Fireworks were set off in the street as John Howard mounted the podium for the last time, the ABC telecast symbolically interrupting Peter Costello’s own smirk-filled victory speech. But after Saturday night’s ‘Ruddslide’ even the treasurer’s smirk, that island in the sea of change that is Australian politics, is no more. With Liberal MPs falling like flies and prime minister Rudd in stellar (though typically opaque) form, it will be satisfying to watch the rout unfold.
And it’s been a long time coming. Under Howard, left politics fell into an unimaginative rut of effigy burning and Catherine Deveny-style reductionism. As Howard’s electoral successes mounted, the electorate – the basis of any credible social democratic vision – became suspect. Howard’s demise was so elusive, and his political skill so uncanny, that it became an end in itself, almost divorced from political principle. But as historian Judith Brett has argued, many on the left misread Howard’s appeal. Instead of exploiting a latent racism and xenophobia, Brett saw a canny manipulation of national symbols and a mastery of the Liberal tradition – of promising to govern for the “whole nation” rather than for a few vocal “interest groups”. Now this formula, successful for over a decade, has finally collapsed under the combined weight of climate change, rising interest rates and industrial relations reform.
WorkChoices – an ideological project never anchored by any credible economic rationale – was a gift to the opposition. By abolishing collective bargaining agreements and eroding workers’ rights, it forced Howard’s working-class “battler” constituency into Rudd’s arms and gave the ALP the sense of purpose that it markedly lacked in 2004. Rudd’s “working families” rhetoric was no less simplistic than the “ladder of opportunity” sold by Mark Latham; it merely met with a more receptive audience. In retrospect, we should have seen it coming: Howard and Costello, in a spate of neoliberal zeal, handing the Lodge to Kevin Rudd. (And Bennelong to Maxine! Now that she has finally levered the seat from the PM’s icy grip, some wag has set up a ‘Maxine McKew for PM’ Facebook group. ‘MAXINE13′ – I think it has a certain ring to it…).
Where to now for the Liberals? Howard gambled his legacy on a fifth term, and goes down in history as only the second incumbent to have his own seat snatched from under him. Going forward, the party has two choices: a move further to the right – a likely outcome with a fanatic like Tony Abbot at the helm – or a shift back towards reason and moderation, possibly under Malcolm Turnbull. The latter, seemingly the most likely, would set Australian politics in an interesting direction: Could a Turnbull Liberal Party soon be playing the Tories to Rudd’s New Labour?
