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If the coalition candidates at the recent federal
election were the Board of Directors of a
public company seeking re-election at an AGM they would have been unanimously
re-elected. During their term, they increased shareholder value and governed prudently and
professionally, although not always to the satisfaction of all shareholders.
- The $96 billion debt inherited from the previous Labor
government was paid off and the economy strengthened such that Australia
sailed unscathed through the Asian economic crisis. Howard has left
Australia with one the developed world's strongest economies. Unemployment is at
a 30-year low.
- Howard's courageous decision to send in Australian
troops to East Timor during its transition to democracy saved the fledgling nation
from complete annihilation
at the hands of the murderous Indonesian-backed militias.
- Older Australians should be eternally grateful for the
Howard government's generous improvements to the superannuation system.
- After decades of government paternalism fuelled
by a do-gooder mentality saw Australia's outback Aboriginal population
spiralling into degradation and genocide, Howard had the courage to
implement the Northern Territory intervention program to finally deal with
the problem.
Yet the gullible eastern states punters chose to throw out a
successful government and replace it by a union-controlled party led by a
trained parrot incessantly squawking "working families" and
"education revolution".
Only the voters of Western Australia, the engine room of
Australia, backed the coalition. The only incumbent Labor politician to lose his
seat to a Liberal was in the WA electorate of Swan.
It seems the West Aussies are less susceptible to the
spin and propaganda of the forces that ranged against the Howard government.
And those forces were considerable.
Labor creates a new election-winning paradigm
The Labor Party some time ago recognised the enormous difficulty of
toppling a government with such a strong economic record. The Coalition was also recognised as superior on issues of national security, and was gaining ground in the areas of
health and education.
So Labor conceived a new paradigm to win the next
election. It set in motion a clever PR campaign to change the public perception of the Coalition, and particularly the
public perception of John Howard, well before the election.
This new strategy was backed up a professional,
disciplined approach that saw Labor frontbenchers rigorously trained in media
performances. By the time each one fronted for a debate they had been through
gruelling sessions in front of a mock TV audience with a person playing the part
of their upcoming opponent.
It was a war waged on a number of fronts.
The unions
The disinformation portfolio was handed to the ACTU. The union bosses running the Labor Party
spent a total of $30 million on the election campaign, including $14 million on
a cleverly crafted TV campaign
savaging Howard and the Coalition government over the Work Choices IR laws.
Unable to find many people disadvantaged by the new laws, the unionists resorted
to hiring actors to portray heart-wrenching dramas about abuses of workers.
 The
most famous advert featured actor Fiona Walsh as single mum, Tracey, who was
sacked for not leaving her kids home alone to work an extra shift. Although
entirely fictional, by the time voters went to the polls the ads had been
so convincing that people believed they had seen the plight of Tracy on television current affairs shows.
In a delicious irony, Walsh's former agent, Elizabeth
Ellis, is claiming Walsh underpaid her $7,000 for her services.
The ACTU's 2-year scare campaign worked
brilliantly. Although most people polled believed Work Choices would not affect
them, they had an uneasy feeling that the laws were bad.
The media
It concert with this campaign, the Labor strategists
used their tame media hacks to portray Howard as old and burned out, out of
ideas.
All of this was seized on by the lefties and
Howard-haters in the Fairfax media, the
ABC, SBS, academia, and by the bleeding hearts and the arts community.
The campaign was amplified by the left-leaning media
generally - after all, most journalists are member of the powerful union, the Media
Entertainment and Arts Alliance and hence have a natural empathy
for a union-led political party..
This bias is reflected in their widely divergent treatment
of Howard and Rudd. No matter what Howard said and did, the media
generally portrayed it in a negative light. Rudd, on the other hand, could do no wrong.
Three clandestine meetings with disgraced lobbyist Brian Burke were conveniently
overlooked. Rudd's drunken night out in a Manhattan strip joint was actually
applauded by the media, claiming it showed he was "just one of the boys."
Imagine the shrieks from the feminists if Howard had been in Rudd's position.
Labor's great propagandist
No better example of media bias is The Australian's Left-wing
cartoonist Bill Leak. This one-man propaganda machine has been pumping out venomous
anti-Howard "cartoons" day after day, for
years. See the panel opposite for a
sample of Leak.
Described by former Labor minister Graham Richardson as
the "last great leftie", Leak has probably contributed more to the
Labor campaign than any other single person. Readers can avoid Philip Adams' poisonous
diatribes in The Australian , but Leak is in your face. Masquerading as a "cartoonist" he slips under
the radar of scrutiny.
Leak's Howard-hating is displayed in his "Australo Politicus" cartoon — Leak's take on the finding of a seven-million-year-old skull in the African desert. He traces the evolution of prehistoric man to John Howard. Leak
says, "I believe these early hominids have very pronounced bottom lips ... put a bit of hair [there] and incredibly, almost miraculously, it looks a lot like John Howard … and I think I am onto something here."
In a gross act of plagiarism, Rudd, on the other hand,
was depicted as the comic book superhero, Tintin, complete with cute dog.
And, just like Tintin, "Rudd looks like the little bloke who is taking
on the big adventure and who just might prevail in the end", Leake said.
Labor's use of the internet
Labor harnessed the power of the internet far better than the coalition.
Their left-wing mates at the Crikey website sent out regular anti-Howard
messages in their daily emails.
The Labor camp set up a front group on the internet
called Getup. This activist group portrayed Howard as mean and heartless
as it fought long and hard for convicted terrorist David Hicks' release from Guantanamo
Bay.
Getup campaigned strongly for Labor in the November 24 election.
Now that Labor has won, Getup has suddenly lost interest in David
Hicks. Getup campaign manager Ed Coper refused to criticise the decision
by the new Labor government to impose a control order on Hicks when he is
released from Adelaide's Yatala prison at the end of December.
"All governments have got to weigh up the liberties of individuals and
security as a whole," Coper said in an interview on December 11. And weigh
up who we are working for, he could have added.
Letters to editors
It seems obvious that the sheer number of anti-Howard letters appearing in
opinion pages over the past two years was part of the campaign. The ratio of
letters was around 3 to 1 against Howard. Although it is expected that an
incumbent government would receive more hate letters than an opposition, the
size of the imbalance indicates an orchestrated campaign.
Getup's website boasts about the number of letters to editors it has
orchestrated.
Howard's fate sealed 12 months ago
By the time Rudd was elected Labor leader some 12 months
ago, the election was already won and Howard was doomed. The opinion polls told
the story. They zoomed up in Labor's favour when Rudd was elected leader and
stayed there.
Howard realised too late that he could not win by
throwing money around in the last few weeks of the election.
He realised too late that his promises of largesse could
not counter the outpouring of spin, propaganda and
bile from the unions, the elites, the bleeding hearts, academics, the arts and entertainment
communities and newspaper letter-writers, together with the cheer squad from a Labor-friendly
media.
Smarting from the defeat of their Messiah, Mark Latham
at the last election, these groups and forces have been working over Howard for
the past three years.
Leak working on the next election
Leak is already working on Election 2010, regularly
lampooning
new Liberal leader Brendan Nelson. Tintin barely rates a mention.
If the Libs have any hope of winning the next election
they have to adopt Labor's tactics - starting now.
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