Here we go again. That would be at the average person’s reaction to the slanging match between Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beazley this week.
Howard said, “The Opposition Leader must deliver clear Yes or No answers. The time for slithering and sliding, chameleon-like, according to the audience he is addressing, is over.”
And Beazley’s said, “[Howard] has been all over the place like a fruit bat over the course of the last six months, ladling money out to try and defend his political hopes.”
But far from worrying about degeneration into slanging matches, we should welcome these two epithets for the valuable understanding they give to the state of politics in Australia. They are deadly accurate descriptions of each leader. Taken together they provide a far more insight than the usual waffle and humbug.
Let us take the fruit bat first. The fruit uses echolocation. It is the use of short high-frequency sound pulses. These reflect from objects in the vicinity and enable the bat to either to home in (and devour) the object or to avoid crashing into the object. So when one sees a fruit bat in the evening sky it appears to fly a in a haphazard way. In fact, it is not flying haphazardly and rather it is flying in a highly directed way to avoid collision and it to move to where it can pickup sustenance. Echolocation describes quite accurately how the modern political operative works. Bounce an idea out and see what comes back. Depending on what comes back, you home in or avoid. How better to describe Howard? There is no leadership and no risk in echolocation.
Also Howard does emit short high-frequency sound pulses when agitated by a television or radio interviewer. But leave that aside. Look at the way he uses echolocation to homes in opportunistically at any stray prey around: IVF for lesbian couples, human cloning, or further in the past a quick opportunistic grab after the Port Arthur massacre to do something about it gun laws (the right deed for the wrong reason).
And look at the way he avoids obstacles, especially before the 1996 election. He used echolocation to avoid putting his real view about this GST before the electorate or indeed outlining any policy detail at all.
And what about the chameleon? Here is Kim Beazley, a bright pink Fabian faced with changes enacted by the Howard Government on health and education. Beazley the chameleon changes colour to pale blue. He says he will not take away the tax break for private health cover. He says he will not take away the extra money that the fruit bat has given to private-schools. Indeed, it was that very unwillingness of the chameleon to tell us which of the fruit bat’s other new spending items he would jettison which led the fruit bat to come up with the epithet chameleon for Beazley.
But at the truly amazing thing about this slanging match is that the epithet Beazley applied to Howard equally applies to Beazley himself and that the epithet that Howard applied it to Beazley in turn applies to Howard.
Howard is a chameleon. This hard conservative has changed his spots to fit whatever ephemeral popular view is out there.
Beazley is a fruit bat. He uses echolocation to avoid obstacles. Indeed, he uses circumlocution to avoid obstacles.
The chameleon and the fruit bat are very similar creatures. They both have finely tuned at tributes for avoiding danger.
How did this happen? I think it is because both major parties have misread the real lessons of the 1993, 1996 and 1998 elections.
The lesson they brought out of 1993 – when the Liberals’ John Hewson set out very detailed policies – was that political parties should not have detailed policies before elections because they provide an easy target for someone like Paul Keating to shoot down. It was the wrong lesson to drawn from Hewson’s 1993 defeat. The real lesson should have been not to put up detailed (italic) objectionable, ideologically driven (end italic) policies. There’s nothing wrong with detailed policies if they are good ones.
The lesson the parties took from 1996 was that it is better to do and say nothing and let government fall into your lap. That is how Howard achieved his victory. That is the wrong lesson. The real lesson is that arrogant governments will lose.
The lesson the parties took from 1998 is that taxation proposals spell electoral trouble. Howard’s GST cost him dearly. That is wrong lesson. The lesson from 1998 should have been that if you swing too far to the extreme (to the right in Howard’s case) you will suffer electorally. If you raise taxes and in fact spend it on education and health for all (not just the elite) you will be okay.
Howard and Beazley think that if they call a spade a spade they will be shot down. They think it is electorally dangerous to be definite about anything — better to waffle, prevaricate, qualify, hedge and pander to this week’s radio talk-back.
In fact, one of the few illuminating, definite, incisive statements either leader has made in the past year has been their description of each other. They truly are fruit bats and chameleons.