Interest
I understand that all party advertising is to have stopped by midnight yesterday, although I don’t know if that includes, for example, union ads advocating ALP positions, but I’m looking forward to never having to hear the awful, negative, vitriolic ads – generated from either side – that have been bombarding me with increasing force and frequency, but particularly the Liberal ads, which, when they focus on the Labor leadership, pretty much just recycle the campaign attacks from 2004 – interest rates and “learner” leaders.

Interest rates have increased six times since the last election, when the Coalition ran on the promise that rates would “always be lower than under a Labor government,” a meaningless promise, if only because the independent Federal Reserve sets the rates, let alone that the Labor government was purely hypothetical.

And while all governments can be – and have been, including Howard himself – tarred with the “learner” brush, that doesn’t mean there’s any substance to the accusation. In fact, under the parliamentary system, the opposition establishes a “shadow” government, developing alternative policies, as necessary, albeit without the full public service resources of the government proper, and debating policy and proposing legislation (insofar as it’s possible – Howard’s double majority, in the House and Senate, has precluded the possibility of any but Coalition-initiated acts moving through).

So while the remaining Liberal ads have been about union “thugs” taking over every small business in the country by force (entertaining little fictions) and the Labor ads have focussed on the lack of future-minded policies from the Liberals (other than the [potentially “non-core”] promise that Howard will retire and crown his successor, voters with serious intentions will already have been focussed on whatever substantive material has been available. Most of that has come from the ALP.

The Liberals have relied on the message, “hey, it’s us; we’re just going to go on like this forever.” This ignores so many important longer-term areas of concern, not least among them climate change, which the Coalition has ignored for the last 11 years, and the eventual need for the economy to end its reliance on the resources boom. Making industrial relations unfair to workers doesn’t position the economy into flexibility, but entrenches businesses while allowing employee exploitation. Labor has offered more in both areas and with an awareness that these are not matters for merely the next three years, but the next thirty.

Howard’s reign has been all about power, a lesson he learned from childhood: the top is only the top if you can keep everyone else beneath you. This is what he has done with his colleagues, first among them his perpetual heir-in-waiting, Peter Costello, and with the Australian public, who have allowed their own interests to dominate their lives and re-elected him to see to the preservation of a increasingly tenuous status quo. I think enough of us have finally seen through that self-interested veil to Howard’s real motivations and will, like me, vote Labor on Saturday.