Howard Already Whining Like A Loser

Depression In The Coalition Ranks Seals Their Fate

Howard And Friends had Mark Latham on the defence for most of the 2004 election. Every time he announced new policy, or held a press conference, he spent valuable time answering questions about a host of orchestrated lies and accusations that flowed like a river from Howard's team.

Kevin Rudd is very successfully laying out the issues that Howard is then forced to comment on, or react to. Now it's Howard's turn to constantly be on the defence. And he's not very good at it.

He looks sulky, he sounds whiny, and has the presence and demeanour of a man already in opposition.

Witness his reaction yesterday to Kevin Rudd's remarkably effective campaign launch speech.

Howard seemed shocked that Rudd had the gall to declare The Reckless Spending Must Stop :

Mr Rudd savaged Mr Howard as a selfish big-spender, prepared to risk inflation and land Australian families with higher interest rates to buy his way back into office.

...the Opposition Leader put economic conservatism at the centre of his political case for power, offering $2.3 billion in new promises and contrasting the spending with Mr Howard's "irresponsible spending spree" of $8.5 billion of pledges at his campaign launch on Monday.

"Mr Howard spent nearly $10 billion on Monday trying to buy his way out political trouble," Mr Rudd said.

"Unlike Mr Howard, I will not place in jeopardy households already struggling with mortgages.

"I don't stand before you with a bagful of irresponsible promises that could put upward pressure on inflation ... I am saying loud and clear that this sort of reckless spending must stop."

You can almost imagine Howard choking on his cup of tea and shouting "Son Of A Bitch!" at that.

Howard knows Rudd outspun him, and did it with gusto, and it's clear Howard is furious that most of the media brought the line that Rudd proved he was an "economic conservative" by announcing spending of 1/4 to 1/3 of that announced by Howard on Monday.

Howard is a defeated man, and acting like he has already lost will now finish him off :

John Howard last night accused Kevin Rudd of being "deceitful" by painting himself as an economic conservative, saying voters should look beyond Labor's campaign launch spending because overall the Coalition had promised to spend less than Labor.

The Prime Minister, campaigning in Townsville, said economic conservatism should be judged by the "aggregate of your behaviour - it's not just how you behave in an election campaign".

"Mr Rudd is being deceitful in his cost comparisons," he said.

"He wants the public to compare the cost of the announcements he has made in his launch with the cost of the announcements we made in our launch as if they are the only announcements that have been made by either side ... It's the total cost of commitments that matters."

He described Mr Rudd as an "arsonist claiming responsibility as a firefighter", saying the Opposition Leader would in fact hurt the economy with his plans to rip up Work Choices.

"On the score of economic credibility, Mr Rudd went missing today," Mr Howard said.

Maybe so, but few noticed. The headlines and lead news stories were virtually all in Rudd's favour. Another set of nails were banged enthusiastically into Howard's coffin.

Most of the Howard team has given up trying to win the election by praising the man who has ruled their roost for 11 years. Their coasting to defeat, and barely putting up a fight. Most of the senior Howard ministers are probably too busy lining up their new jobs, outside of politics. Leave it to Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce to cut to the core of what's now happening inside the Coalition. Depression is spreading like a flu virus through their ranks :

Coalition MPs are getting depressed and frustrated over their parties' poor performance in opinion polls, which are uniformly pointing to a Labor landslide, Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has said.

Senator Joyce last night said the Coalition's election campaign might be faring better if it had made a big infrastructure announcement to capture public imagination.

“There is a sense of depression about it. If the polls are the reality we're not going to lose, we're going to get annihilated,” Senator Joyce told Sky News.

He blamed the trend on voter ambivalence about a change of government. “It's frustrating for us, obviously.

“I see it like you're in a perfectly good marriage that's been going for 11 and a half years - would you get divorced just to see what it was like?”

“We're working on the premise that there are a lot of people out there who are still making up their minds.”

He expressed some admiration for Labor leader Kevin Rudd's campaign strategy - which has been derided as a "me-too" plan to win office.

“Mr Rudd has done a very good job of neutralising any form of division between the two parties.”

The Queensland senator said the Coalition may have erred by focusing much of its attention on the economy, health and education.

“These are dry topics which people really have to really read through the paper to understand. It's a hard thing to sell in a pub on a Friday night.”

Joyce is right. Most of the punters don't want to read about it. They just want to government to do it, fix the problems, and shut the hell up.

Howard and the Coalition are not announcing Big Vision strategies. As others have noted, we are a wealthy nation, with huge surpluses, so where are the grand infrastructure projects that make jaws drop and get people excited about the future?

Howard seems only to be patching up holes in health and education, which leads many to ask, cynically : "Why now? He's been there for 11 years. If he has to spend so much to fix the problems, what's he been doing all the years to let education and health fall into such disarray?" Blaming state governments simply isn't cutting through.

Rudd has effectively echoed a lot of the Friday night pub talk that Joyce is talking about, hitting on themes like these :

"Howard only cares now because he's about to lose"

"Howard had years to fix all this stuff and he didn't do it"

"Howard's been there long enough. It's time for something new."

"I'm really sick of hearing Howard and Costello and Downer waffling on and on about how awesome a job they've done, but now they tell us how much there is to fix up."

Let's hope the action in this election campaign picks up next week. If not, it won't be an orderly change of government. It will be a thoroughly boring change of government.

Why Bribe The Rich?

Stop Demanding Praise, Just Shut Up And Do Your Job

John Howard and Peter Costello did a masterful job of appearing not to be at all thrown by Kevin Rudd's announcement of his tax policy. Or should that be, the Howard government's tax policy, but with the big fat bonuses for the richest Australians diverted to many tens of thousands of parents who can't afford to get their kids online and computer literate.

As Glenn Milne makes clear in this column, big fat tax cuts for the rich, a few handfuls of gold coins for the rest, don't win voters over anymore. And they haven't for a while. It's like Rocky VI. Yeah, it might be good to see Balboa bounce back, but does it really matter anymore?

Voters want something more. Money into health, education, infrastructure. Where all those curiously large surpluses are supposed to be spent, before they become curiously large surpluses

It's that simple.

Ruddin Hood taking away tax cuts for the rich was probably expected by Howard and Costello, but even a day or two later they didn't seem to comprehend just how popular Rudd's few-red-lines revision of their tax policy really are.

Here's Milne :

...courtesy of Costello and John Howard's decade plus of economic management, Rudd promises $31 billion of tax cuts for middle and low-income earners.

Then he jettisons the Government's cuts for those earning more than $180,000 a year and commits the savings of $2.3billion to helping families meet the education costs of "breaching the digital divide''.

Winning elections is about having a coherent narrative.

Leaders must construct a story about where they want to take the country that resonates above the rival political noise, sufficient that it carries all the way to the ballot box on polling day.

The danger for John Howard now is that the education rebate threatens to do just that. Rudd has been smart here, if economically disingenuous.

He reaps the same Budget harvest as Howard and Costello, enabling him to promise the same generous tax cuts to the constituencies that count politically, but he overcomes the cynicism that accompanies such tax give-aways by the altruistic "gift'' of the education rebate.

There is another overlay at work as well - voters now show an increasing reluctance, at least in the published opinion polls, to want to appear selfish. So while the Howard/Costello package backs self-interest in the form of tax cuts, the polls consistently show that voters would prefer governments to spend their surpluses on services, such as health, and infrastructure.

What Rudd has done is dual-track his messages: he appeals to self-interest by embracing the Government's tax cuts but he also satisfies the vanity of voters, who at the same time want to regard themselves as selfless, by convincing them Labor's "alternative'' is about the future of their children rather than their own hip pocket.

Howard spent a decade social-engineering Australians to dream big, to want more, to spend beyond their earnings, to become mega-consumers. But the bills are piling up, the McMansions are being taken away by the banks and Howard and Costello are still telling us all that we've never had it so good.

And they're still demanding that they be thanked, praised and cheered for what they've done.

You don't need to take a poll to know that what really gets under the skin of so many Australians when it comes to Howard and Costello, and Abbott and Nelson and Downer, is their constant carping and demands for people to praise them for their allegedly excellent economic management.

And when they don't get that praise, as they very rarely do, they act all prissy and sooky.

Don't they get it?

How many Australian workers get told they've done a great job?

How many get told that, over and over again?

How many Australians expect to see people on TV addressing them directly saying, "Mate, you're bloody awesome. Seriously. You rock. You're a deadset legend. This country would absolute ratshit without all that great work you've done."

Few, if any.

Australians do their jobs, they work hard, and they mostly don't ask for praise, recognition or rewards, outside of time with the family, or a weekend free to do what they want to do.

But off the back of another massive Surprise Surplus, and 'tax cuts for all', there's Howard and Costello, yet again, waving frantically for our attention. "Hello? I'm over here! Don't you have something you want to tell me? Yes? How brilliant I am? Well, thank you."

What we expect Howard and Costello to do is to do their bloody jobs. Run the country, keep the economy strong, and spend the money handed over in tax making our health, education and infrastructure the best in the world.

But what we most expect, and are now clearly demanding, is for all those politicians to get on with and shut the hell up and stop demanding praise for doing their jobs properly.

We will expect the same of Rudd and Co. Do your jobs, do them well, don't expect to be praised.


Howard shouldn't be on the ropes going into the Great Debate tonight, but he clearly is. Wife Janette will spend most of Sunday reminding him that she isn't ready to move out of Kirribilli yet, so he can't fuck it up.

Expect to see Howard sweating a bit. Hopefully someone has reminded him that This Is It. His last days, if he doesn't pull off a miracle. Will the pressure be too much? Rudd will probably look and act like he has been slowly drip-fed, all day, a carefully balanced mix of valium and ecstasy.

It's not up to Rudd to blow Howard away. Howard has to forget Rudd completely, and remind the majority of Australians why they voted for him before, and convince them why they must vote for him again. One last time.

This may involve some of that trembling lip, weepy eye 'how can you do this to me?' DeNiro-quality acting that Howard has pulled off so often in the past.

90 minutes of them both selling themselves, and probably their souls, for our votes will probably be 50 minutes too long, but you can hope for some action, some screw ups, some great drama.

He who wins the debate won't necessarily win the election. But all eyes will be on Howard. If he screws it up, if he cracks, if he shudders, faints, or clutches at his chest, you will know we really are in The Last Days Of John Winston Howard.

Let's just hope we get some laughs.