by Jason Falinski

The Victory
by Pamela Williams
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, 370pp, $24.95
ISBN 1-86448-405-5

This is the first book in Australian politics that attempts to give readers an inside look at a Liberal Party federal campaign. There have been others that dissected federal campaigns from afar, and there have been inside accounts of Labor Party campaigns, but never an inside account of a Liberal Party campaign. This alone makes Pamela Williams’s book worth reading, but fails to live up to expectations.

When Williams addressed the Sydney Institute last year she was asked why the Liberals had changed their minds and let her cover the story from the inside. She said she did not know. This sums up the narrative of the book – startling facts and mind boggling stories that simply leave the reader wondering if there is more. Given the unusual access that she had to the Liberal campaign it is disappointing; there is a remarkable lack of intimacy between Williams and the Liberal campaign. (Although this would be less surprising if, as I have been told, she was only invited to one campaign strategy meeting, and then only for the first twenty minutes.)

In fact, from this reader’s point of view, she gets closer to the drama of the ALP campaign in spite of not being ‘inside’ it. Nevertheless, even here there are vital pieces of the puzzle missing that must have occurred to Williams. For example, when Keating’s office was vehemently arguing that Gary Gray (the ALP National Secretary) should open an attack on Howard, his team, and their past, Gray resisted. He was resisting this attack so vigorously that he went so far as to deceive Keating’s office about his
intentions.

Separated by thirty pages, both Andrew Robb and Mark Textor (the Liberal Party’s Federal Director and its pollster) comment that the Liberal Party was vulnerable to this line of attack. In fact, Robb was sufficiently concerned to have a mock campaign prepared by the Liberal’s advertising agency to try to anticipate Labor’s attack and plan a counter. Williams had all of this information, and yet she failed to consolidate it and draw some obvious
conclusions, such as that Keating was right and Gray was wrong.

Williams records the now well-reported ‘Captain Wacky’ nickname earned by Keating, and Gray’s decision simply not to spend money on advertising in the last week of the campaign, without remark. Surely this was a large problem: the ALP’s campaign head was openly deriding and ignoring the wishes of its leader. If Gray thought Keating so bad, why did he not do what the Liberals had done and agitate for a change in leadership, or go himself? Yet, search as you might, there is no analysis and no comparison between choices made in the two camps.

There is no serious discussion of the legitimate protest of Keating’s office that Gray had no answer to the government’s falling popularity. In the entire book only Russell, Watson and Keating enunciate a possible election strategy. The strategy involved reinventing welfare and the public service along similar lines to what Bill Clinton was doing in the United States. Keating failed to implement the strategy because he felt it was too late in the day to implement it and it would have been seen as cynical.

That is it. Regardless of Gray’s criticism, Keating’s office were the only group of people in the book who worked out an ALP campaign strategy. Gray could only tell them how bad things were. As Andrew Robb has admitted to this writer, the strategy would have worked; in fact, the Liberals were expecting it about a year earlier. So there you have it: Keating and Robb thought of the same strategy, but not Gary Gray, the one person responsible for an ALP re-election campaign strategy. Remarkably, Gray escapes any criticism from Williams.

In comparison, what hope did the Liberals have of Williams noticing the little things that make up a campaign, such as a Liberal crying in the campaign headquarters after a bad day? Where was the analysis of the drama and the emotional roller coaster that is a federal election campaign? Surely this demanded further investigation; it must have been a pointer to a highly charged atmosphere in Liberal Campaign Headquarters.

Williams’s book suffers from the ‘too many spin doctors spoiling a story’ phenomenon. How she could have believed some of the nonsense on the Liberal side about who was responsible for aspects of the campaign is beyond me. And certainly, on the ALP side, the account of the ‘Letters Affair’ in the last days of the campaign does not sound right. Reading Williams you are left with the impression that Willis’s office, known for their thoroughness and caution, were guilty of rushing in where angels fear to tread, while all the time the ALP National Headquarters, which had sent Carmen Lawrence out earlier in the campaign to denounce Howard with a faulty media transcript, were preaching caution. Willis clearly was not part of the ‘off the record’ briefing sessions that everyone, except Keating, appeared to be in on.

For all of this, Williams’s book does convey some important aspects of modern day politics and political campaigns that are worth further analysis. She accurately describes the strategy of modern political campaigns that have made oppositions more dangerous than governments. By keeping yourself a small target, and saving your campaign resources until the campaign, it is possible to make enormous headway against any government. This strategy was first brought to Australia by Petro Georgiou and used to get Jeff Kennett elected by a massive majority; to date, it has only been used by the Liberals, not against them. One worry in Williams’s description of the campaign is the now enormous amounts of money required to run campaigns and the potential that could have, in the future, to distort government policy.

Williams recently wrote a long piece in the Financial Review about the Liberals’ strategy to keep Howard prime minister and the manoeuvring of the Victorian division. Once again, it was a good narrative, but failed to explain the motivation and thought processes behind the strategic decisions being made. The Victory does not give you the insight into the Liberal Party that you might hope for, and the Labor Party account is reduced to Gray and others, making a preemptive strike against the Keating tirade that never came. The Victory is a good start, but more is needed, and this writer hopes that Williams gets the chance at the next federal election to once again write from ‘the inside’ of the Liberal campaign.

Jason Falinski was national president of the Young Liberal Movement in 1997.

 
by Paul Martyn

The results of the 1996 election were stunning in their magnitude. The ruling Labor party was devastated by the loss of 40 seats, while the Liberals returned from 13 long years in the wilderness. But beyond the immediate electoral landscape, what are the long term lessons of this event? Pamela Williams’s chronicle of the 1996 campaign, The Victory, provides the detail from which the implications of the end of the Keating government can be drawn.

The book itself does not pretend to be a scholarly work, unlike The Politics of Retribution, edited by John Warhurst. It is, rather, intended to be an account of the events leading up to and including the campaign, largely from the viewpoint of the ‘insiders.’ Williams relies heavily on the reflections of the two campaign directors – Gary Gray for Labor and Andrew Robb for the Liberals. This provides some fascinating and at times humorous anecdotes and insights. However the private agendas of her correspondents do intrude, so the cautious reader should beware – because of the ‘inside’ nature of many of the events, Williams understandably has been unable to confirm the details provided.

Looking at the 1996 election through the prism provided by The Victory, it is possible to discern, with hindsight, some fascinating developments. I identify three: a Labor myth, a Liberal tragedy, and the first stirrings of New (Australian) Labor.

The Labor myth is that of the ‘Howard Battlers,’ a theme promoted heavily by Andrew Robb in the book. Williams relates Andrew Robb’s view that a large part of the blue collar, traditionally Labor voting working class had been permanently detached from the ALP by John Howard’s bland ‘For All of Us’ message. The phenomenon has been said to be similar to the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the United States. Robb asserted that Labor was out of touch with these people, and that the party’s concern with socially progressive Big Picture issues has alienated this constituency for some time to come

Like most myths, there is a basis of truth for the Howard Battler phenomenon. True it is that blue collar voters deserted Labor in droves in the 1996 election. Recent polls suggest, however, that rather than being a permanent realignment, the blue collar voters are strongly returning to the ALP; the South Australian result particularly suggests this. Whatever the reasons for this abrupt reversal, be it reaction to Coalition policies or Cheryl Kernot, the point is that the ‘Howard Battlers’ are a myth. The Prime Minister has no following amongst the ‘hardhat’ constituency. If anything, 1996 may be seen as a one-off election, the culmination of many one-off factors, such as Paul Keating’s persona and Labor’s 13 years in office. What it does not foreshadow is a seachange in the
landscape of Australian voting patterns.

The second development suggested by the 1996 campaign, as related by Williams, is the political and policy failure of the Howard government, a tragedy for the Coalition. Most commentators, and many former supporters, agree that the Coalition in government has failed to achieve many of the objectives that it set itself and has been a poorly managed and reactive administration. The origins of this failure clearly derive from the Liberals’ ‘small target’ campaign fought in 1996. Williams cites one member of the national campaign committee who
comments:

This approach, while successful in winning an election, has had an adverse impact on the Coalition in office. It required the need to distinguish between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ promises, and magnified the feeling of betrayal and disenchantment in the wider community, ironically greatest amongst business. Now Paul Keating’s chosen theme of Leadership resonates sharply. The origins of the current malaise lie in the decisions taken prior to the 1996 election.

The third, and most surprising, development that I identified in the book was the beginnings of the nascent ‘New Labor’ in the final year of the Keating administration. Currently there are moves within the ALP led by a younger generation like Mark Latham and Lindsay Tanner (and maybe Cheryl Kernot?) to promote a vision of a reinvigorated Labor, modelled on Tony Blair’s successful version in Britain. New Labor seems to be a party dedicated to opportunity and responsibility, to the individual and the community.

Williams details attempts by two of Keating’s senior advisers, Don Russell and Don Watson, to revamp Labor’s appeal on lines similar to that of Bill Clinton. This was a strategy of ‘leading from the centre,’ stressing personal responsibility and the virtues of work. One proposal was a ‘work for the dole’ scheme, although tied to training and skills development unlike the current Coalition scheme. It was proposed to introduce a new approach to welfare, involving mutual obligations between recipients and the state. While in the end these ideas were not carried through (Keating was concerned, rightly, that it was too late for major change), we can see the first signs of an ‘embryonic’ new Labor emerging.

With a federal election likely late in 1998, The Victory serves to remind those interested in politics of the events of 1996. While Australia stills lacks election studies of the calibre of Theodore White’s magnificent Making of the President series in the United States, Williams’s book is well written and, with the benefit of hindsight, makes thought-provoking reading.

Paul Martyn is a Queensland solicitor with honours degrees in Law and Politics.

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