A Blowhard on Struggle Street

Retread Australian Labor Party leader Kim Beazley has found himself in an unfamiliar position recently, ahead of John Howard’s Coalition in the latest polls.

Usually the media would be analysing what the man has done right, talking about turnarounds and that kind of thing, but Beazley has done almost nothing to contribute to Labor’s recent resurgence. The Coalition’s planned industrial changes are extremely unpopular, but it is the unions, not the ALP, that have taken the initiative with a series of television ads ramming home the implications of Howard’s new regime.

The changes, to be pushed through the now government-controlled Senate in the next couple of months, will damage the interests and power of Labor’s traditional support base of workers and unions. Those workers know full well what is coming and why, so it didn’t really take a lot to get them mobilised.

But the unions have managed to reach out through their advertising to a large constituency of marginal, often non-unionised, workers and create a very significant wedge, the first really effective wedge that has been created against Howard.

Beazley’s performance on the issue has been almost as abysmal as the government’s. His performance over proposed tax cuts was even worse, yet both of these issues should have played well to Labor’s heartland.

Never one to use one word where twenty will do, Beazley has so far missed the best opportunity he may ever have to really differentiate the ALP from the government.

The one word I am referring to is “battlers”. It is a word Howard has used to devastating effect to ally himself with a vast amorphous group of people who feel they are doing it hard for Australia. The unsung heroes of Struggle Street, one and all. True blue, mate.

Howard was still rolling the term out during the recent debate over tax cuts, appealing to the battlers while giving money to the privileged. It’s a great term because it embraces small businesses as well as workers and if you can do that you will win every election from now until kingdom come.

But where Howard seems to do this effortlessly, even when at his most hypocritical, you can never quite be sure who Beazley is appealing to. Instead of that one concise powerful term, a term that he could now make his own and steal off Howard forever, Beazley gives long tedious lists of the types of people who will suffer under the new laws.

Here he is talking about tax: “Those seven million Australians those nurses, those truckies, those people on the waterfront and on the building sites worked for the wealth of this country and they deserve a decent tax cut.”

On the surface this may seem fair enough, except when you are left off the list. What about the panel beaters, Kim?

"Doh! I forgot the panel beaters!"

"We say you can do a decent cut for folks on up to $100,000 and have their aspirations met and still do the right thing by the hardworking nurses, the truckies, the panel beaters, the men and women who are around about the $50,000 to $60,000 level who are treated so contemptuously."

And so on. Endlessly.

Beazley seems always to be reaching for some kind of grandeur in his pontificating, while Howard simply lets that one simple word “battlers” work its magic over and over again.
It is getting to the point where when I see Beazley appear on TV, I rush out to make a cuppa or an emergency dental appointment.

Anything.