Mark's picture
Sun, 02/12/2007 - 7:20am — Mark

One week ago, a key section of the electorate, the swinging voters in marginal seats, came down overwhelminglyon the side of the ALP where they had basically backed Howard four times before. Why? WorkChoices, that’s why. The marginal seats in Australia are typically working class suburban. The people who live and swinging vote in these electorates are precisely the kind of people shafted by WorkChoices and they know it. Outer suburban seats recorded a higher swing to Labor than the average.

Malcolm Turnbull recognized this in his bid for leadership. By a slim majority, the Liberal party room failed to back him, and have gone instead for denial.

The line they are pushing on WorkChoices is instead that it was a good policy, but that people were somehow bamboozled into believing that it sucked. This is a patently ridiculous argument, primarily because if people were easily swayed on this issue, then they would have been convinced by the government, the Liberals and the employers barraging them with ads claiming that WorkChoices was great. The resistance of ordinary Australians to this propaganda blitz, when generally they frankly tend to be fairly suggestible to the worldview pushed by the popular media, can, I think, only be explained by the fact that their own direct experience told them that the government’s line was a load of hokum and that what Labor was saying about the reforms was substantially correct. The myth that WorkChoices was not the reason for Labor’s victory is extremely important to the Nelson Libs, since it makes it conscionable for them to use their Senate power to stop the legislation being repealed.

Peter Costello is running a different, entirely self-serving line: the Libs lost because he wasn’t in charge. The evidence for this is that Labor won with Rudd in charge. Now Rudd was an electoral asset for the ALP, for sure. But this is because he is Kevin Rudd, a charismatic and highly-competent TV personality, not just because he’s some new bloke. There are plenty of new blokes the ALP could have picked, but they wouldn’t have performed like Rudd. Similarly, Peter Costello wouldn’t have performed like Rudd. All the indications are that his leadership wouldn’t have helped the Libs at all.

Which is why I’m waiting for a different myth to emerge: the stab-in-the-back. A more obvious scapegoat than Howard, it seems to me, is Costello himself, or rather his attempts to undermine Howard, and his insistence on being named as successor-within-the-life-of-the-next-parliament. Labor continually attacked the Coalition on the basis that they were going to give Costello the PMship. I think Tony Abbott may be right that the Howard years will pass into Liberal myth as a Golden Age – and since Howard will have been incapable of error, blaming Costello will help cement this myth, and, hopefully, condemn the Libs to even longer in the electoral wilderness.