Doug Lorimer
“If the pre-election opinion polls in Australia were anything to go by, Mr Howard was going to be punished by the electorate for his support of Mr Bush in Iraq. But when it actually came to voting, Australians preferred Mr Howard’s sober and conservative policies”, the Murdoch family’s Sydney Daily Telegraph editorialised on October 11. There is a good deal of truth to this assessment.
In February 2003, a million people took to the streets of Australian cities to protest against the impending US war on Iraq and PM John Howard’s support for it. Every opinion poll since then has confirmed that Australian voters overwhelmingly oppose Australia’s participation in the US-led invasion and occupation.
Following ALP federal leader Mark Latham’s announcement in March this year that if it won the 2004 federal election, Labor would withdraw Australian troops from Iraq “by Christmas”, opinion polls put the ALP well ahead of the Coalition parties on a two-party preferred basis. In April, Labor was registering support of up to 56% on a two-party preferred basis in some polls.
By election day on October 9, however, this had completely turned around and the Coalition parties were returned to government with a two-party preferred vote of 52.6% to Labor’s 47.4% — representing a swing of just under 2% to the Coalition since the 2001 federal election. In some seats, the Coalition registered a swing toward it of up to 10%.
British and US newspapers interpreted the election result as an endorsement for Howard’s policy on the Iraq war. The Murdoch-owned New York Post, for example, declared that “the presence of Australian soldiers in the Coalition of the Willing had been a major issue in a bitterly fought campaign”.
In reality, as everyone in Australia knows, the Iraq war was almost a non-issue in the election campaign — thanks to Labor’s decision to run dead on it. This was made clear at the beginning of the election campaign, during the “Great Debate” between Howard and Latham, televised on September 12.
Throughout the entire “debate” — in reality, more of an orchestrated press conference — Latham failed to mention, let alone hammer, the Howard government’s campaign of lies about Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify committing Australian troops to the invasion of Iraq last year.
Not once did Latham condemn the death and destruction inflicted on the Iraqi people by the US-led war. He only mentioned Labor’s official position of opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq once in the “debate” — and couched it in the mildest of terms possible: “We didn’t support this conflict in the first place, but we have a commitment to the rebuilding of Iraq through the processes of the United Nations”, he said.
Even more incredibly, Latham did not make a single reference to the ALP’s policy commitment to bring Australia’s troops home from Iraq “by Christmas”.Latham just repeated Australian Federal Police commissioner Mick Keelty’s claim that the Iraq war had made Australia a “bigger target for terrorists” and argued that it had “diverted” Australian military resources away from waging the “war on terror” in South-East Asia.
When Howard argued that “whether Mr Latham likes it or not, the reality is that if the advice of his party had been followed, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Iraq”, Latham let this remark pass — despite the fact that prior to last year’s invasion of Iraq, Howard himself had stated that the invasion could not be justified on the grounds of “regime change”, but only on the grounds that Iraq allegedly possessed banned WMD.
Again, when Howard argued that “there’s not the slightest doubt that if Australia were to cut and run from Iraq that would give enormous heart to those who are opposed to the coalition, including terrorists, because it would send a signal to the rest of the world that one of the countries that was part of the original coalition has weakened and buckled and I think that would be sending completely the wrong signal and however Mr Latham tries to rationalise it, he cannot escape the heavy burden of that reality”, Latham’s response was to ignore it. Instead, he responded by declaring the ALP’s support for the US-led global “war on terror” and its support for Australia’s military alliance with the US.
Throughout the rest of the election campaign, Latham only mentioned the Iraq war and Labor’s opposition to Australia’s participation in it when he was questioned about it.
The ALP deliberately downplayed the Iraq war — the issue that has most galvanised public opposition to the Howard government since 2003 — in order to reassure the super-rich families that own Australia’s economy and mass media, and who see the US alliance as vital to defending their international business interests, that Labor is on their side and not that of working people, either in Iraq or Australia. Having made this decision, Labor handed the election to the Coalition parties.
Labor politicians have blamed their defeat on the Coalition’s interest-rate scare campaign. However, it was Labor that decided to allow the election campaign to be focused around domestic economic issues. And by doing so, Labor enabled Howard to contrast his stable, low-interest rate regime (which is more a product of the sluggish state of the US economy than Howard’s own economic policies) to the high interest rates that prevailed under the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of the 1980s and early ‘90s (which largely mirrored the high interest rates prevailing in the rest of the developed capitalist world).
In this context, many heavily mortgaged working people decided to stick with the devil they know rather than risk losing their homes by putting Latham into the Lodge.
Furthermore, Latham’s mildly progressive reform proposals on health and education could not counteract the correct perception held by many working-class voters that, overall, his policy approach is not much different from the neoliberal user-pays, “free market” economic policies of the Coalition government. This was undoubtedly reinforced by Latham’s failure to criticise the equally indistinguishable-from-Coalition-policies being implemented by existing state Labor governments.
However, where opposition to the Coalition’s Iraq war policy was made a prominent issue in the election campaign — by high-profile former intelligence analyst and Greens candidate Andrew Wilkie in Howard’s own seat of Bennelong — the Coalition actually suffered a 3.6% swing against it, in defiance of the national trend. If the swing against Howard in Bennelong had been generalised nationally, the Coalition would not have been returned to government.
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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