Blackadder was justified be kinder to Shakespeare when he visited him a second in his time machine on Monday night. Earlier, he had castigated Shakespeare for being the scourge of every schoolboy. On the second visit he praised his prescience. A scene involving a time machine that was especially apt for Shakespeare, the playwright who transcends time.
On Friday morning on the ABC’s AM program, Treasurer Peter Costello, more than 400 years after the play had been written, was behaving just like Hamlet. It has been Costello’s outrageous fortune to have John Howard as his stubborn, resilient, accidental leader, preventing him from succeeding to a leadership which he thinks should be naturally his.Costello was being questioned about assertions in a new biography by Age journalist Shaun Carney that Costello thought that Howard was uncomfortable at some level with the prevalence of Asian faces in Australia, that Howard seemed lost in the prime ministership and by mid-1999 had unofficially retired.
The theme of a younger challenger’s certainty that the present leader had no right to be there but uncertainty as to how to effect a removal of him is a common one. Paul Keating was a Hamlet figure as he struggled to wrest the leadership from the older Bob Hawke. In that case, Bob Hawke was a King Lear figure, wanting to be loved by it all and manifestly past it as a leader. Keating, like Costello now, was vacillating over whether and when to strike.
As with Hamlet and Keating, Costello is up against an older and experienced campaigner.
And like Hamlet and Keating before him, Costello has to deny that he is doing anything to take over the kingdom which he believes is rightly his.
On AM yesterday, Costello was confronted with the assertion that he had told colleagues in 1999 the that Howard had “run out of puff”. Costello obviously categorically denied it — his voice raising an octave or two while doing so.
“I most certainly do not hold that view and I most certainly was never of the view, and have never been of the view, that John Howard has run out of puff.”
An interesting similarity with Howard’s assertion that Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has not got “”the ticker” to be leader.
Unlike Keating, though, timing has been much worse for Costello.
Labor went it wobbly in the opinion polls more than eight months out from the 1993 election. At the time Labor’s leader, Bob Hawke, was naturally blamed for the drop in voter support. There was plenty of time for Paul Keating’s supporters to prey upon the one thing the that concerns backbenchers more than anything else – – their prospects of re-election. Faced with the greater likelihood of loss under Hawke, they went for Keating. Costello has not had such a generous timing. The first two times when he had a chance to take the leadership both he and his colleagues thought that he was too young and too inexperienced. Shortly after John Hewson lost the unlosable election in 1993 and looked like experiencing a repeat performance at the next election, a leadership change was inevitable. The 30-something Costello opted for the deputy position under Alexander Downer rather than going for the top job. And when Downer fell in a heap shortly thereafter, Costello preferred to sit in the deputy’s position – – having seen under Downer the complete hash that inexperience can cause – – rather than aim for the leadership. Instead, he allowed John Howard, virtually the last man standing in the Liberal Party with any leadership credentials or experience, to take the leadership in the naive hope that it would be for only a short time and before too long the leadership would fall into his lap.
It is now too long, but leadership falls into no-one’s lap. Ask Paul Hasluck.
Timing continues to do damn Costello. The Coalition only went well wobbly in the opinion polls at the beginning of this year, just months away from an election, not the full year and a bit that Keating had. And jittery backbenchers would not risk a leadership change such a short time at out from an election, particularly after the experience at the most recent NSW state election when the Coalition tipped Peter Collins out of the leadership a short time out from an election only to suffer grievously at the election.
It looks too much like panic — though heaven and everyone else knows that the fistful-of-dollars spending policies of recent times must look much more like panic and then leadership change.
And it is the policy questions that must be so galling to Peter Costello now.
Like generals, political leaders so often fight the present election campaign on the precepts of previous campaigns. The spectre of the policy-rich John Hewson losing the unlosable election in 1993 still dogs our present leaders as they shrink themselves into ever smaller policy targets. The huge losses sustained by the Coalition in 1998 in the face of the far right challenge by One nation has it both major parties still flummoxed.
But what applies in 1993 and 1998 no longer apply in 2001. All of the qualitative research done by people like Hugh Mackay indicate that people are crying out for leadership and direction. The lesson of 1993, surely, is not that detailed, definitive policies are a political mistake in toto, and but rather that the particular detailed and definitive policies proposed by John Hewson were a mistake – – namely to the threaten Medicare, radically privatise and to change and flatten the tax system. Conversely, the lesson from 1998 is not that the policies of One Nation were embraced, but rather that support was given to someone who had the fearlessness to state things plainly in a political arena cluttered with obfuscation, windbaggery, qualification and trickery.
The centre-ground has always captured support in Australia’s political history — especially when it is defined clearly and spoken plainly, as Menzies and Curtin did. But our present major-party leaders are avoiding the centre ground.
If Shaun Carney has captured Costello’s position correctly, Costello stands for a softer position on the republic, reconciliation, welfare, immigration and refugees and for a more consistent policy of fiscal rectitude. These policies are far more in tune with the Menzies position that Howard so unsuccessfully aspires to. Present Costello doth protest too much in denying the policy differences. Unfortunately, he has to.
The Mackay qualitative research is showing absolutely no enthusiasm for Labor. But it is likely that Howard is driving people, almost against their will, into the Labor camp with his hardline policies on those areas that Costello wants to soften and with his weak economic approach of a recent months which has seen him squander the budget surplus thus threatening good inflation figures and lower interest rates.
People who might have stomached what they see as the unpalatable social policies in order to benefit from fiscal rectitude must now think after the past or few months of Howard squandering that there is nothing to lose by voting Labor.
But it is probably too late for Coalition backbenchers to take action against the man leading them in this direction. They are like Hamlet too.