The rest of them, as Dr Lawrence noted last week, seem unable to discuss Australia in terms other than John Howard’s “shriveled” version. They can’t shift the conceptual goalposts.

It’s not just timidity and opinion poll obsession. Their hearts aren’t in it.

The Federal Labor Party today is run by Angry White Males. Crean’s inner circle can’t lay a glove on John Howard because they like the cut of his jib. They reckon he’s got it about right.

Take the man said to be closest to Simon Crean, Martin Ferguson. He chastised the New Zealand Prime Minister last year for caring more for Afghan boat people than Aussie Ansett workers. Straight out of Politics The John Howard Way 101.

Go to Martin’s brother Laurie, who regularly warns the party not to go soft on asylum seekers. “If Labor continues a path of fiscal conservatism and social progressiveness, it won't go far”, he advised early this year. Think of wannabe leader Wayne Swan. They’re Angry White Males, all of them.

Angriest of all is Mark Latham, whose parliamentary tirades against Right-wing columnists and “the establishment” have become the stuff of legend.

Latham hates Liberals, that’s for sure, but the real source of his fury is that he’s not sure why. He’s a Howard man too.

Howard’s Labor men would tell you they’re what the country wants. Labor has to reconnect with “Howard’s Battlers”, those conservative working class Australians who form the electoral bedrock of Howard’s reign.

But “Howard’s Battlers” are a fiction and the voting figures prove it. Look at Laurie Ferguson’s western Sydney seat of Reid. Held by Labor since its creation in 1922, the second lowest median income in Sydney (the lowest is Fowler, to which the following also applies), very safe ALP, as true blue battlers as you could imagine.

Howard’s battlers? Not at all. Of all federal elections over the last two decades, Labor’s biggest vote in Reid was not at any of the Hawke-Keating wins. It was in 1998, when Labor lost. Similar results were recorded all over the country.

No, Labor’s electoral problem remains what it’s always been – an embarrassment of battlers and not enough others.

The real action, of course, remains out in the capital cities’ suburban fringes. The pork barreled middle classes. Polled and pampered within an inch of their lives, praised by all sides for their inherent wholesomeness and deservedness, their every prejudice regurgitated and every whinge validated. This is the “centre” that Simon Crean, like every leader before him, has discovered.

Crean has been told to look at Steve Bracks’s win in Victoria two weeks ago, but that provides no clues because winning elections from opposition is a different task from doing it from government. (Gough Whitlam, for instance, was brilliant at one and awful at the other.)

Part of Federal Labor’s problem is the paucity of federal opposition to government election wins from which to draw inspiration - just two since the 1920s (John Curtin came to power on the floor of the House). Whitlam took the outer suburban path but did it by communicating something fresh.

As did Bob Hawke, whose government may have been pragmatic but didn’t clear that hurdle on a platform of sameness. The winning message in 1983 was of a different Australia and it contained more than recycled grabs from qualitative polling.

Labor today seems frozen in the spotlight of a government that squandered a massive majority to spend most of the last six years setting record lows in the opinion polls. They scraped out of jail twice, but John Howard’s electoral prowess is another myth. His government has simply achieved what every government - bar Whitlam’s - has in the last sixty years – a third term.

Still, Labor is in awe of the master politician. There are no bigger John Howard fans than the thick necked boys of the ALP. They probably vote for him.  

Peter Brent is editor of mumble.com.au



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