WHAT GOES UP: Behind the 2007 Election
By NICHOLAS STUART
Scribe, 2007, 322 pp, $32.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
No matter what the Prime Minister, John Howard, desperately tried in the November 2007 election – character assaults on Kevin Rudd, pork-barreling in marginal electorates, the ‘One Big Idea’ of tax cuts, union scare campaigns – nothing cut through with the large proportion of voters who had decided that they were through with Howard’s discredited and backward-looking government.
Nicholas Stuart’s What Goes Up: Behind the 2007 Election revisits Howard’s string of failed election tactics and general aura of being out-of-touch with common voters. Howard had needed briefings to find out what how much bread and milk cost and he hadn’t filled his own car with petrol for years. Rising interest rates didn’t impinge on his taxpayer-funded housing luxury at Kirribilli House.
On Iraq, Howard offered more of the same (undying love for George Bush and the promise of more war dead) for a war that most Australians opposed or thought unwinnable. WorkChoices attacked Australia’s ‘fair go’ labour ethic and threatened a future where income inequalities would widen and employment insecurity deepen. A nuclear-powered future for Australia (which even a third of Coalition supporters opposed) was Howard’s radioactive and unpopular response to global warming.
The ALP was the beneficiary of the disillusionment with the Coalition mainly because the ALP wasn’t the Coalition, despite trying to appear like them. Nowhere was the aping of the Coalition clearer than with the Shadow Environment Minister, Peter Garrett. The former green activist, says Stuart, was a “prop brought out to look good” whilst Rudd took a policy chainsaw to the Tasmanian forests in a tawdry display of “trading principles for votes”. Garrett’s new role, says Stuart, was now as “a very large lump of soft putty; his positions were obediently moulded into shape as he was told how to behave”.
This and other examples of perceived “electoral necessity” came easily to a party under Rudd which Stuart concludes stands for not much more than “managerialism writ large”. There was, however, enough (ill-defined) promise of hope to sweep them to electoral success but Rudd Labor will, senses Stuart, turn out to disappoint the holders of hopes for a better future who placed their trust in Labor.
Such insights are, alas, sparsely scattered in Stuart’s book which is basically an extended-mix written version of the blow-by-blow establishment media coverage of the 2007 election. There is some pleasure in replaying the Coalition’s steady stumble to defeat but Stuart, a former ABC journalist and therefore part of the superficial media culture which sets the parameters for political coverage, rarely peeks outside the conventional analytical blinkers which define politics as narrowly parliamentary, its focus on leadership personalities, media management, factional jostling and electoral mechanics rather than the substance of class interest and forces behind these surface phenomena.
The ACTU’s Your Rights At Work campaign, for example, and the maturation of many other social and political campaigns over the course of the wasted decade of Coalition misrule, is near-absent. Stuart’s book is the fast-food approach to politics – deceptively filling but ultimately not satisfying.