Don't Punch the Old Man

It was September 2007. The Federal election was to be called in a little over a month. John Howard and a handful of his top lieutenants sat down to a secret briefing in the genteel commonwealth offices in Melbourne's Treasury Place. Joining them was the Liberals' advertising campaign team. The meeting was to review the ad campaign for the election that loomed.

The party's pollster, Mark Textor, gave the gathering grim news. The Howard Government was facing a tough struggle for re-election. It looked terminal. The balding, blunt-talking Textor ran a presentation demonstrating why.

His research with focus groups of voters found entrenched perceptions of the Howard Government. Certainly, the positive views of happier times persisted. Australians still regarded Howard as a man who had the courage of his convictions. But harsher attitudes had developed since the last election.

Consistently now, Textor said, the Howard Government was seen as out of touch, too old and too tired. When participants turned to see how the Prime Minister was taking this news, they discovered that Howard had dozed off.

Out of touch, too old, too tired.

Asked about this incident some months after the election, Howard said in an interview, 'In twelve years, the odd Cabinet minister would have closed his or her eyes for a minute, myself included. But no one ever went to sleep.' He denied that he had dozed off in this particular meeting: 'Absolute tripe,' he called it.

Another participant said that not only had it happened but it had made a big impression: 'There were ad people in the room who hadn't seen Howard for a couple of years, since the last campaign, and they were amazed. People went out after the meeting into the corridor and said to each other, "Wow, did you see that?".' Voters' perceptions would be difficult to change because, it seemed, they were right.

* * *

It was in this phase of the election that the previous Labor Prime Minister of Australia decided to offer some political advice to the next Labor Prime Minister. With the informal electoral contest well under way, yet with the formal commencement of hostilities still to come, Paul Keating phoned Kevin Rudd. His counsel? To get more aggressive.

The tip was well meant. It was also rejected. 'You've got to throw a few punches,' Keating told Rudd in the course of a long phone conversation. He wanted to see Rudd hurt John Howard.

That was in character. One of Keating's many aphorisms was, 'If you're in politics, you're in the conflict business'. It had always been his style to throw the most direct and damaging blows he could. Many years earlier, a livid Keating had sworn on the front steps of the old Parliament House in Canberra that he would make Howard wear his leadership of the Liberal Party 'like a crown of thorns'. The then treasurer was enraged because he suspected that Howard had condoned a political attack on his private life. His anger then had been almost uncontainable.

Kevin Rudd politely thanked Keating for his advice, but privately he counselled intimates to follow another course entirely. Rudd was much impressed by the wisdom he had heard years earlier from Tony Blair. As a fresh backbencher in the Federal Parliament, the Queenslander had been part of a delegation of Australian Labor politicians to meet the then Prime Minister of Britain. Blair explained that he had taken power amid considerable unease about British Labour — the party had been out of office for a long time, it was still associated with trade union radicalism, and it had been subjected to a Tory campaign of demonisation. So, the new British Prime Minister said, he had decided to be guided by the need to supply the British public with three vital commodities — reassurance, reassurance and reassurance.

Rudd's essential approach to taking power from John Howard was to let the sixty-eight-year-old expire gently of natural causes rather than try to beat him to a bloody pulp.

Rudd's campaign was certainly vigorous, but he would never openly savage Howard. Throughout, he respectfully called the older man 'Mr Howard'. So did Labor's TV ads. In the so-called Emma Jane ad, a mum in her suburban kitchen complained about the rising cost of living, concluding with the line: 'You've lost touch, Mr Howard. No offence, but you've just been there too long.'

Labor's focus groups of voters had evidently turned up precisely the same sentiment as Mark Textor's had for the Liberal Party. Howard was still held in some popular regard, but he had been around too long and was now out of touch. Howard was shrivelling as a result of his own misjudgments and his sheer longevity.

The Liberal Party's confidential research showed that there were three principal reasons why the Howard Government was likely to lose the election. This proved to be accurate. The party's findings were later made public by Howard's successor as leader of the Liberal Party, Brendan Nelson, who had not seen them while he was a minister in the Howard Cabinet. Howard was secretive with party research and withheld the most sensitive work from all his colleagues, including his deputy.

But five months after the election, Nelson said: 'I've seen the research now. There were three reasons the Government lost. First was longevity. It was the longevity of Howard, Costello and Downer, but Howard in particular. Second was Work Choices. A significant number of people voted Labor for the first time, and Work Choices had a lot to do with that. Third was our approach to climate change.'

Each of these liabilities was self-inflicted — longevity of the leadership, Work Choices and climate change policy. The Howard Government was not demolished — it imploded. Rudd's task was to position himself as the reassuringly competent alternative. When the Government fell, it would fall to him.

The Labor Party's campaign team summarised it succinctly in its mid -2007 strategy review: 'Many people are ready to switch to Labor. Need to REMIND them of the benefits, then REASSURE voters who have switched to us that they have made the right choice.'

Rudd was confident that he was on course to win the 2007 election. He was chiefly concerned not to frighten voters with bellicosity, but to reassure them with his trademark calm. The biggest risk to Labor's prospects, the party leadership concluded, was that Howard...