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Beazley's on a soft soap path to power
Date: 04/11/2000
By ALAN RAMSEY
John Utting is the Labor Party's Federal pollster. Geoff Walsh, once a Fairfax journalist and Hawke government staffer, is
Labor's tyro national secretary. In a year's time they will head up the campaign effort of Labor's national organisation that
makes or breaks Kim Beazley's leadership. In Adelaide 10 days ago Utting and Walsh briefed Beazley's shadow ministry on
where they think Labor stands a year out from the election. There was a fair bit of careful optimism. Utting constantly polls
the same 12 marginal Coalition seats in the five mainland States. Labor's election strategy and planning is based almost
entirely on Utting's findings in those 12 seats. So, too, in large part, is Beazley's limp policy me-tooism.
Yet it wasn't policy the briefing was about.
It was about voter perceptions, likes, dislikes, shifting sentiment on relative party standings, at least in those 12 Coalition
marginals. I don't pretend to know the detail of what Walsh and Utting said. Beazley and his office are paranoid about leaks.
Beazley, gritting his teeth, made it crystal clear to his front bench recently how "personal" he takes media disclosures on
what is said in shadow cabinet. But one Utting remark that struck home at the Adelaide briefing came in his report on voter
attitudes to leadership.
It's not that there were no leadership positives about Beazley. There were, a number. Essentially, marginal seat voters are
like most others: they like Beazley, even those who say they won't vote for him. And Utting stressed Howard's perceived
negatives, most prominent a growing distrust. But the Utting remark that caught the attention was the one he used first up: that
marginal seat voters, in their overview of the leadership alternatives, were "comfortable" with both leaders, though neither
was inspiring.
For a Government as insensitive, hardline, ethically bankrupt, morally diseased and administratively incompetent as this one
can be, with no real depth of community goodwill for it, led by a Prime Minister as deadening as Howard has become, you
really have to wonder, in this television age of leadership primacy, what the dickens Beazley has been doing - or, more
pertinently, not doing - for the past five years that he shows up no better against Howard than a joint comfort.
And that on the assessment of Labor's own pollster.
There is nothing particularly profound in acknowledging this country's vacuum in national leadership. It remains a seminal
issue. It is not that voters want a messiah. They just want someone of genuine sincerity and conviction, like the
Governor-General, Bill Deane, far and away the most admired figure in Australian public life.
The political caricature of One Nation underscored the leadership vacuum at the last election. Two years on and some 15
per cent of all voters still can't abide the major parties. If this attitude persists, we are in for a repeat next year of the 1998
result: minor party preferences of upwards of 1.5 million voters will decide the outcome.
In Parliament this week, Labor's Mark Latham (see below) told the House: "Worldwide, there is a trend whereby people are
losing faith and trust in public institutions. This does not just apply in the area of politics. It seems to be happening across the
board.
"In particular, this Parliament is suffering. We are now working in an environment of distrust and cynicism. I think it is very
hard to do our job effectively if MPs have two challenges: first, to try to get the trust of the public; and second, to try to
persuade them to our point of view. So it is a difficult environment and, in many ways, democracy has entered a crisis."
Neither Howard nor Beazley will articulate the problem as explicitly. They see it simply as a political exercise in blaming
each other. Both are blind to the obvious electoral benefit of breaking the mould. Both are prisoners of the debauched party
political system. Genuine leadership is as foreign to each of them as is a genuinely new idea about anything.
Beazley, as Opposition Leader, has the higher mountain to climb.
Howard is the incumbent. Beazley must displace him. You feel, despite the relative evenness of the polls all year, it might
well be easier to displace Beazley. His caution since his campaign energy and resolve, with nothing to lose, drove Labor to
a net gain of 18 seats at the last election - the most seats won under a losing leader since Gough Whitlam in 1969 - is a
travesty of the political creativity needed to gain the extra seven seats Labor must pick up, on new boundaries, to form a
government.
Health policy is a good example.
Labor previously opposed the Government's 30 per cent private health insurance rebate. Not just opposed it but it fought it,
tooth and nail. All those extra millions, insisted Labor, should be going into the rundown public hospital system.
What does this rebate now cost the public purse? Every cent of a massive $2.8 billion a year. All of it pumped into the
private hospital system and the pockets of the system's medical fraternity. It must, sooner or later, destroy Medicare, Labor's
universal health care system. Yet how many elections, how many years, did Labor fight to introduce, then keep Medicare, or
the old Medibank? It has been a constant of Labor policy since 1969.
Medicare was - and is - one of the most popular policy innovations ever. Its introduction, by the Whitlam Government in
1974, and retention has been the cornerstone of much of Labor's electoral success of the past 30 years. In 1993, when the
Keating Government stunned expectations by winning the unwinnable election, the Hewson Coalition's perceived threat to
Medicare was among Labor's strongest campaign issues in rallying grassroots Labor support.
So what did Beazley and his kitchen cabinet of pragmatists decide to foist on his shadow ministry and parliamentary Caucus
six weeks ago? In the midst of the Olympics, while voters were barely looking, Beazley took his motley mob off to Ballarat,
in country Victoria, and there, after steamrolling shadow health minister Jenny Macklin, his front bench reluctantly adopted
Beazley's pragmatism, as an election promise, to keep Howard's health rebate and its escalating $2.8 billion cost.
Later, when Parliament resumed after the Olympics, the Labor Caucus got its opportunity to ask (1) why the ALP was
adopting the Government's health policy, in the same way Beazley's me-tooism had adopted Howard's work for the dole
scheme, his halving of capital gains tax, and Labor's own vague "rollback" version of the GST regime? And (2) why support
for the 30 per cent rebate had been announced before it was endorsed by Caucus?
But only two MPs had the courage to put the question to Beazley.
His answer was the same excuse used to rationalise why Labor had rolled over on other Government initiatives the
Opposition had previously opposed. Beazley lamely told Victoria's Senator Barney Cooney and the Northern Territory's
Warren Snowdon, both from the Left faction, that the Opposition had no option but to support the 30 per cent insurance
rebate because it was too popular and too entrenched to oppose. The voters liked it.
There was a deal of wink, wink soft soap as well to dampen dissent. That is, look, the first essential is for Labor to get back
into government. Once there, well, then Labor can redress some of these issues. But first Labor has to win. It is the same
hoary old rationalisation usually trotted out when politicians are caught behaving with a complete lack of spine on
pragmatism versus principle. Beazley is just so practised in doing so.
The only public indication of Labor dissent came from Latham, the self-exiled loose cannon on Labor's back bench. In an
article in the Financial Review on Monday, Latham, tongue firmly in cheek, referred coyly to the "outbreak of political
bipartisanship" for the 30 per cent insurance rebate when he labelled joint adoption of the initiative "one of the most
significant developments in the history of Australian health policy".
He added: "It changes forever the issues associated with the universal provision of health care." What Latham really meant
is that the Medicare system, as Labor introduced it, must now surely be destroyed. What it will be replaced by has yet to
evolve. What we can be sure of is that the Opposition has no policy alternative, not for the coming election, anyhow.
If Beazley had fought as hard for a decent health policy that didn't blow $2.8 billion in annual insurance subsidies to
middle-class voters that undermine the Medicare system as he did in Parliament for the removal of Peter Reith because of
his $50,000 Telecard stupidity - which Reith ended up paying anyhow, or most of it - you'd see some merit in his political
leadership. As it was, the day the Telecard story broke in the media on October 10, Beazley wouldn't touch it. Labor drove
the issue furiously in the Senate, but it was shunted off to Lindsay Tanner as a down-the-list priority one hour into Question
Time in the Lower House on that first day.
Only the following day, when the story was front-page headlines in all the papers, later to become one of the all-time
political frenzies on talkback radio, did Beazley drop his caution and wade in, embracing the issue as his own in the House.
And he wouldn't let go of it until Wednesday of this week. That says as much for his political courage as it does for his
leadership. It says a great deal about the Opposition, tooBy