The preselection of Maxine McKew by Labor for Bennelong could be just what the PM ordered. The biggest risk to Howard this election was a protest vote. It was probably the only way that Beazley was going to win. One also suspects that the size of the vote for Rudd is also not so much as a vote for him, but a kick up the pants for Howard.
But perceptions change with events. Rudd’s high approval rating has made him the favourite, and Howard the under-dog. McKew’s preselection would confirm that. It should also help Howard.
Rudd is in danger of running the first Australian government to have lost office before it has even been elected. (Actually, there was one other, the Hewson government that lost the 2001 election to Paul Keating). By acting as though he is president elect he draws all the focus on what he will do in office, and away from Howard.
As yet there is little to indicate what the Rudd government will do, but we have an inkling of what it will be like. It will consist of “A” listers looking straight down their noses and TV cameras and telling us all what is good for us – a replay of the Keating government. Get ready for the “Queen Bee” state.
McKew is a fitting ambassador for that state – a high profile outsider who will be imposed on the branches in Bennelong. She is potentially a good talisman for Howard of what Mark Latham called “Tourists” and “Residents”, a term that taps into the dynamic that has shaped the last 4 federal elections – the battle between urban elite and ozzie culture.
While Rudd looks formidable at the moment and is enjoying “playing with Howard’s mind” the risk for him is that the collective electoral mind is already set against his play book. Rudd should enjoy the spoils of office while he can.

There is a simple reason why John Howard is sending extra troops to Iraq and Tony Blair is withdrawing them. There are votes for Howard on Iraq, but none for Blair.
Blair’s constituency is by-and-large anti-war. While there are some left-of-centre hawks, like Nick Cohen, they are significantly outnumbered by the peacenicks. Blair’s backing of the American action in Iraq was much braver than John Howard’s.
For Howard, the biggest political reason for backing the Iraq war was the support that he solidifed from blue-collar conservative voters.
When politicians are in trouble, as Blair and Howard are (although Blair has already announced the time-table for his own withdrawal), the sensible strategy is to first shore-up core support, which is what both are doing.
That part of middle and upper Australia that supports Howard doesn’t do so because of foreign affairs policies. It votes for him on economic issues. It’s the blue-collar conservatives who are motivated by Iraq and refugees. By running on foreign affairs Howard alienates some of the upper-demographics, particularly those in the educational and caring sectors, but he gains the solid loyalty of a group that more often than not votes Labor at other levels of government. So far it has been a winning combination.
I suspect that this group is not being properly captured at the moment by surveys. Either that, or the middle class has succumbed to Rudd’s charm in huge numbers. For Howard, keeping all his constituencies together is a delicate balancing act. He’ll be hoping that an additional 70 soldiers is a large enough token of goodwill for one group,while not sufficiently large to upset the other groups.

Vladimir Putin steps onto German soil and almost immediately throws the gauntlet down to the US, raising the spectre of another Cold War and what is the Australian commentariat and Opposition obsessed with? John Howard’s comments about a junior senator’s bid for the White House and his policies on another international issue – Iraq.
Howard won’t be complaining. Labor’s already lost two elections on foreign affairs, and he’d love to help them do it again.
Howard’s comments were good politics (whether they were diplomatically nice is another issue). As Putin’s comments show – major powers don’t have a problem criticising other major powers if they think it is warranted and in their own interest. Indeed, the US Ambassador quickly bought into Australian politics during the last election campaign when he criticised Latham’s position on Iraq.
Out around the barbeques, no-one’s going to be worried about whether the diplomatic cocktail circle choked on their olives, they’ll be glad that an Australian leader was happy to speak up in the national interest.
They’ll also be bemused to think that so many Australian commentators and US politicians think that the Iraq War is just a matter of domestic US politics, rather than being a major international one. We’ve got soldiers and our own national security at stake in this war. Everyone knows that we got into it to pay the premium on our defense pact insurance policy with the US. If the US thinks Iraq just comesS down to their own national interest and bugger their allies, then that is more damaging to all their alliances than anything John Howard has said.
If Obama, or anyone likely to get elected, is going to squib on the deal, then they should look elsewhere for support to give them international credibility next time they want it.
Average Australians will also be reminded that Howard has been lampooned as Bush’s Deputy Sheriff, but they won’t see these comments as those of a mere side-kick. They’ll contrast them to those of former ALP governments when we were supine to every south-east Asian leader who took umbrage for being called “recalcitrant” or who buttered up the Prime Ministerial ego by declaring him a “son”.
While it’s the consensus commentariat position to criticise Howard on this issue, it should be remembered that the unfashionable most often inherit the earth. Rudd’s best attribute is that he is a nerd, his fatal flaw may be that he wants to be fashionable, something that Howard has never wanted to be, and which has helped him to at least two election wins.

Friday’s breakfast meeting between Rudd and the Labor State Premiers suggests Howard may have another potent weapon to shift voters away from Rudd.
Labor is in power in every state in Australia, and with the possible exception of South Australia, is almost uniformly seen as incompetent and corrupt. The only reason that it holds power is because the Opposition in each state is regarded as being even worse. The dynamics are quite different at a federal level. While voters don’t particularly warm to Howard they don’t regard him as corrupt, and they do think he is competent.
Out of all the governments in Australia, only one is seen to be truly functional – John Howard’s.
In fact, if you look at many of the problems identified by Kevin Rudd, they are quite frequently problems which have been created by Labor state governments. Education, which was the basis of his pitch in his Australia Day ad, is a state problem. Local water infrastructure, where Rudd thinks some of Howard’s $10 billion fund ought to go, is a state issue. So is the shortage of tradespeople. The problems in health aren’t federal, they’re state too.
The dysfunctionality of the states can be clearly seen in the negotiations over the Murray-Darling. It appears that their only real objection to the Prime Minister’s scheme is that he is not buying them off with enough money.
Rudd’s plans to reform federalism can be seen as a tacit acceptance of the misgovernment by Labor of the states.
The states more than tacit endorsement of Rudd can be seen as part of a scheme to prop-up their own maladministration by putting their own man in charge of the federal cookie jar.
This doesn’t mean that Rudd is just a cog in the Labor machine, just that he can be made to look that way. It’s a perception that Rudd and the Premiers reinforce every time they decide to co-operate and sit down together. Rudd doesn’t help when he quotes his time with Wayne Goss, a former Labor state premier, as proof that he has economic credentials.
Australians have a history of voting for checks and balances. It’s most commonly seen in Senate voting patterns and has been the motivating factor that has kept the Australian Democrats viable for around 30 years. That doesn’t mean it has to be limited to the Senate. I think it will be a theme that Howard will develop over the next nine or so months.
The games not up for Howard yet, even though the latest polls must be very discouraging.

Posted for William York with particular apologies to Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson
I HAD written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him on the Murray, years ago,
He was boating when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, “Flannery, of The Overflow”.
And an SMS came directed from a source quite unexpected,
(And I think it was dictated from a river bank or bar)
‘Twas the Prime Minister who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
Flannery’s gone all atmospheric, and I don’t know where we are.
With Australia Day flattery, visions come to me of Flannery
Gone a-driving “down to Canberra” where the politicians go;
With the journalists and stringers, and a pointing of his fingers,
Flannery draws a future of disasters none of us will live to know.
And the Greens come out to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
While the politicians ponder an election to be won,
And he sees the vision horrid of our country turning florid,
With a baking sun, a rising sea and little being done.
Gazing up at Kirribilli, I wonder will the “Silly
Season” finish with a whimper or a bang
Will we all start getting warm, or is this the perfect storm,
Orchestrated by Al Gore and echoed by the noisy local gang?
It seems to me Prime Minister that there is something here quite sinister
In the push to put our economics in a great big melting pot.
With the present calls for action, you will need to find some traction
For ideas that cool the hot heads so we don’t destroy our lot.

You wouldn’t think it from yesterday’s question time, but global warming could be a bigger political problem for Rudd than Howard. Howard is currently being criticised for appearing to suggest that the link between CO2 and climate is still unproven. That may yet be the case, but it is an untenable position for the leader of any country to take at the moment.
But there is more than one untenable position on the issue when it comes to electors. One of those is to demand that Australia take more than symbolic action to fix the problem.
Howard holds government because of the compact he has made with working class conservative Australians. While global warming is currently the highest rating issue on the news (three out of the four AGW piece we’ve published so far this year are in the top ten percent of most popular articles for that period), that doesn’t mean that it rates outside the news. Average Australians are much more likely to be worrying about what brand of air-conditioner they are going to buy than reducing their “carbon footprint”. And they remain deeply suspicious of “trendy academics” without much “real world” experience.
Rudd is an enthusiast for all things AGW, which is where Howard’s potential benefit lies. If he is going to win the next election Howard needs to renew his compact with blue-collar Australia. He can do this by painting Rudd as a trendy inner-city elitist who wants to impose every currently fashionable notion on Australians, whether or not they work.
Amongst these notions is ratifying the Kyoto protocol. Yesterday’s announcement by the Chinese government that while they accept greenhouse gases are a problem, they don’t intend to stop building CO2 emitting power stations because they can’t afford to, shows just what a political problem it is.
For example Labor needs to win the new seat of Flynn, which is centred on Gladstone in Queensland, with the largest alumina plant in the world. Alumina uses so much electricity, it is sometimes described as “solid electricity”. Howard can go to Gladstone and say:
“If you vote for Kevin Rudd he will sign Australia up to the Kyoto protocol. That means that your power station and your alumnia refinery will go overseas to somewhere like China. And the sum total of difference that will make to global warming will be zero. In fact, it will be less than zero. We will be worse off because not only will our jobs go overseas, but they will go overseas to a country using dirty electricity which will emit even more pollution into the atmosphere than we do.
But what would you expect from Kevin Rudd? He says he has the economic credentials to make Australia strong because he ran Queensland under Wayne Goss. Well, we all remember how Wayne Goss gutted rural and regional Queensland under the fashionable economic theories of the times. Some things never change. So who do you trust to fix global warming and keep you in a job?”
Howard’s taskforce which reported today in favour of carbon trading is a plank in that strategy, as his his other inquiry into nuclear power.
Howard is putting himself in a position where he can pit “bad” Kyoto against “good” Howard policy; trendy Labor versus trustworthy Howard. I’m not putting any bets on the next election yet.