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Wednesday, 8 August 2007

Old Habits Die Hard

It is differences of opinion, it appears, that make a Coalition when it comes to election campaign tactics. The last few days have revealed a clear difference in approach between the Liberal Party and the National Party.

Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile told the Federal Council of his National Party in Canberra on Saturday that people don't want to hear that Labor had a $10 billion budget deficit in 1995-96 or that it ran up $96 billion in government debt. "They know we've fixed Paul Keating's legacy", he said. "They've thanked us already, by re-electing the Coalition in 1998, 2001 and 2004. And they don't want to hear esoteric arguments about macroeconomic statistics or budget measures."

In the House of Representatives yesterday, Prime Minister John Howard showed he had either not read his deputy's words or he did not agree with them.

 "When his party was last in office," the PM reminded the Leader of the Opposition and all the rest of us, "it was not a given that families could get work. In fact, it was the norm for over a million Australians that they could not get work. I remind the Leader of the Opposition that unemployment in Australia -the greatest measure of the dividend of economic policy-is now at a 33-year low. I remind the Leader of the Opposition-and this affects working families all over Australia-that interest rates under this government for housing have averaged 7¼ per cent over the last 11½ years, compared to 12¾ per cent under the previous government, a clear difference of five percentage points. . The former Labor government not only left us with a $96 billion debt."

That the old habit of fighting elections against Paul Keating dies hard for Liberals was reinforced by Treasurer Peter Costello's question time contribution. No National Party Minister was going to stop him having a word or two about budget measures.

"When I first became Treasurer", said Mr Costello, "the budget was $10 billion in deficit. The year before that it was $13 billion in deficit. The year before that it was $17 billion in deficit. The year before that there was a deficit of four per cent of GDP. If we had a budget deficit of four per cent of GDP, as Labor had in the mid-nineties, it would be a deficit of over $40 billion for one year."

Mr Vaile would surely have been shaking his head at the prospect of even more such "esoteric arguments about macroeconomic statistics" when the Reserve Bank delivered its interest rate rise. His campaign recipe is to "cut through the pollie-speak and run strong local campaigns."

Promises of a Distrusted Man

The clever but tricky label Labor has been applying to John Howard all this year seems to have stuck if the Liberal Party pollster is to be believed. And if it is true that many people do not believe anymore what the Prime Minister says, he is just getting in to more and more electoral trouble by repeating his mantra that interest rates will always be lower under a Coalition Government than under Labor.

Mr Howard was back on that theme as soon as the Reserve Bank released its statement this morning about the rise in interest rates but the problem is that the people believe they heard that same Mr Howard proclaiming during the last election campaign in 2004 that his Government would keep interest rates low. That was the clear impression the Liberal Party advertisements set out to leave and the improvable qualification about being lower than Labor strikes many people as typical weasel words from a politician.