"Many in the West are polite and good people. The American media are inciting them against Muslims, but some of these good people are demonstrating against the American attacks because human nature is against cruelty and injustice... All my wives are Arabs...the kind of life I have chosen is ultimately not for personal gain."
Osama Bin Laden
We knew before anyone else but his inner cicrcle that the Prime Minister had lost the plot. The frantic whistle stops through shopping malls, touching a thousand hands, shaking, shaking, good to meet you, good to meet you, nice to meet you; had, this time around, an ethereal, distant air. He failed to connect with anybody or anything. The rock star status he had once had, much to the astonishment of the Howard haters, had disappeared. If anybody tried to tell him there were problems, he would barely listen, in his half deaf manner, before cutting his critic short: "Other people tell me different". And walk on. None of it touched him; nothing filtered through. These were the people he was suposed to represent; and he had lost them. He had forgotten the very source of his power.
We would land, in those long lost days, on the properties which had grown up on the flood plains. Water was all important and the politicians never listened. The ancient river meandered in elaborate curls across the flood plains, marked by the line of green beside the river channel. In the wet there was water as far as the eye could see; but in the dry, which was most of the time now, the plains were little better than desert. That anyone could eke a living out of this hostile environment was incredible, yet they did. And to me, urban to the core and sleazy from past and present addictions as we flew from one remote settlement to another, there was a cosiness and truth in the rambling houses; those magnificently large homes built by the squattocracy and the wealth that had come even to here; the last wave the sheep boom of the 1950s.
And then there was John Howard, who we had all hoped would lead us to the prommised land; a conservative in a fundamentally left wing country - a reaction, perhaps, to its convict heritage - and he was going to slap the country back into shape after all those excesses of the left; and in the end that was what made his betrayal even deeper. Small business thought he was on their side; and he wrapped them up in paperwork and the GST like never before. Separated dads thought he was on their side; and instead the populace was bombarded with domestic violence hysteria promoting the myth of the violent male; and the Family Court and the Child Support Agency and all the rest of the parasites remained as dysfunctional and dishonest as ever they were. The people who thought, like all good conservatives, that you should stand on your own two feet and a government's role was only to help you do that; they too were betrayed as welfare spread ever deeper into the middle classes. He bought himself out of trouble and spent and spent and spent. You now have to have an income of more than $100,000 before you escape the clutches of Centrelink.
And the festering bureacracy spread and spread. The world, the government, he created was a lawyer's picnic. A complete charade. Most of all, the true believers are left gasping for something to believe in; and it's all gone. And Howard will get a pension of something like $350,000 a year, seven times the average wage, for doing nothing but having been the Prime Minister. And all those excesses, the grotesquely high salaries of our hopeless judiciary, the ridiculously high and utterly unjustifiable wages of senior bureaucrats; it's all got worse. And once, we were naive enough to believe. And now; we have been betrayed at our core and can only look in other directions for the meaning and comfort we so desperately need.
THE BIGGER STORY:
EXTRACTS FROM PAMELA WILLIAMS series of articles in the Australian Financial Review:
Australian Financial Review
MON 15 OCT 2007.
A tough competitor to the bitter end - ELECTION 2007
By: Pamela Williams
The Prime Minister is the ultimate aspirational - he has spent much of
his political life either fighting to get the top job, or to hang on
to it, writes Pamela Williams, national correspondent.
In the casino of Australian politics John Howard is an obsessive
player. If it takes another poker hand, one more throw of the dice, or
a last spin of the bottle, the gambler is there. Addicted to the game,
the Prime Minister never folds his cards.
Through 33 years as a politician, Howard has bet on himself. Others
may have thought he lacked the nerve, but Howard has seen off many a
high-stakes player. Now he has placed his biggest wager since taking
the leadership of the Liberal Party in January 1995.
Whether it is finally one bet too many will be known on election day.
Howard thought carefully about his legacy last year when he briefly
considered quitting and handing over - Tony Blair-style - to Treasurer
Peter Costello. But it was a short flirtation and he has now bet both
the government and his own place in history on himself. His brief loss
of nerve last month when he asked cabinet members if they thought his
time was up was a mirage. Thirsty men and women, they turned towards
the oasis, but just as suddenly it vanished as Howard pleaded with
voters to give him one more turn.
...
Had he quit last year, Howard would have gone out a champion, much as
the great sports stars he so admires. If he wins this time, there will
be absolute jubilation in the Liberal ranks, but the victory will be
shaded by the notion that Howard never knows when to let go - and
fears that the next three years will be jinxed by Howard taunting
Costello, while toying with his own desire to go on for ever. If he
loses, Howard risks being pilloried for squandering the goodwill and
the loyalty, for never resisting the urge to play one more hand and
robbing the government of a chance for generational change.
...
Australian Financial Review
MON 26 NOV 2007.
Costello clocks off as Howard's flaws are exposed
By: Pamela Williams National correspondent
He told Howard of his decision not to
stand during a phone conversation on election night.
This spectacular finale to the decade-long contest between the two men
leaves the Liberal Party wounded to the core and removes Costello as a
juicy target for a resurgent Labor Party in government.
It was almost 9 o'clock on election night before Costello knew
officially what had been an open secret at Liberal campaign
headquarters for more than a week: the government of John Howard was
dead. With it died more than a decade of Costello's hopes to lead the
nation, lost in karmic retribution against a government that paid the
ultimate price for not listening to the electorate.
The Liberal prime ministerial transition plan - Howard's sleight of
hand to cling to power himself - was dead, too. It was a preposterous
plan designed by Howard to hold onto the leadership in the face of a
recommendation from most of his cabinet that it was time to go.
...
For Howard, who would risk anything to cling to power, the massive
election defeat should have come as no surprise. Lying in a drawer
somewhere was the secret Liberal Party dossier that almost a year ago
predicted the Prime Minister's demise, warning that the nation had
stopped listening to him.
The dossier, developed shortly after Rudd became opposition leader on
December 4 last year, showed voters had a string of grievances against
the government over broken promises and dishonesty and against Howard
in particular; voters had gravitated straight to the
pleasant-mannered, unthreatening Rudd. The government was seen as
arrogant and out of touch. There was an urgent need to reinvigorate
the Liberal team.
Howard was very quickly made aware of internal Liberal polling showing
a sharp fall for the government. This was no honeymoon season for
Rudd. This was the real thing. The secret document, prepared by
Liberal pollster Mark Textor, spelled doom for the government with
Howard at its head.
But Howard took the expedient course of a man obsessed with power and
personal conviction. He ignored all warnings...
The public polls that dogged Howard's steps for the next year after
Rudd's elevation to the Labor leadership, told Howard the same thing
his own pollster had told him: that it was time to go.
....
As Costello finally left the hall, flanked by a crush of fans,
security and media, he heard over his shoulder Howard's voice. He
turned back, pushing to the front of the hall with his family again
where they stood as a group, watching Howard's speech of concession.
Costello kept a smile on his face, while the man who he had already
told some time before that he would not stand as leader, declared that
the future of the party lay with Peter Costello.
...
Inside the Liberal campaign headquarters the Prime Minister's
inability to stick to the message - promoting the economic story and
bashing Labor over union connections - was bringing everyone down... Instead of sticking to the message on the economy, Howard decided to
give the media a lesson on how a leadership succession would occur.
"The incumbent leader goes to the meeting and says, 'I have decided to
resign' and then you know I make a little speech about various things
and thank the party for its support, understanding and loyalty and
then I say, 'Now we have a vacancy for the leadership'."
Those listening in Melbourne cringed. Crumpled paper was thrown. Worst
of all, it was another lost chance to push the message. Instead Howard
was back on his own theme, talking about himself.
...
After rates went up, Howard simply lost the plot, first saying sorry
to voters and then prolonging the agony the next day with a spurious
argument about whether saying sorry was an apology or a sorry.
Standing beside Howard, Costello, grim-faced, looked to be a man ready
to fasten his hands around the prime ministerial throat.
The worst day of the campaign, when things really went south, was the
day the entire message went to hell in a hand basket: the Liberal
campaign launch in Brisbane. Howard's rambling speech veered all over
the place. His spending, apparently pruned back by Costello, still
spiked up. There had been a campaign strategy drawn up for the speech,
but Howard decided to do his own speech - and focus on himself.
The speech blew out to double the time and culminated with a ramble on
why Howard wanted to continue as Prime Minister: "Let me tell you why
I want to be Prime Minister," he went on. "Let me tell you about my
hopes and dreams . . ." Twenty minutes later, he gave Costello a
tribute. Yet this was the man Howard was supposed to be pushing as the
next prime minister. It all had a tacky, stale feel to it. Howard's
strategy to spend, spend, spend, cut right across the campaign message
- a point Kevin Rudd leveraged to acclaim days later. Television
coverage of the Liberal campaign focused on Howard's pitch for himself
to remain as Prime Minister.
It could not have been more damaging.
Behind the scenes, Howard was said to take more account of the advice
of his wife Janette, his former chief of staff Grahame Morris, and his
friend, the former adman and now climate change campaigner Geoffrey
Cousins, than he did of the professionals at campaign headquarters.
For at least part of the campaign Howard was said to be reading
"Dickie's media briefing notes", as one disillusioned campaign adviser
described a media summary he claimed was often sent to Howard
overnight by his son Richard in the United States - where he had the
benefit of the time difference to read and assemble news from the
Australian newspaper websites. "It's almost Captain Wacky in reverse,"
muttered another adviser.
By the end of the campaign, senior strategists inside campaign
headquarters urged Liberal state directors to resist any pressure from
Howard's office to put his photograph on the party's how to vote
cards.
The ugly last-minute racist shenanigans in the seat of Lindsay were
perhaps the last defining imagery of Howard's era. Brochures intended
to provoke racism in the electorate were designed by the husbands of
Howard pet Jackie Kelly, who was quitting, and her successor, Karen
Chijoff. In what seemed a breakthrough for men's rights, both women
claimed to know nothing of their husband's activities.
+++++++++++++++++
Australian Financial Review
FRI 30 NOV 2007, Page 1
It's my party: the day John Howard refused to go
By: Pamela Williams
The PM's ministers begged him to step down. But, as national
correspondent Pamela Williams reveals, his response was a
Machiavellian plot to cling to power.
The windows of Alexander Downer's suite at the cushy Quay Grand hotel
framed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The tinkle of ice suggested a
cocktail party in full swing. Just across the water was the ultimate
political trophy, the prime minister's residence at Kirribilli.
Sydney was abuzz. It was Thursday evening, September 6, and
international leaders, great and small, were gathering for the APEC
summit. For those present, Downer's little gathering would make
history too, because it was here at the Quay Grand that some of the
most senior members of John Howard's government assembled to ponder
the future of their ageing and increasingly unpopular leader.
After hours of debate they agreed on a plan. But what they saw as its
strength, the Machiavellian Howard would quickly exploit as its
weakness.
Never mind that Howard had asked for this meeting. Within days he
would reject them completely, clinging to the leadership and, as they
feared, leading them to humiliating electoral defeat last weekend.
Distilled from the knowledge that disunity is death, his ministers'
strategy was to ask Howard to do the right thing by the party that had
given him absolute loyalty since he was elected leader in 1995. They
could not confront him, but they would ask Howard to stand aside and
hand over to his deputy, Peter Costello, both for the sake of the
party and Howard's own legacy.
But Howard would outfox them all.
...
On Wednesday, September 12, Howard recorded an interview with the
ABC's Kerry O'Brien. It would be a desperate plea to stay in power and
it would be the first that his party room had heard of his definitive
promise to retire in the next term if he won the election. It was a
preposterous promise. Howard, with a beseeching look, said he would
seek re-election and would then retire after a period, and hand over
to Peter Costello.
It was the Liberal Party's kamikaze moment.
Australian Financial Review
TUE 11 DEC 2007, Page 1
A right royal mess: how Howard led Libs into chaos
By: Pamela Williams
His rule of the Liberal Party was absolute, writes national
correspondent Pamela Williams. Now it must repair its internal
structures and restore its battered finances.
From the prime ministerial suite in the white-angled splendour of
Parliament House, and from the gabled elegance of Kirribilli House in
Sydney, John Howard ran both the country and the Liberal Party.
It was an unrivalled grip on power. By the time of the 2007 election
campaign, Howard, his wife Janette and a tiny coterie of close family
and friends were nicknamed the "Royal Family" by some Liberal insiders
due to their influence over party and over campaign matters both large
and small.
Now, as the family leaves behind the prestige of Kirribilli and
Howard's shattered aura of invincible power, his role in sidelining
the Liberal organisation is also coming under the spotlight.
Like a house of cards, everything has collapsed, leaving the party
structurally and financially vulnerable.
The Liberals' fortunes are teetering, caught between massive campaign
spending costs and seriously reduced fund-raising.
The situation is so fraught that one insider told The Australian
Financial Review the party was "unviable".
So much had been spent on the campaign that staff at the federal
directorate faced a slash and burn, he said, before adding a
devastating assessment of the organisation John Howard professed to
love: "The party's broke. They're smashed up. And it's mayhem."
...
Over the years as Howard became the party's supreme commander, many of
the old practices broke down. The federal executive, once playing a
commanding role itself, was sidelined and largely ignored by Howard.
The federal election campaign, with Howard controlling the strategy,
was a revelation of the steady deterioration of the party organisation
over a long period of time. One insider said yesterday there had been
at best only one federal executive meeting in the past year.
"Increasingly this all became a Howard operation, with his small
coterie," said a party-machine man yesterday. "As a consequence, the
organisation was marginalised and the competitive tension between the
organisation and the parliamentary party was lost. There was no
counterbalance."
...
Howard's wife and closest confidant, Janette, had become so entrenched
in the campaign structure that few dared to challenge her opinions.
Her views were imposed in even minor matters such as lighting and the
colours in advertising brochures. One bitter campaign worker said last
week: "While the ALP was running a professional campaign, the Liberals
were doing Homebake."
In the end, Howard's old modus operandi ran out of steam too. Spending
his way back to power had been the hallmark of every election for this
veteran politician. But suddenly, spending was out of fashion. Former
treasurer and longtime leadership aspirant Peter Costello had tried
his best to tie up the money with a massive tax cut strategy, working
on the basic assumption that if you cut tax, you can't spend it.
But Howard then wanted a massive health policy on top of the tax cuts.
He planned to spend billions of dollars taking over district hospitals
across the country.
Costello fought and fought. Finally, with the coup of Rudd's tactical
announcement that big spending was out, and health minister Tony
Abbott's personal campaign implosion, Costello won.
He pared back Howard's plans for even more generous child-care
rebates. It was a constant war between the treasurer and the big
spenders led by Howard, the prime minister who believed that
ultimately only he could draw the ace. But in the end, Howard's
strength was proved ephemeral. The man who misplayed the electorate so
badly did not even have the membership ticket to vote for a new party
leader. The man who believed he could hold the vote around the whole
country could not even hold his own seat. And when he fell, he took
the party with him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Australian Financial Review, Edition 1
FRI 21 DEC 2007, Page 29
Fall of the liberal empire
By: Pamela Williams National correspondent
There was more than one attempt to cut down an intransigent John
Howard before the great election loss that has left a divided Liberal
Party struggling to find a path out of oblivion.
The Prime Ministerial Boeing 737 is known in the RAAF as Air Force
One. It is the ultimate symbol of life at the top, with its privacy,
its pilots and crew, its club lounge chairs, beds, and its $10,000 an
hour running cost. Here in this exclusive sanctum John Howard really
knew he was boss.
It was here too that Howard ran up travel bills estimated at more than
$10 million over 11 years just flying back and forth from Canberra to
Kirribilli, the Sydney residence where no previous prime minister had
lived, but which Howard chose to make his home. And just as he
eschewed The Lodge in Canberra, Howard eschewed the cheaper Challenger
aircraft that was intended for the Prime Minister's domestic use. The
Howards liked the status of the big Boeing. They became accustomed to
first class.
Back in 1996 the perks of power were anathema to John Howard. He was
carried to government on the shoulders of a party bereft and out of
office for 13 years. Back then, Howard listened to everyone in his
party organisation as they mapped strategies, first for a leadership
tilt and then for a prime ministerial run. For Howard, no advice was
too small. But that was then.
Andrew Robb is a man who knows both John Howards well - the humble
supplicant of 1996 and the hubristic jet-setter of 2007. Today Robb is
a federal Liberal MP himself and has been given the Herculean task of
overseeing the rebuilding of the devastated Liberal Party organisation
and its finances, which withered away during Howard's reign.
...
The role of Howard's wife,
Janette, in the election campaign has played into the story, becoming
a sore point with senior parliamentary members as well as with members
of the federal executive and the campaign professionals.
It was Howard himself who revealed his wife's role in his
decision-making to the public, declaring that he had consulted his
family in his decision to reject the request of his cabinet members to
go quietly. Downer has privately denied that Janette Howard's rage at
the cabinet was a factor in Howard's decision to stay. Nevertheless,
the talk continues in some Liberal circles that Janette Howard turned
on Downer too as the bearer of bad news, asking, "How could you do
this to our family?". In the end only Downer knows the truth, but the
fact it has become a topic of discussion shows how controversial the
role of the prime minister's family eventually became.
Howard had been one of the luckiest prime ministers in history. From
the landslide win of 1996 against Keating through to the tactics of
Tampa, when he literally scared people into voting for him, Howard had
the country in his hand. Finally he betrayed that trust, introducing
Work Choices, the hardline industrial relations policy that had not
been flagged to the electorate. It was the moment when Howard finally
forgot how he had succeeded in the first place - by listening and by
asking voters to reject the arrogance of the other side.
...
Business has flocked to Labor, naturally
following the government of the day. The Liberals must start again
from the bottom. Fewer and fewer major companies are giving to the
Liberals, and in states such as NSW, the ALP has become the natural
party of choice for big property developers. The Liberals have little
hope of making serious inroads here.
...
In just over a decade the Liberals have gone from feather duster to
feather duster. From the party high point when the federal president,
treasurer and director had the clout and respect to give Downer the
last rites for the sake of the party, to the low point of 2007, when
no-one even thought to contact federal director Loughnane to advise
him that Howard had asked his cabinet members if he should stand
aside. Senior ministers say Loughnane found out the same way most
others did, by phoning around to ask what was going on after the
rumour mill started churning.
It was a classic example of the degradation of the party: the leader
mortally wounded and at loggerheads with his cabinet over his future,
and an election coming up...
Loughnane struggled to pull back the strategy from the Howard family,
according to insiders, trying to get Howard to attend meetings without
his wife and key adviser. The problem for the campaign team was that
once Janette Howard took a decision, no-one dared to oppose her.
Moreover, the role of Howard's son Richard, based in the US and
providing his father with a media strategy, ultimately made him the
honorary deputy strategist to his mother.
It was chaos for the professional campaign staff. If the campaign put
out a brochure that Howard did not like, he would distance himself.
The threat of this hung in the air, sapping the campaign of passion
and immediacy. No one would say "shove it up your jumper" to Howard.
Everything had started to crack open the year before. The introduction
of Work Choices, in the face of a broad understanding in the
electorate that this was not going to happen, set off alarm bells
among party hard-heads and professionals. But there was nothing anyone
could do. With the imbalance between the organisation and the
parliamentary wings, there was no substantive discussion in the
broader party, no briefing first of the federal executive; there was
no robust discussion, no testing in the market, and virtually no
research. Here was proof positive that power had gone to Howard's
head.
For Howard himself, the end was tumultuous. He had achieved all his
great dreams, he had travelled the world, lived in the perfect house
on Sydney Harbour, presided over APEC with Russia's Vladimir Putin on
one arm and US President George Bush on the other. Janette Howard,
too, had enjoyed the spoils of office, planning and preparing for a
year for the star-dusted APEC moments, designing the outfits,
orchestrating the menus. For all the world they appeared to be the
glamorous hosts. Watching them through the APEC prism, it would be
hard to believe either seriously entertained the thought of giving it
all away before this grand finale.
Howard was on borrowed time.
Liberal Party polling showed he was no longer trusted, that the
electorate was no longer listening to him. Public polling showed the
same thing. Party research showed that Work Choices was the last
straw. All this must have seemed trivial against the glitter of world
leaders, the intimate barbecues with the Bush family and the revving
jets as Air Force One took off smoothly for Kirribilli.
Howard promised the nation one last time that if they favoured him
with a repeat performance, then he would go. But the public had worked
out that John Howard would never stand down. And that his party would
never force him out. They did not believe him.
In order to finally put a stake through the heart of Lazarus with a
triple bypass, the electorate took on the job itself. They would vote
him out, and not just out of office, but out of his seat as well.
