Elites just don't get Howard

The presence of the former prime minister at Sunday's launch of the Liberal Party's election campaign sent sections of the media into predictable apoplexy.

In The Sydney Morning Herald, David Marr sneered at "back from the dead" Howard, the "strictly boy-girl kissing" among those at the launch and the Tony Abbott touches where, "as always the whackiest involved sex". The Opposition Leader had the audacity to describe having families as being the most conservative instinct of all. More tut-tutting over at the Australian Financial Review when Geoff Kitney suggested Abbott was wrapping himself in "the electorate's nostalgia for the less chaotic and more prosperous period of the Howard era".

This recent sniffing by Fairfax media elites about the return of "Howardism" betrays one constancy: they just don't get John Winston Howard. And it's likely they never will. The reason is simple enough. If you don't understand mainstream Australia, then Howard is equally mystifying. They cannot bring themselves to admit that Australia is quietly, comfortably conservative by nature. Not in that overtly American way of muscular individualism, flag-waving patriotism or screaming Tea Party opposition to big government. In Australia, public displays of philosophical affection give way to private pragmatism and common sense. Howard battlers are not pining for the past. They have always sought the leader and the government that best represents their values and aspirations.

That reality defeats even the better minds in the media. Take Leigh Sales of ABC1's Lateline. In the first week of the election campaign, the Friday night host wondered whether we should expect to see "John Howard wheeled out during the Liberal Party's election campaign, or will he be a bit too much of a reminder of Work Choices and that era?" Howard is invariably depicted as an embarrassingly dotty, dribbling old one-trick pony forever shamed from political life by the 2007 election loss. For them, Howard represents everything they, the educated classes, despise: flexible workplaces, strong border control, moderate climate change policies, indigenous intervention. And so on.

They failed to comprehend the differences between Howard's 2007 election loss and Paul Keating's drubbing in 1996. Mainstream Australians stood ready with baseball bats to boot Keating, his Italian suits, antique clocks and Mahler CDs out of office in 1996. Meanwhile, the educated classes cried into their chardonnay at the rise of a balding, nerdy chap in thick glasses who espoused family values and torpedoed political correctness.

In 2007, only the educated classes had their baseball bats at the ready for Howard. Most Australians did not harbour visceral hatred towards him. While Australia's second longest serving prime minister certainly overstepped the mark on Work Choices, his bigger problem was overstaying his time in office. After 11 years as PM, Australians gave the new guy pretending to be Howard-lite a go. When they worked out Kevin Rudd was conning them, the battlers turned away long enough and swift enough for Labor to switch to a new face.

Those who lay claim to reporting, analysing and explaining Australian politics need now only ask themselves one question: if Howard is such a fossil from the past why has Julia Gillard mimicked the former Liberal PM on the critical issues in this election campaign? When Gillard shelved the emissions trading system, she signalled she is browner than Howard. Likewise, Gillard copied Howard's strong borders policy by proposing offshore processing of illegal immigrants and echoed Howard's policies on Afghanistan and the US alliance. On ABC1's Q&A on Monday night, Gillard -- the architect of waste and mismanagement within the $42 billion schools building program -- continued the me-too caper she started early on in the campaign, lining herself as the natural heir to Howard's record of sound economic management.

In other words, Gillard knows this election will be decided in the homes of Howard battlers. Issues that concern Australians in the sun-belt seats of Queensland and western Sydney are very different to the left-of-centre agendas pursued by those in inner-city seats where our media elites work, live and practise pilates.

Those who misread Howard and history misread Abbott. When there was no mention of workplace reform at the Liberal campaign launch, some assumed the Opposition Leader had consigned industrial relations reforms to the history books. The seers might wish to consult those same history books. Howard's legacy is not just about economic management: it is a legacy of learning from mistakes about the timing of major reforms.

In 1993 the Coalition tried to bring in major reform from Opposition -- a GST -- and failed. The Coalition did not make the same mistake in 1996. Instead, working in sync with a changing mood towards a GST, Howard took the biggest tax reform in half a century to the 1998 election and won. While in 2007 Howard forgot about calibrating reform to the national mood, Abbott has not. Further industrial relations reform will likely come when the country is ready.

For much of the media, the prospect of Abbott becoming prime minister on August 21 is as repugnant as Howard winning in 1996. Mesmerised by Labor's latest messiah, they speak about the "sparkle" in Gillard's eyes. For them, a secular Gillard who pretends to be a conservative is far more preferable to a Catholic Abbott who is the real thing.

The rest of Australia may beg to differ. In fact, it didn't take long before Gillard started to look more Titanic than messianic. Witness her embarrassing call for help from Kevin from Queensland. Gillard and the number crunchers now know that Gillard for PM is not winning over voters in those critical Queensland seats no matter how much she talks about understanding the stresses of family life, balancing the family budget, buying that new pram and paying for those music lessons.She now depends on the man who she politically assassinated, a church-going family man, to pull Labor over the line. The question is whether Queenslanders are awake to Labor's latest conservative con.

janeta@bigpond.net.au