The nutty professor
Spare a thought for Kim Beazley. For all his faults, he at least has some notion of the practical realities of politics. How galling it must be, then, to be lectured on how to win elections by armchair tactician Professor Robert Manne, as he is in today's Age.
The Prof has a simple, one-step formula for ALP victory in the next election, so simple that Kim must be slapping his own forehead with astonishment at his blindness. Apparently, in order to ensure a landslide triumph for the ALP at the next federal election, all Kim needs to do is make a 'non-revocable promise' to roll back Howard's IR laws. Unfortunately, the Prof has no suggestions as to how you produce a convincingly 'non-revocable' promise in the context of real-life election campaigning, something that no other politician has ever succeeded in doing. To say nothing of the possibility that the Prof might be underestimating electoral support for Howard's reforms. But I suppose everybody Prof Manne meets in the faculty lounge at La Trobe agrees with him on this, so who could possibly be voting for Howard?
Readers might recall that Beazley ran on a comparable non-revocable promise to roll back the dreaded GST in 2001 and got slaughtered at the polls. Does this invalidate the Prof's argument? Apparently not (see if you can follow this logic): despite being defeated on GST rollback - and Manne blankly refuses to engage with this as a refutation to his new election strategy - Beazley's real mistake was to abandon his opposition to the GST after that defeat. Got that? Run on a promise to roll back an existing legislation. Get thrashed. Keep up the same promise in opposition, after having been beaten on it, so that you can do it - or something else very like it - again next election. I hope the ALP caucus is taking notes.
Spare a thought for Kim Beazley. For all his faults, he at least has some notion of the practical realities of politics. How galling it must be, then, to be lectured on how to win elections by armchair tactician Professor Robert Manne, as he is in today's Age.
The Prof has a simple, one-step formula for ALP victory in the next election, so simple that Kim must be slapping his own forehead with astonishment at his blindness. Apparently, in order to ensure a landslide triumph for the ALP at the next federal election, all Kim needs to do is make a 'non-revocable promise' to roll back Howard's IR laws. Unfortunately, the Prof has no suggestions as to how you produce a convincingly 'non-revocable' promise in the context of real-life election campaigning, something that no other politician has ever succeeded in doing. To say nothing of the possibility that the Prof might be underestimating electoral support for Howard's reforms. But I suppose everybody Prof Manne meets in the faculty lounge at La Trobe agrees with him on this, so who could possibly be voting for Howard?
Readers might recall that Beazley ran on a comparable non-revocable promise to roll back the dreaded GST in 2001 and got slaughtered at the polls. Does this invalidate the Prof's argument? Apparently not (see if you can follow this logic): despite being defeated on GST rollback - and Manne blankly refuses to engage with this as a refutation to his new election strategy - Beazley's real mistake was to abandon his opposition to the GST after that defeat. Got that? Run on a promise to roll back an existing legislation. Get thrashed. Keep up the same promise in opposition, after having been beaten on it, so that you can do it - or something else very like it - again next election. I hope the ALP caucus is taking notes.
posted by cuckoo at
1:04 PM
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