LESSONS FOR POMS

David Butler thinks that

Mr Kinnock could learn from Labor's victory in Australia

Sydney To switch from a British election to an Australian one is to see some strange reverse caricatures. An incumbent Prime Minister wins a third election in a row — but it is a Labor Prime Minister. An opposition suffers from its loony extremists — but it is on the Right not the Left. A third party seeks the balance of power — but in the Upper House not the Lower House. Forty-three per cent of the vote is plenty for one incumbent's re-election — but 51 per cent makes it a damned near run thing for the other. The stock market, which trembles in one place at a Labour' victory, trembles in the other at a Labor defeat.

Yet in some respects the mirror was not a distorting one. In both countries there was a general reaction of boredom to a packaged election. In both countries the opposition suffered from inadequately costed tax proposals. In both countries it was a two-person campaign.

Australia is different from Britain; it has a federal system that generates six strong and distinct state loyalties; it has compul- sory voting which makes traditional get- out-the-vote campaigning irrelevant; its right wing is divided between the urban Liberal party and the rural National party; and it has preferential voting which allows third parties to stand without splitting support.

But Australia, with an essentially two- party system, works on the Westminster model; in 1987 an English observer still feels very much at home during an election that is fought over four weeks on the television, with ad-men and party mana- gers scheming to get the right picture at the top of the evening bulletins with their man developing the approved theme in the approved words.

It is the unexpected that provides in- terest in campaigns — but the new style of carefully prepared effects leaves little scope for surprise either in Canberra or London. The occasional minor gaffe, when a junior figure says something at variance with party policy, can be brushed off, while the polished professionals at the top go through their prepared routines.

For all its distances and its state diversity Australia is a united country. Last Satur- day the Labor share of the votes was between 49 per cent and 52 per cent in each of the five mainland states and the anti- Labor swing varied by less than one per cent, except in Queensland, where the antics of their remarkable 76-year-old pre- mier, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, cost the opposition dear and allowed Labour a net gain in seats despite a national loss in votes. Sir Joh, who, with his National party, has for 19 years dominated Queens- land, tried this year to move on to the Australian-wide scene with a proposal for a flat rate income tax of 25 per cent. He failed to get the federal leader of the National Party ousted and, though he attracted widespread populist support, he was forced to suspend his crusade to take over personally in Canberra soon after the election was announced. But Sir Joh — and his most notable supporter, Mr (now Senator) John Stone, a longtime head of the Treasury — continued to rock the opposition boat, demanding even more stringent tax and spending cuts than those which John Howard, the Liberal leader, so recklessly promised.

The economy did, indeed, provide the focus of the Australian contest — even more than is usual in democratic elections.

The terms of trade have gone bad for the lucky country and real living standards have fallen. The market is unfavourable for wheat and for some, but not all, of those staple exports in agriculture and • minerals, on which Australia depends.

Unemployment refuses to go down. Any government presiding over this bad patch should have lost the election. Only a two per cent swing was needed, and Australian voters have, by tradition, an exceptionally sensitive hip-pocket nerve.

But the Opposition threw away their chance. Two years ago, the dry, competent but uncharismatic John Howard pushed out the wetter, but more personable, Andrew Peacock as Liberal leader and moved the party so sharply to the right that a significant number of influential figures were left hoping for electoral defeat in order to get rid of Howard and his policies.

But Mr Howard's most serious difficulties came from being outflanked by Sir Joh.

Populist pressures from the National party made it electorally impossible to go ahead with the consumption tax — a version of VAT — which alone would have allowed income tax cuts big enough for the `incen- tivation' with which Mr Howard promised to turn around the Australian economy.

Meanwhile the government was manag- ing to put a good face on its troubles. Bob Hawke never lost his extraordinary popu- lar appeal while his powerful Treasurer Paul Keating retained the confidence of the business community — and behind these two was the most sharply impressive front bench of postwar years, contrasting sharply with Mr Howard's decidedly low- grade team.

In Britain last month Mr Kinnock, with a moderate programme and a brilliantly orchestrated campaign, could only get 32 per cent of the vote for Labour. A common verdict was that a Labour party based on declining trade unions, on the diminishing percentage of council tenants and manual workers, and on a coalition of deprived minorities could never win back domi- nance in a nation of owner-occupiers and white-collar employees. Its base was erod- ing fatally.

But other middle-class economies — Sweden, New Zealand and, most of all, Australia—have trade union-linked Labour governments, getting around 50 per cent of the vote. What can Mr Kinnock learn from Mr Hawke? In the 1960s the Australian Labor party suffered from an impossibilist Left. In the 1970s the first Labor govern- ment for a generation was thought guilty of gross economic mismanagement. But all that has long since been put behind. A small (and strangely inarticulate) left-wing minority complain that Hawke and his colleagues have sold out, abandoning any socialist pretension as they free the curren- cy, privatise the public sector, and make friends with big business.

Labour has indeed captured the middle ground in an increasingly right-wing coun- try ( though one must not exaggerate the achievement when its very dry opponents have just come within 2 per cent of topping it). Labor's success has lain in offering to middle Australia the image of competent, caring, pragmatic government. Aided by a strongly centralised party constitution, it has had the skill to convert, or intimidate, or marginalise its left-wing critics so that it now contains nothing to frighten the very conservative Australian electorate.

Mr Kinnock has far more embarrass- ments then Mr Hawke — in the nature of his trade union movement, in local councils and in left-vving ideologists. And, with a less authoritarian party structure, he prob- ably lacks the weapons, even if he has the will, to move the party safely on to the centre ground, with an image that will not frighten middle Britain (let alone the City) and will make it possible to bounce back to an election-winning 40 per cent.

But should he want to? Mr Hawke's bland approach signals the death of much of the traditional battleground of 20th- century politics. Since the far Right will never prevail in Australia, it seems likely that a consensual, Hawke-Peacock, Tweedledum and Tweedledee politics will now be the order of the day. Electors will have to choose between ins and outs, not between ideologies; between fine-point print, not between alternatives.

An ordered society, as well as a func- tioning democracy, demands a high degree of mutual agreement. But a politics in which there is no left wing seems oddly empty. Mr Kinnock should go to Australia to see how a Labor party can win and hold power in an advanced nation. But even if the British Labour party would let him, he may not want to follow suit.