Ungracious Rudd gets a free pass

WHEN Kevin Rudd launched Paul Kelly's new book, The March of Patriots, on Monday, he unwittingly proved one of Kelly's hypotheses correct: that John Howard and Paul Keating may have been the last truly significant leaders "in a business burdened by spin, manipulation and gesture".

An example of the new form of lowbrow political spin Kelly refers to was on display in Rudd's speech when he tried to use the occasion to mount a partisan attack on the Howard government, and not a very good one at that.

Rudd claimed that the 11 1/2 years of Coalition rule represented an "opportunity squandered". He condemned Howard and his treasurer, Peter Costello, for not emulating the "transformational reforms" of the Bob Hawke and Keating era.

Listing the Howard government's achievements as a retort to Rudd is hardly the point (for a thorough assessment of the many achievements, whether one agrees with them or not, read Kelly's book). It's not as though there aren't fair arguments to make when criticising the Coalition for losing its way on reform in the second half of its time in power. But it was the lack of grace in the way Rudd spoke that matters most.

He called Howard "indolent": slothful and lazy. Apart from the woeful inaccuracy of the remark, it was a politically dangerous thing for the Prime Minister to do.

It may play out well with the Howard haters who voted against him in 1996, 1998, 2001, 2004 and again in 2007. But it is not the sort of rhetoric that will appeal to swinging voters who turned against the Coalition only at the previous election. They did so for a variety of reasons - Howard was too old, Liberals didn't renew, voters didn't like Work Choices, Liberals appeared out of touch on climate change - but none of these reasons caused swinging voters to have baseball bats at the ready, as former Queensland premier Wayne Goss said about Keating in 1996.

In other words, the public was ready for a change and Rudd looked like a safe alternative. His "fiscal conservative" rhetoric helped.

Rudd's decision to now try to trash the Howard years is the equivalent of telling voters that while they got it right at the previous election when they removed the Coalition from office, they were wrong to re-elect Howard three times before that, indeed to elect him in the first place, if the Hawke and Keating era was so unambiguously glorious.

Nobody likes being told they are wrong. One of Howard's best political lines is that the public never gets it wrong; election results always deliver the correct outcome. Howard continued to stand by this assessment even when voters kicked him out of office.

Rudd's over-the-top condemnation of the Howard years won't damage him politically in the short term, such is his popularity and the divided state of the opposition. But it will damage him in the medium to long term when he ceases to be as dominant.

A far more politically sound approach for Rudd to take when referring back to the Coalition's time in office, if I may offer the Prime Minister some free advice, would be to congratulate Howard on his record in government but condemn him for overreach in the second half of his administration, especially the final term.

Rudd also could point out that while Labor philosophically disagrees with many of the Coalition's positions throughout its time in office, he recognises that on any measure Howard and Costello were substantial figures on the political landscape.

This approach may not appeal to the Labor base, but in a compulsory voting system the base is hardly about to accept the fine and not turn out on polling day (or, worse still, vote Liberal out of pure spite).

Rudd became a senior player on the Labor side only in the final term of the Howard government. It is a perfect opportunity to confine his criticisms to that period of the Howard government and zero in on Work Choices, climate change and leadership tensions as the things Howard didn't address and therefore lost office.

As poor as Rudd's form was in attacking the previous government as indolent, poorer still was his decision to do so at the launch of Kelly's book. The central thesis of the book is that Howard and his Labor counterparts, Hawke and Keating, were substantial figures who changed the nation. For Rudd, having been invited to launch the book, to use the occasion to score such cheap partisan points by suggesting Howard was not as substantial as Kelly claims was disrespectful to the nation's foremost political commentator of the past 30 years. After all, he was explicitly challenging Kelly's thesis. One wonders if Rudd has even read the book.

The history wars over economic credibility have only just begun. Some commentators consider this debate navel gazing about the past and therefore not relevant to the economic future. This is a misreading of the importance of the debate at hand. Rudd is seeking to de-legitimise what the Coalition says on economic matters today by condemning what it did previously. He is fudging the facts to do so.

THE Liberal Party has to decide what kind of opposition it wants to be - one that uses its time in the political wilderness to rebuild, rebadge and prepare for a return to government with clarity of purpose, or one that chases the 24-hour news cycle the Prime Minister is so good at dominating - in an effort to pick itself up in the polls. The former is a model for medium to long-term success. The latter carries the illusion of unlikely short-term success, but at the expense of long-term direction.

I fear that what is in the best interests of the Liberal Party and its leadership team are no longer the same. I fear it not for the sake of the Liberal Party but for the sake of our political system: if one side of politics is weak, the other can become complacent, and that lowers the standard of governance.

The Liberal leadership team is at the pointy end of its career and needs to succeed with short-term plays to win its way back into office before time passes it by.

The Liberal Party needs to risk short-term electoral success to give it long-term direction by taking stock of what went wrong in 2007.

When you see some of the senior Liberals arguing their case against Rudd and Labor, whether it is overspending or policy direction, they look like ex-administrators who don't have the philosophical vision (or courage) to set a course for the party they lead.

It is not that the likes of Turnbull, Julie Bishop and Hockey aren't smart; of course they are. But they don't seem to have the attachment to philosophical debate that leaders need and that former Liberal leaders have always had.

The Coalition has been out of power for nearly two years, yet we are further away from knowing what it believes in than immediately after it lost the election. This weekend the NSW Liberals are having a convention, the first in a decade.

Turnbull is addressing the delegates on Saturday. Let's hope he takes the opportunity to start the much-needed process of spelling out what it means to be a Liberal under his leadership in the 21st century.