not too much

This morning we went through the long queue at the polling booth in the local primary school, with its usual accompaniments of party workers, how-to-vote cards and a sausage sizzle run by the school parents.

Howard has not been good for Australia. Trouble is, I'm yet to be convinced that Rudd's Labor will be a whole lot better. It is long on pragmatism and short on vision and principle. Few writers have mastered the art of political invective as well as Alan Ramsey and Philip Adams. Evidence these exerpts condemning Howard to the dustbin of history, the first from a Ramsey's his election day piece. (SMH 24 Nov)

The end of the line. Remember that heading in the Herald a few weeks back, after one of the opinion polls bumped up the Government's lousy standing a point or two? "Lazarus stirs", it said optimistically of John Howard. Wrong. It was just the flies moving. Yesterday, in the nation's Parliament, with hardly a politician to be seen anywhere, we got some election realism. Three rows of recycling bins, whacking big green ones with yellow lids. More than 300 of them.

Where? In the basement corridor of the ministerial wing. The bins seemed a more apt commentary than all the desperate, last-minute Coalition windbaggery going on around the nation on what is about to descend on the Prime Minister after 33 years in public life and almost 12 years remaking Australia in his own miserable, disfigured image. They arrived two days ago and whoever they're for, 48 hours before a single vote is cast today, you felt somebody, somewhere, finally got it right.

The end of the line. Howard doesn't think so, obviously. [. . . ] ". . . I ask them not to change the government, because when you change the government, you do change the direction of the country." Indeed you do. And hallelujah! Howard obviously does not understand this is exactly what voters seem intent on doing, irrespective of some heroic assessments in the final opinion polls.

A clear majority remain heartily sick of the Prime Minister and his Coalition claque of tired mediocrities. The "it's time" factor has been driving political sentiment all year, just as the dominant policy issue in the cities has been the Government's hated Work Choices legislation. Clearly, it has not occurred to Howard that, for almost a year, ever since Kevin Rudd became the Labor alternative, an overwhelming majority of voters agree it is, indeed, "a question of assessing what is good" for Australia.

What voters have been "assessing", in increasing numbers, is that they prefer Rudd's "fresh leadership" to Howard's "same as usual" approach. And if Howard couldn't bring himself to get out of the way and allow an election choice between Rudd and Costello, then his "fellow Australians", as he prefers to call them, rather than his 1996 appeals to "Australia's battlers", will use the ballot box to get rid of his government. [. . .] Howard never thinks anything is wrong with his leadership, just as while he says he's "sorry" for the six increases in home mortgage rates since the last election, he refuses to acknowledge any public responsibility. Good heavens, no. This is what John Howard is good at: sliding around responsibility, around accountability, for things that go wrong.

Why should anyone be surprised when he says, "No, of course Australians don't want to change the country's direction", however he defines that, just as he insists they really don't want to change any of his Government's policies, which are really very good for us all.

How then, you wonder, does he account for all those "fellow Australians" who tell the opinion pollsters his government stinks, his leadership most of all? [. . . ] Howard's true political "genius", if you like, is forever talking to what he sees as his base constituency as if they are no more than sheep. In this he might well be right.

Monday of this week was a Howard anniversary of sorts. [. . .] It's a nice irony that the 30th anniversary of Howard's first big heave-ho up the slippery pole [his appointment as Treasurer on 19 Nov 77] -- he was treasurer for five years, while his first budget (in 1978) introduced an income tax surcharge, an increase in the Medicare levy and Australia's first petrol tax -- should come on the first day of the last week of his last election campaign. And, I continue to assert, his last week as Prime Minister.

Well, we'll see. Soon, hopefully. And now this, from Phillip Adams in the Weekend Australian (25 Nov 07)

The right-wing rapture in which the Bush Administration and its Australian disciples were carried aloft on clouds of hubris has ended in ignominy. [. . . ]Howard's role in Iraq should be a major, the major, issue today. The only reason it isn't? He cut a deal with Washington that kept our troops as far from the fighting as possible. [. . . ] The Australian PM has a lot of Iraqi blood on his hands -- yet he has escaped the political repercussions that destroyed the reputations of Blair and Bush. Howard's enthusiastic support of the hammer-walnut approach to Iraq, and of the entire US response to 9/11, represents a far greater failure of leadership than a few interest rate rises or his industrial relations laws. [. . .]

Ditto for global warming -- or, to use Bush's soothing euphemism, climate change. Having welcomed the Kyoto protocols, praising them as an unprecedented diplomatic achievement, Howard switched sides. He obeyed Bush in refusing to ratify. A President who got his scientific advice from the author of Jurassic Park determined that global warming was a left-wing plot -- and Howard went along with it. Another suicidal policy. Another decade lost. First Howard invited trouble in his uncritical acceptance of the so-called war on terror. Then he places us in the crosshairs of the weather's war on us.

Apart from his gun laws, the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands and our belated support for East Timor, I've spent the past 12 years opposing Howard on every other issue -- from the republic to reconciliation to his culture wars on history, the ABC and public education. His overturning of the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia laws infuriated me. But finally they're eclipsed by Iraq and climate change.

And one other issue, or cluster of issues: Howard manipulated and encouraged the Hanson-lit bushfire of bigotry. His political arson led to one of the most disgraceful periods in our history, the Tampa election. Howard's ruthless exploitation and escalating slander of refugees fleeing the Taliban and Saddam, the cruel and extended imprisonment of men, women and children in concentration camps, made Australia a pariah.

It hardly matters whether Howard is a bigot or simply another politician skilled in exploiting the bigotry of others. In many ways the latter is more morally repugnant. Either way it's this behaviour that condemns Howard -- far more than any IR laws or his Government's extraordinary waste of the nation-building opportunities provided by the economic boom.

Rudd complains of fear campaigns on Labor's IR policy and trade union connections. These are nothing beside the far greater fear campaigns that Howard has employed throughout his career -- from the fear of Asian immigration and helpless refugees to the fear of terror, that blank cheque of the Bush Administration. And I fear they're not factors in today's election.

Nonetheless, the Howard era is over. Even if his Government scrapes home, even if he survives in his own seat, he'll be permitted the briefest victory lap before his cowardly colleagues finally find the courage to kick him out. Which means he'll join Bush and his WMDs in the WPB of history as part of a failed experiment; the brief era of conservative triumphalism, of pre-emptive war, of the ultra-radical right.

But I'm not suggesting that either the US or Australia will experience a pendulum swing back to the more hopeful, less fearful politics of the past. In the US midterms the pendulum did not swing far at all -- the big winners were the more conservative Democrats. Rudd knows this well. He is the perfect Labor leader for the times because, in a strange way, Howard has both chosen and groomed him as his successor.

The youngest voters are too young to recall Howard's response to Hansonism while Tampa and even Iraq may be fading in the memory or concerns of their parents. But rest assured that the judgment of history will be far harsher on Howard than anything that happens in the tally room tonight.