The day John Hewson didn't become PM

Party hats came out twice last week, with the anniversaries of the elections of the Hawke and Howard governments, twentieth and seventh respectively.

Today there's another. It's ten years since adoring crowds in the Bankstown Sports Club chanted “we want Paul, we want Paul” as the conquering hero took a bow.

The feral abacus had been slain.

Back then, the idea of John Howard as Prime Minister a decade on would have seemed bizarre; of Peter Costello as darling of the Liberal moderates even weirder. ("Genghis Khan" being a more likely sobriquet for the star of Michael Kroger's Victorian class of '90.)

March 13 1993 is widely seen as a wasted opportunity. Keating had the world at his feet and squandered it on the “big picture”.

But it is often forgotten that throughout much of 1993 to 1996 few Liberals coveted the leadership. It was thought that Keating, through sheer force of personality, had grafted together the economic and political cycles and delivered the decade to Labor.

Big election defeats are not good for the history books, and those books aren’t kind to the Keating government. His kindest critics speak of noble causes but a failure to include middle Australia.

He concentrated on APEC, the republic and reconciliation but neglected bread and butter issues. He sucked up to Aborigines, Asians and Arty Farties but not to the rest of us.

This accepted wisdom is more caricature than reality, but it has become a lesson for today’s ALP a lesson in what not to do.

In defence of Keating

But it is the wrong lesson. It was electoral gravity that did Keating in. When he wrested the leadership off Hawke in December '91 the government looked headed for disaster. They'd been around for 9 years and voters were sick of the lot of them.

Ten years ago he got them out of jail once. He just couldn't pull it off again. 

John Howard won in 1996 with a landslide but its magnitude too has been overstated. It did not remotely resemble Steve Bracks’s last year, for instance, and in the federal context was closer to Hawke’s in 1983 than big ones like Malcolm Fraser’s in 1975 and 1977 and Harold Holt’s in 1996. The big wins in Australian federal history are all non-Labor ones.

(See seat and vote proportions here.)

But March '96 was probably bigger than March '93 would have been had that gravity taken its natural course. So some Labor MPs would never have lost their seats.

Howard now has three wins under his belt. In some circles this is taken as evidence of political genius, but it is a hurdle that no conservative federal government in 90 years has failed to clear.

(The parallels between March '93 and November '01 are stark. Government headed for a hiding grabs single issue - on rational analysis a tenth rate one - and runs mother of all scare campaigns. Secures a pro government swing that is biggest in the Labor heartland. Great Leader feted in caucus. A bedazzled commentariat, assuming the consummate communicator can pull such wins out of his hat at whim, fails to recognise the government's weak opinion poll position.)

The Labor Party, on the other hand, had never won consecutive federal elections before Gough Whitlam in 1972 and 1974.

From 1983 to 1990 Bob Hawke got four on the trot, and ten years ago today Paul Keating, against the odds, tacked on one more term. Rather than shoehorning the electoral cycle to his purposes, it turned out he had postponed the inevitable.

Howard didn’t suddenly find the Australian pulse in March 1996. He just won an election. The Keating government's loss had more to do with its longevity than what it did. The electorate will cut much slack for first term administrations, but little for fifth term ones.

Perhaps, for a real electoral prowess contest, we need to assume the present government wins the next two elections.

Then, sometime around the year 2009, it will be asking the electorate for a sixth term.

Let’s see how they go.

March 13 2003