You know how sometimes you are watching sports and a team thinks they’ve got a big enough lead that they can just play safe and see the game out for a win? I think the All Blacks have done that a few times but it’s even more common in soccer: pack the defence and let them attack.
That seems to be the way John Howard is planning to handle Mark Latham. The only problem is that in soccer at least the strategy never seems to work. Teams try and close the game down, but more often than not they pay with defeat.
And it’s not like Howard has much of a lead any more. Some polls are already putting Latham in front.
Last night the government announced it would dismantle the extraordinarily generous super scheme that applies to MPs after Latham attacked it a few days ago. Why? According to Howard so that it doesn’t become a “political football”. Read that: “To get it off the table before the election."
What really happened? Well, Latham has just scored a big win, despite losing God knows how many thousands out of his own retirement income. He has an uncanny knack of finding stuff out of nowhere that really hurts the government.
Another example? Tonight I saw Darryl Williams speak at the Australian Internet Industry Association AGM dinner. Williams, as minister of technology, telecommunications and the arts is what you might call a safe pair of hands. Some say he’s a bit of a nightwatchman, aiming to keep Labor’s quicks under control and his stumps intact for the election. Since he took over from ABC-basher Richard Alston last year Williams has been totally invisible and unavailable for interviews.
His speech, to a crowd of 400 or so, was notable for the fact that those 400 seemed to carry on as if he wasn’t there. The hubbub of conversation continued all the way through despite the odd “Ssshhhh!” from a young Liberal here and there.
It was very different when Oz magazine founder and self-styled stirrer Richard Neville spoke. His was an electrifying appearance covering the internet, Iraq, the military industrial complex and the sorry state of most modern mass media. I asked permission to reproduce his speech here as one of our guest speakers and Neville agreed, so with a bit of luck you’ll see that in the next few days.
Anyway, the government’s strategy seems to be to neutralize issues and keep the lid on any volatile sectors in the lead-up to the election. Their strategy is to bore their way back to power. It looks like a loser to me.
Okay so what about that free trade deal, huh?
Well, I’m not too big to admit I was wrong. Australia is about to embark on a new era of free trade with the US while New Zealand contracts a bad case of the Argentinian disease and withers into the third world.
Australia minus the sugar industry, that is. But sugar is pretty third-world anyway. Right? Florida, the federal election lynchpin, is a sugar state, you see, so you can’t really have free trade in sugar. Oh and the beef farmers are going to have to wait eighteen years before quotas are dropped. In the meantime they have gained .17% of total US beef production.
Apart from that it’s a really great deal, ushering in a new era of trade etc and establishing a shining precedents for the future. Did I mention the dairy farmers? Oh. The dairy farmers will partake of this new era in trade too. But tariffs will remain and so will quotas, though these will be increased
However, Aussie companies will now have access to the $US80 billion Federal procurement market. How about that! Okay, so apparently 80 other countries already have that status. So what? What’s your point?
I guess in the end the devil is in the detail and we will just have to wait for the release of the final 500-page document. In the meantime, though, you might want to ask yourselves why it takes 500 pages to announce the arrival of free trade.
Just a thought.