From hard but fair to the ugly style of politics
- From: The Australian
- January 26, 2013
APART from its usual theme of understated patriotism, Australia Day
this year has a new resonance. It is the first anniversary of a race
riot fomented within the Prime Minister's office.
In the aftermath, the junior staffer most directly involved lost
his job.But John McTernan, the former aide to Tony Blair who was recruited as Julia Gillard's director of communications, remains her chief spinmeister. He is widely credited with having authorised inciting the crowd at Canberra's Tent Embassy.
It was done by wantonly misrepresenting Tony Abbott's remarks on the role of the embassy in a radio interview that morning. McTernan makes no apology for his approach to politics. He's on the record saying:
"If you get to senior positions, you have to be able to kill your opponent. It's not pretty; it's not pleasant, but if those at the top can't kill, then those at the bottom certainly cannot. High politics demands very low political skills too."
While standards may have slipped in the Keating era under Graham Richardson's motto of "whatever it takes", federal politics in this country has generally been a hard-fought but clean contest, where the ordinary courtesies were observed.
Menzies and his Labor opposite numbers, Curtin and then Chifley, disagreed profoundly on a great many issues. But it didn't stop them from having friendly relations and publicly admitting the highest regard for one another's abilities.
When Menzies went to the 1949 election, campaigning inter alia against the nationalisation of the banks, he was content to argue his case. He would have regarded vilifying his opponents as beneath him. He also understood that electors in the sensible centre of politics where majorities are garnered hate that sort of thing.
To take two more recent examples, both Bob
Hawke and John Howard were grown-ups.
They understood that the
electorate expected them to display a modicum of civility to the other
side, who were after all their opponents, not their enemies. When Hawke
as prime minister was planning economic reforms he often used to ring
Howard to discuss them before he announced them.
They didn't agree on
all the detail, of course, but it made for a high level of bipartisan
consensus and was plainly in the national interest in difficult economic
conditions. In government, Howard took the view that most of
those facing him on the opposition benches were decent people, however
wrong-headed some of them might be. He also thought the fact that they'd
been elected to represent more than 45% of the population
entitled them to some respect.
He disdained skulduggery and the black arts.
As we begin election year, Gillard and McTernan's predicament is clear.
They cannot run on the government's record. Nor can they run on policy, because most of what passes for policy is unfunded, utopian and vague. The old Hawker-Britton approach to these problems was narrowly focusing on news management. The current paradigm is character assassination.
To that end, we've seen various fronts unleashed: first class wars, then gender wars and most recently an abortive exercise in the religious wars. It's worth noting that all three were from Blair's playbook and seem better adapted to British circumstances than to contemporary Australia.
Class warfare in particular is still a far more entrenched feature of life in Britain than it has been here for donkeys' years. The Currency lads and lasses were in some respects precursors of today's aspirational class. The last time federal Labor tried class warfare, with Mark Latham's infamous hit-list of the private schools he planned to de-fund, it lost him a lot of votes.
Whether dismissing Abbott as an out-of-touch silvertail from the north shore devoting his career to serving the interests of a few mining billionaires will work remains to be seen. It doesn't fit with his policies or the footage of the volunteer firefighter we've recently seen (after all those years when he refused to let himself be filmed while on duty), let alone with the teachers' aide doing regular stints in Aboriginal communities on Cape York.
On the gender wars, I said most of what I have to say last week.
The fact that he invited his female chief of staff to store her IVF drugs in his office fridge and disagrees with Catholic teaching on the subject may, in the eyes of some ultra-conservatives, make him a trendy liberal materially co-operating in a grave evil.
However, it will give sensible people grounds for wondering whether Abbott is by any measure sexist or doctrinaire in the way he's so often been painted.
The theme of the doctrinaire leader, "Captain Catholic", has been exploited, with considerable help from the ABC and the Fairfax papers, ever since the fall of Malcolm Turnbull.
David Marr, the incarnation of the zeitgeist at the Sydney Morning Herald, has time and again reminded us that the age of sectarianism is not dead.
In the most recent skirmish, late last year Gillard said on a Friday that she was against a royal commission into institutional sexual abuse but reversed her position on the following Monday. She plainly hoped to lure Abbott into a passionate defence of the Catholic Church, but he failed to oblige and guaranteed bipartisan support for the inquiry well before she changed her tune.
It's worth noting Richardson's heroic attempt to spin on Gillard's behalf.
"She understood the needs of victims and put them first. She showed real compassion and understanding and it looked so real. While all this was occurring, all Abbott could do was watch and comment. The credit for what she has done will accrue only to her and she will deserve it."
He disdained skulduggery and the black arts.
As we begin election year, Gillard and McTernan's predicament is clear.
They cannot run on the government's record. Nor can they run on policy, because most of what passes for policy is unfunded, utopian and vague. The old Hawker-Britton approach to these problems was narrowly focusing on news management. The current paradigm is character assassination.
To that end, we've seen various fronts unleashed: first class wars, then gender wars and most recently an abortive exercise in the religious wars. It's worth noting that all three were from Blair's playbook and seem better adapted to British circumstances than to contemporary Australia.
Class warfare in particular is still a far more entrenched feature of life in Britain than it has been here for donkeys' years. The Currency lads and lasses were in some respects precursors of today's aspirational class. The last time federal Labor tried class warfare, with Mark Latham's infamous hit-list of the private schools he planned to de-fund, it lost him a lot of votes.
Whether dismissing Abbott as an out-of-touch silvertail from the north shore devoting his career to serving the interests of a few mining billionaires will work remains to be seen. It doesn't fit with his policies or the footage of the volunteer firefighter we've recently seen (after all those years when he refused to let himself be filmed while on duty), let alone with the teachers' aide doing regular stints in Aboriginal communities on Cape York.
On the gender wars, I said most of what I have to say last week.
The fact that he invited his female chief of staff to store her IVF drugs in his office fridge and disagrees with Catholic teaching on the subject may, in the eyes of some ultra-conservatives, make him a trendy liberal materially co-operating in a grave evil.
However, it will give sensible people grounds for wondering whether Abbott is by any measure sexist or doctrinaire in the way he's so often been painted.
The theme of the doctrinaire leader, "Captain Catholic", has been exploited, with considerable help from the ABC and the Fairfax papers, ever since the fall of Malcolm Turnbull.
David Marr, the incarnation of the zeitgeist at the Sydney Morning Herald, has time and again reminded us that the age of sectarianism is not dead.
In the most recent skirmish, late last year Gillard said on a Friday that she was against a royal commission into institutional sexual abuse but reversed her position on the following Monday. She plainly hoped to lure Abbott into a passionate defence of the Catholic Church, but he failed to oblige and guaranteed bipartisan support for the inquiry well before she changed her tune.
It's worth noting Richardson's heroic attempt to spin on Gillard's behalf.
"She understood the needs of victims and put them first. She showed real compassion and understanding and it looked so real. While all this was occurring, all Abbott could do was watch and comment. The credit for what she has done will accrue only to her and she will deserve it."
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