Brian Bahnisch has a comment in a recent John Quiggin entry that I think is so on the money I'm going to send you over there. But first a few quotes:
Margo may have called a book "Not Happy, Paul" in the mid-nineties, but from what she has said, for very different reasons. Like many, she thought that Howard was a standard conservative, who would do no great harm, whereas Paul's neoliberal economic policies had caused a lot of grief. It was therefore reasonable to put Labor back into opposition to sort itself out and find its values.
I'm not sure I agree with him there. Or rather, I see his point, but unlike Margo I never supposed that Howard would do no great harm, so I could never have voted for him. And unfortunately, we effectively have a two party system.
Labor did some draconian things in the early nineties, but was always on the job and I think acceptably transparent about what was happening.
Compare this with Howard, who let 220 plus boats come and then cracked down on the Tampa in a brutal and opportunistic way. During the election period they were intentionally letting the boats coming further south so their interception was high profile and dramatic in the media, which is where they may have come unstuck with SEIV X.
Labor played their politics hard, but there wasn't the consistent use of fear to influence the Australian electorate, and there wasn't the serial lying and misleading both the parliament and the people. There also wasn't the blatant manipulation of events for political purposes and the total subvention of foreign policy to domestic politics, with scant regard for human rights and our international reputation.
There's more, but you should go and read it over there.
**This post was orginially published on Mountain View Commentary using Blogger.**
