The Leader of the British Labour Party, Tony Blair, and the Leader of the Australian conservatives, John Howard, have a few things in common.
Both have spent the past year not so much promoting their own policies for government but distancing themselves from the more extreme policies their respective parties held earlier in Opposition.
Blair has spoken of New Labour for a New Britain, with capital Ns, but he does not really mean anything too radical.
Both he and Howard want to ensure the horses are not scared as power falls into their lap from long-term, discredited governments.
It is odd that Blair and his deputy John Prescott came to Australia to see how a Labor Party achieves and stays in office. There was not much useful to learn from them. For a start, campaigns for second preferences have no application in Britain and marginal-seat tactics less certain in a world of three parties. It would have been more pertinent to look at the Coalition experience. How to avoid tiredness (Fraser in 1983); how to avoid sabotage by an external extremist (Joh in 1987); how to prevent any electoral system denying you power after getting more votes than your opponents (1990); how to prevent an internal extremist taking over the Opposition just as it is to get Government (Hewson in 1993).
Of the five elections, Labor really only won 1984. Either the Coalition lost the others or in 1990 it won the votes, but not the seats.
On that, experience Blair should do a deal with the centrist Liberal-Democrats. They typically take about five to 15 per cent of the vote (an election-determining amount) and get about 3 per cent of the seats. Under the British system, though, voters just put one X in one square, with no preferences marked. So if in a seat the Conservatives get 45 per cent, Labour 43 and Liberal-Democrats 13, the Conservatives would get the seat, even if all 13 per cent of the Liberal-Democrats would have preferred Labour (and Labour could expect the lion’s share of Liberal-Democrat preferences if the British system permitted it). Typically, the Conservatives have held power on about 40 to 45 per cent of the vote.
Blair should do a deal not to stand in, say, 40 of the Liberal-Democrats’ best seats, if they refrained from standing in, say, 80 nominated seats Labour was after. It would guarantee a Labour victory on attaining Government, Labour would introduce preferential voting, making things harder for the Conservatives in future.
But there is no sign of such an obvious strategy. Whatever else they did in Australia, Blair and Prescott did not learn anything so Richardsonian.
Rather he took the Coalition’s course of not frightening the horses. Blair even redefined radicalism. He was speaking to the 10th annual dinner of the Association of British Editors. (Australia does not have such a beast, though an attempt was made to set one up about six or seven years ago, but the Murdoch papers were not interested. They probably thought it easier to meet in Aspen and let the non-Murdoch editors meet in a phone box somewhere else.)
Anyway, Blair said modern radicalism did not mean high tax and public ownership. Labour still stood for fairness, health, education, social justice and a productive and happy workforce, but it had to be achieved by different means for different times. Earlier Conservative Governments had higher tax and public ownership than was now being proposed by Labour.
Like Howard, Blair said he stood for family values, individual responsibility, public accountability and all the other clean and wholesome things prospective in-coming Governments say they will stand on.
This led to Hugh Cudlipp … who has had a forty year career in journalism including managing major national dailies … to (with tongue in cheek) despair a Labour victory.
There would be nothing to write about: no sleaze, no incompetence, no unemployment, he said. Even the trains would run on time.
I was reminded of Malcolm Fraser saying before the 1975 election that under the Coalition people would be able to ignore the front pages and safely turn to sport.
And that is another likeness between Blair and Howard. Under both their governments the Press will still have plenty to write about. Just watch.