No More Shadowing John Howard

1590 words

Extract

HOW DO YOU LOOK THROUGH A MOB OF INGRATIATING JOURNALISTS sucking up to become a new government’s chief news contact for the next four years? How do you look through a mob of ingratiating Labour Movement and State Labor hacks looking for a job in Canberra? How do you do these things and look out into Australia and see what the people really think of you?
John Howard had an uncanny ability to look out and see what ordinary people thought. It was because he never stopped travelling around to see ordinary people in their day to day lives. The thing is ordinary people don’t want to give you bad news: they don’t want to tell you‘mate it’s time to move on and give someone else a chance’. So in the end John Howard’s radar failed him. He mistook ordinary peoples’ dislike of Peter Costello for a vote of confidence in his own leadership. He forgot that Australians very rarely let dominating people stay in power for more than ten years. He had a very good run.
The problem for Labor – the party of the ordinary people – is that it is insulated from the ordinary people by a bureaucracy of labour movement activists, environmentalists, trade unionists and other heroes who claim to represent the ordinary people. So in fact Kevin and Julia and Wayne are now, in my opinion, farther from ordinary Australians than John Howard ever was.