Leader looks to Ming in final bid

HIS final launch was vintage John Howard. Coming from behind, Howard has offered special deals for families, buckets of middle-class welfare and a new culture of opportunity.

HIS final launch was vintage John Howard. Coming from behind, Howard has offered special deals for families, buckets of middle-class welfare and a new culture of opportunity.

After declaring that Australia faced "storm clouds on the horizon", Howard pledged to middle-class Australian households an extra $8.5billion over four years. He seeks to nail Kevin Rudd's lead on childcare and housing affordability and put the political blow-torch to Rudd's education revolution.

It is the time-honoured Howard tactic: cover your weakness, launch an offensive, spend big time and cloak yourself in economic responsibility. Win or lose the election on November 24, Howard is being Howard.

Promising to complete Australia's transition from "welfare state to opportunity society", Howard took middle-class welfare to a zenith.

The ageing warrior was slower. His voice was a bit croaky. It was the dullest of his five campaign launches since that 1996 victory.

But Howard had Janette by his side, Peter Costello as his warm-up act and the same relentless projection of Howard values off the back of a growth economy, and monies off the budget.

Facing the nadir of his career, he returned to a foundation template - schools policy, his hero Robert Menzies's famous 1963 win on schools funding and the Menzian dictum about homes, material and spiritual.

Howard's centrepiece was a political knife at Labor's heart: a new refundable tax rebate ($400 a year for primary and $800 for secondary children) covering every possible expense from school fees, textbooks and laptops to excursions and, critically, applying to both government and non-government schools without any means testing.

It is the Howard philosophy of choice and aspiration backed by taxpayer subsidy. It mocks Rudd's own, more limited tax deduction for families. This looms as the education equivalent of Howard's private health insurance rebate, with the estimated cost at $6.3billion over four years. His aim is to burn Rudd on his education revolution.

Howard has pitched to first-home buyers, their parents and working families with his home affordability and childcare packages. Both decisions represent a change of heart imposed upon Howard by Labor's success with these constituencies. Howard's problem has been to leave his reply until voting eve.

The Reserve Bank and the economists will dislike this policy speech. But remember, Howard could have gone further. With the central bank warning that inflation will be above 3.25 per cent until mid-next year, Howard had to strike a tolerable compromise between spending and responsibility. So Howard and Costello campaign as fiscal conservatives while spending off the budget down to a surplus of 1 per cent of GDP. Their campaign strategy is a classic double game - warning that Rudd cannot be trusted to manage the economy, they push the inflationary risks to the limit with their own spending agenda.

Presumably Rudd will not succumb to me-tooism. Rudd has boasted all year he will spend less than Howard. Now is the time for Rudd to verify this by offering a different alternative in his own education revolution.