SYDNEY, 24 June 2004 — During Australia’s last general election campaign in 2001 the Labor Party’s Mark Latham played a cameo role by getting himself on the front pages of national newspapers by breaking a taxi driver’s arm in a dispute over a fare.
This time round, as Labor leader, the tubby tyke from Sydney’s backblocks is making headlines with catchy grabs on immunization, plastic bags, dentistry, reading to children and junk food.
His campaign to deny a fourth term to Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition is Australia’s first taste of the “third way” politics espouses so successfully in Britain by Labour leader Tony Blair and in the United States by former President Bill Clinton.
Rather than a head-to-head contest between the right and the left, the election campaign in Australia pits a coalition that wants to talk about economic management and national security against a party that ducks and weaves on those issues but strikes telling blows on line items like apprenticeships and hospital waiting lists, the need to curb plastic bag use and to fit the elderly with dentures.
It’s a battle in which Latham and his wordsmiths have gained traction with bob-each-way slogans that echo Blair’s deliciously appealing “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” headline-grabber.
Howard, in contrast, flails at an adversary who refuses to fight on the traditional platforms of budgets and plans.
“This is something that we have never seen before in Australian politics,” veteran broadcaster Barry Cassidy told his listeners on Australia’s ABC Radio. “Latham is coming up with issues that you would have never dreamt of before.”
It certainly appears to be working. The latest opinion poll puts Labor in an election-winning position of 52 percent against the coalition’s 48 percent.
The 64-year-old Howard, who has spent 30 years in Parliament and been prime minister for eight years, still holds the edge in the popularity stakes. Forty-eight percent of respondents preferred him as prime minister to 43-year-old Latham, in Parliament for 10 years and without ministerial experience.
Election analysts note that Labor led the coalition by five percentage points until the final weeks of campaigning in 2001 and that a late spurt delivered Howard a narrow victory with 50.95 percent of the votes cast and 83 of the 150 seats in Parliament.
To unseat Howard, and have a clear majority in Canberra, Labor needs to improve on its 49.05 percent of the two-party preferred vote in 2001 and win back eight seats.
Howard swept to power in 1996 by a successful appeal to disaffected Labor voters in the suburbs. He wowed the upwardly mobile with his pitch that they all had a “right to succeed, to accept responsibility, to work harder if they wish and to be rewarded for it”. It was classic conservative politics.
When Latham took over the leadership of Labor in December, he began pilfering conservative policies, attacking the hard left of his party and appealing for old Labor voters to come back and reunite with the “new” Labor. “Too many (Labor) activists are now willing to excuse or rationalize away bad behavior, such as juvenile crime, welfare fraud and illegal immigration,” he told the party unfaithful, urging them to return and reclaim their party.
To the dismay of the left, Latham joined with Howard in declaring that only heterosexuals could marry, only asylum-seekers arriving with visas could escape the grim immigration detention centers, and only those unable to work could draw the dole, or unemployment benefits.
