Sussan Ley’s Liberals look nothing like John Howard’s golden era | David Penberthy
Australia is a very long way from the the Hawke-Howard golden era now, writes David Penberthy.
Some professions bring with them a terrifying absence of job security. Like lion taming. Managing an English football team. Or being a leader of the Australian Liberal Party.
This country is now littered with the remains of ditched Liberal leaders while others walk the Earth as the political living-dead, staggering around like zombies and mumbling about net zero.
Sussan Ley is the Crock-Pot version of Britain’s Liz Truss, whose brief stint as British Tory Leader and Prime Minister failed to outlast the life of an iceberg lettuce.
While Ms Ley’s leadership simmers away in the background awaiting inevitable collapse, other Liberal leaders have been knocked off, or cling to stays of execution.
It is truly remarkable to see how the Liberals in near record time have gone from being a party that was synonymous with stability to a forum for constant brawling and chaos.
The weird thing is that when it comes to providing stable government it was the Liberals who wrote the book in post-war politics in this country.
They did so because they knew what they stood for. And what they stood for actually mattered to normal people.
My only stint in the Canberra Press Gallery was in the mid-1990s when the great reforming era of Hawke-Keating came to an end, making way for the stability and certainty of the Howard era.
I would argue this period from 1983 to 2007 was a golden age of political leadership.
In Bob Hawke and John Howard we had conviction politicians running the joint who, despite being from opposite sides of the political divide, had an innate grasp of what mattered to the average Aussie.
And as the Liberals risk vanishing in an orgy of self-absorption, they should really reflect on what made them such a success for more than a decade less than 30 years ago.
When Howard defeated Paul Keating in 1996 he didn’t do so by focusing on fringe issues.
He had such a single-minded focus on economic management that it became at times almost tedious covering his speeches and his government itself.
Howard stood for three key things – lowering taxes, running budget surpluses, keeping interest rates low.
He did some other big things too, the biggest being the introduction of the GST.
He did another big thing which helped guarantee his defeat, WorkChoices – where, giddy with having control of the Senate, he exceeded his mandate to pursue his long-held passion for industrial deregulation, pushing working-class voters back to the ALP.
But for every other policy move made by John Howard – and importantly also Treasurer Peter Costello – his entire reason for being came back to those three key things mentioned above.
Tax cuts, budget surpluses, low interest rates.
Despite Keating being the greatest economic reformer of Australian history, Howard savaged him over the patchiness of our recovery from the recession, his “five minutes of economic sunshine” line resonating with voters who felt financially worse off.
Howard spent his first term cementing Labor as the party of economic mismanagement, berating Kim Beazley over what he called the “$8 billion Beazley black hole”, a quaintly small figure by modern-day standards.
In 2004, with Mark Latham surging in the polls, Howard outflanked him by saying the election was all about trust, asking Australians to reflect on which leader they most trusted to keep interest rates low.
The entire Howard era was defined by this steely focus on the economy, the budget, and the budgets of households and small business.
Throw in a $3000 baby bonus aimed at helping young families as they grew and grappled with a mortgage, and you can why swathes of suburban Australia which had historically backed the ALP swung to the other side, earning the moniker “The Howard Battlers”.
It is baffling to see the modern Liberal Party descend into near irrelevance when its model for sustained victory was not just created but perfected in those 11 years between 1996 and 2007.
Back then the Liberals agreed on three key fundamental things. These days they disagree on almost everything.
Be it net zero and climate change, the importance of transgender politics, women’s issues, free trade and immigration – the party has become bogged down and inwardly focused.
Its inability to agree on climate change has been the biggest disaster of all.
To go back to the Howard years, it wasn’t like the party was without a factional divide in the 1990s. Far from it.
The Liberal Party had only just emerged from the great Andrew Peacock/John Howard schism which paralysed it through the 1980s, and those fault lines still resonated through the party with its division into so-called “wets” and conservative “dries” as they were known at the time.
But the party managed to co-exist and despite hailing from the conservative stream Howard made sure that moderates held senior positions in his Cabinet and outer ministry.
Three decades on and these are the two things the Liberals have lost. An inability to co-exist. An inability to remember why they exist. Their reason for political existence is the promise of superior economic management.
How on Earth can the Liberals be so far behind when so many Labor governments are doing a seriously mediocre job managing the economy?
When debt is surging federally and in every state bar Western Australia, when the Reserve Bank has repeatedly warned about the link between profligate spending and inflation, when the ephemeral gimmickry of power bill rebates is blown out of the water by a 25 per cent year on year surge in electricity prices?
To that end, the leadership change in Victoria this week might be a watershed moment for the Liberals.
Against the worst government in Australia, the Libs may have found a leader who seems guided by a blunt but effective political maxim. It’s the economy, stupid.
Downer: The little parasite in our pockets killing community spirit
