Q v o r t r u p The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 Howard in 2004 had promised would not occur if Coalition was re-elected) gave Labor a 13 per cent lead in the polls. These ®gures, however, did not result in outbreaks of euphoria on the opposition benches. Latham too, had been ahead in 2004. Indeed, even in 2001 the then leader Kim Beazley had been ahead by more than ten points before Hoard skilfully combined the fears of post-9/11 terrorism and concern about immigration to change the public mood. Showing footage that allegedly portrayed refugees throwing children overboard in order to be granted access to the country, Howard was able to paint himself as a resolute and ecient leader. The fact that the footage later was shown to beÐat bestЯawed did not have much political e€ect. The campaign in 2007 The period between 2004 and 2007 was notable in several respects. Not only did the government's handling of the economy take a pounding as a result of the rate increases (six in all), it was also on the defensive as a result of a long period of drought, which was blamed on global warming (a phenomenon John Howard had doubted the existence of). This hurt the Coalition even more as AustraliaÐ alone with the United StatesÐhad not rati®ed the Kyoto Agreement. That Australia was also seen as been too close to the Bush government did not improve matters. Whereas the two previous campaigns had been dominated by foreign a€airs (immigration in 2001 and Iraq in 2004), the 2007 election was dominated by the economy8Ðand the usual debates about the quality of the leaders. John Howard was seen as having lost the televised debate between the leaders. However, the debate was less about who scored which point than about the network's Channel Nine's decision, after pressure from the government, to cut the `worm': an instant response measure operated by the audience. It showed Rudd winning by a 66 to 24 margin.9 The Coalition began the campaign by promising tax cuts and index-linked pensions, but the Aus$34 tax cut was all but matched by Labor's shadow treasurer Wayne Swan.10 Just as Labor sought, with some success, to move to the centre, the Coalition endeavoured to do the same. Thus John Howard promised early on in the campaign to address the issue of recognition for aboriginals. However, his pledge to hold a referendum on a constitutional amendment that recognised the original peoples rights was met with varying degrees of scepticism and disbelief among aboriginals, who accused him of electioneering and of being a `Johnny come lately'. The charge that this was a proverbial case of too little too late was illustrated by the fact that aboriginals situation had anything but improved during the eleven years of Liberal-National reign. For instance, infant deaths among aboriginals is three times higher than among white Australians and `many aboriginal people live in a poverty characteristic of Third World countries'.11 The criticism of Howard's conversion to aboriginal rights was further damaged by the revelation that he had only informed the Cabinet about the decision the previous day. It seemed that the 68 year-old Howard had lost his genius for winning elections. And he had certainly lost the support of the Murdoch newspapers. Nobody wants to back a loser! In the ocial launch on 12 November (more than halfway into the campaign), Howard pledged to spend extra money on education and to change `Australia from a welfare state to an opportunity society'. He mused that Kevin Rudd's `views were unknown to the Australian public and perhaps even to himself '. The country at large did not agree. Labor's poll ratings went upÐand the personal ratings for Howard went down. T h e Au s t r a l i a n Fe d e r a l E l e c t i o n o n 24 N o v e m b er 2 0 07 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 271 The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 The Coalition's pledges were hampered by an interest rate increase during the campaign itself, and by expressions by economists that the government's spending plans were likely to lead to further interest rate rises. As a result, Labor's campaign launch a couple of days later was economically subdued and only promised a comparatively small Aus$2.5 billion spending on further education, primary education and cleaner energy.12 The failure to curb the Tintin look alike from Queensland was characteristic for the campaign. In 2004, the Coalition had skilfully deployed an arsenal of un¯attering home truths about Mark Latham (including assault charges and violence against his former wife). This alongside his less than impressive record as leader of Liverpool Council made him virtually unelectable. This strategy did not work against the squeaky-clean and almost dull Rudd. An attempt to wrong foot the Labor leader over a visit to a strip club in New YorkÐa story that had several Liberal ®ngerprints on it13Ðdid not hurt him. Rudd immediately owned up to his minor misdemeanour and the average Aussie bloke seemingly saw the whole incident as a welcome sign that Tintin could be a red-blooded male. `Little ®ght left in dispirited incumbents' said the headline in The Australian (a Murdoch newspaper) on 17 November. A bit premature perhaps, but a sober assessment given that both Newspoll and ACNielsen showed a 54 to 46 lead for the ALP. Rudd was cruising. His ride continued until polling day. The result The result did not come as a surprise. As forecast by all the opinion polls, ALP won a comfortable victory and took far more than the 79 seats required for a majority in the House: 88, to be precise. More spectacularly, John Howard lost his own Bennelong seat to former news presenter Maxine McKew (who became a junior minister in the Prime Minister's Oce after the election). Howard was the ®rst prime minister to lose his seat since Stanley Bruce in 1929. The result (a 6.03 per cent swing to Labor) showed that voters felt it was time for a change. In addition to a loss for the Liberals, their junior partner, the Nationals won a mere ten seatsÐtheir worst result ever. The latter party's defeat led to the resignation of the leader and Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile. After the election, he was replaced by the Queensland MP Warren Truss. The result was a landslide; though not the earthquake predicted by some pundits (see Table 2). Whether this election result will lead to a new departure is debatable. To be sure, the new government will ratify the Kyoto Agreement and pull Australian troops out of Iraq, but on the home front much less is likely to happen. An issue like the abolition of the monarchyÐalso favoured Table 2: Seats in the Australian House of Representatives, 2004 and 2007 Total divisions won Party Liberal Australian Labor Party The Nationals CLP±The Territory Party Independent Total NSW VIC 14 28 5 0 1 49 12 21 2 0 0 37 QLD WA SA TAS ACT NT 7 15 3 0 1 29 10 4 0 0 0 15 5 6 0 0 0 11 0 5 0 0 0 5 0 2 0 0 0 2 0 2 0 0 0 2 This election Last election 48 83 10 0 2 150 74 60 12 1 3 150 Source: Australian Electoral Commission. 272 M a t t Q v o r t r u p The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 Table 3: Members of the Senate Party Continuing New Total 19 14 2 1 0 18 18 3 0 1 37 32 5 1 1 Liberal/National Coalition Australian Labour Party The Greens Family First Others Source: Australian Electoral Commission. by the Liberal Malcolm Turnbull (who ran the republican campaign in the 1999 referendum)Ðis unlikely to be a high priority for the Rudd administration. If we are to believe the prime ministerelect's victory speech, it will be business as usual. There are political reasons for this. In the aftermath of the election there was speculation14 that the lack of a majority in the Senate would, or even could, lead to a battle in the Upper House, especially over the new government's reversal of the outgoing administration's industrial relations laws (see Table 3). Brian Costar, a political scientist, thus has predicted a double dissolution election as early as next year.15 This, however, seems unlikely. Following the defeat, the Liberal party declared that they had been wrong over work-choice legislation, and that they would not obstruct its abolition as Labor had a mandate for change. Still, Labor does not have a majority in the Senate and has to rely on the motley crew of one member of Family First (a Christian Party), ®ve senators from the Green party and an independentÐAde- Table 4: Members of the Cabinet Prime Minister: Kevin Rudd Deputy Prime Minister, Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Social Inclusion: Julia Gillard Treasurer: Wayne Swan Leader of the Government in the Senate, Immigration and Citizenship: Chris Evans Special Minister of State, Cabinet Secretary, Vice President of the Executive Council: John Faulkner Trade: Simon Crean Foreign A€airs: Stephen Smith Defence: Joel Fitzgibbon Health and Ageing: Nicola Roxon Family, Housing, Community services and Indigenous A€airs: Jenny Macklin Lindsay Tanner, Finance and Deregulation. Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development, Local Government, Leader of the House: Anthony Albanese Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy: Stephen Conroy Innovation, Industry, Science and Research: Kim Carr Climate Change and Water: Penny Wong Environment, Heritage and the Arts: Peter Garrett Attorney-General: Robert McClelland Human Services, Manager of Government Business in the Senate: Joe Ludwig Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: Tony Burke Resources and Energy, Tourism: Martin Ferguson T h e Au s t r a l i a n Fe d e r a l E l e c t i o n o n 24 N o v e m b er 2 0 07 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 273 The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 laide anti-gambler Nick Xenophon. This would seem dicult. However, minorities in the Senate are the norm rather than the exception. Only on three previous occasions has the government controlled both houses: twice in the 1950s and during the period 2004±2007.16 The biggest question mark possibly hangs over the Liberal party. Within hours of the defeat, Howard's anointed successor Peter Costello declared that he would not contest the leadership. Three candidates did contest the leadership: Dr Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbot. Shortly before the contest, the latter pulled out with a vague excuse that `he had been too close to Howard'. Contrary to the bookmakers' predictions, Nelson (a one-time member of the Labor party) won the contest 45 to 42, but immediately appointed the runner-up, Malcolm Turnbull, as shadow treasurer. In a country where most administrations get more than two terms, the position of the Liberals is not enviable. Five days after the election, Rudd presented his new cabinet (see Table 4). He made a point of departing from the Labor tradition of letting the caucus select ministers. So he might have done. However, there were few surprises in his line-up of ministers: Julia Gillard became deputy prime minister, Wayne Swan treasurer and Stephen Smith became minister of foreign a€airs. The only possible surprise was that Simon Crean (a former leader of the ALP) made a comeback as minister for trade. Conclusion I have only ever met one committed fan of John Howard: a used car salesman from Toowoomba in Queensland. Admittedly university departments are not blue-ribbon territory, but even in Sydney's eastern suburbsÐthe heartland of Liberal support (and Malcolm Turnbull's constituency)Ðthere was little love for Howard; respect, to be sure, and acknowledgement that he was a cunning and skilled operator, but never a€ection. Howard was never a charismatic leader in the Weberian sense of the word. On 24 November 2007, the luck ran out for the man who once described himself as `Lazarus with a double by-pass'. His successor, Labor's Kevin Rudd, is hardly more charismatic. And unlike Howard, who was treasurer under Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970s, the new prime minister has no previous ministerial experience. Winning the election was the easy part. Rudd started o€ with a much heralded apology to the aboriginal peoples of Australia for the white population's past misdemeanorsÐespecially the forced removal of children (the so-called `lost generation'). Yet that too was the easy part. Now comes the dicult bit. For as Machiavelli once observed: There is nothing more dicult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the inventor has for enemies all those who derive advantages from the old order of things, while those who expect to be bene®ted by the new institutions will be but lukewarm supporters.17 Notes 1 Cited in The Australian (http:// www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/ 0,25197,22812651±1702,00.html; accessed 24 November 2007). 2 Wayne Errington and Peter Van Onselen, John Winston Howard: The Biography, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2007. 3 Judith Brett, `Relaxed and comfortable: The Liberal party's Australia', Quarterly Essay, no. 19, 2005. 4 David Adams, `John Howard: Never great, always adequate', in Gwynneth Singleton, ed., The Howard Government: Australian Commonwealth Administration, 1996±1998, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2000, p. 20. 5 Helen Irvin, `The republic debate', in John 274 M a t t Q v o r t r u p The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 Summers, Dennis Woodward and Andrew Parkin, eds, Government, Politics, Power and Policy in Australia (7th edn), French Forest, Pearson Education, 2002, p. 143. 6 Patrick Weller and Jeremy Flemming, `The Commonwealth', in Jeremy Moon and Campbell Sharman, eds, Australian Politics and Government: The Commonwealth, the States and the Territories, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 38. 7 To viz: Latham criticised state Labor premiers Bob Carr, Peter Beatie and Geo€ Gallop calling them `A-grade arseholes' (Mark Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2005, p. 6). 8 Ian McAllister and Clive Bean, `Leaders, the economy or Iraq? Explaining voting in the 2004 Australian election', Australian Journal of Politics & History, vol. 52, no. 4, 2006, pp. 604±20; Katharine Gelber, `A fair queue? Australian public discourse on 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 refugees and immigration', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 77, 2003. http://www.abc.net/lateline (accessed 20 October 2007). SBS World News, 23 October. Judith Bessant and Rob Watts, Sociology Australia, Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2002, p. 226. `ALP wins high ground on the economy', The Australian, 15 November, p. A1. http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/ story/0,23739,22268874-952,00.html (accessed 26 November 2007). ABC-Lateline, 27 November 2007. Brian Costar interviewed on ABC-Lateline, 27 November 2007. The Senate has twelve members from each state and four from the territories. Members serve six years and half are elected every three years. Niccolo Machiavelli, `The Prince' in The Prince and the Art of War, London, CWR, 2004, p. 32. T h e Au s t r a l i a n Fe d e r a l E l e c t i o n o n 24 N o v e m b er 2 0 07 # The Author 2008. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2008 275 The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 2