Shouts from the desert

Commentators have been suggesting that Howard would attempt to turn this year's Federal election into a referendum on security. This seems unlikely. His security message has been seriously muddled by the planned British reductions &emdash; even if the regions Britain has been dealing with are safer (a claim that is seriously questionable), if the Bush Administration is right that more troops are needed then the British troops ought to be redeployed elsewhere in Iraq. On the one hand you have the Bush Administration, with Howard's support, claiming that more troops are needed, and you have the British Government reducing troops. You cannot escape the contradiction by saying one particular region is safe when the troops purportedly no longer needed there are purportedly needed elsewhere.

Moreover, Howard's claim to be strong on security have been seriously undermined by actual events. He likes to position himself as the person who will make the tough decisions, but it is not enough to make the tough decisions &emdash; you have to make the right decisions. On that score Howard's major strategic military decisions, made in concert with George W. Bush, have amounted to one serious blunder after another. These mistakes clearly demonstrate that Howard does not understand the nature and limitations of military power or military strategy, and his continued insistence that he has not made any mistakes in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary demonstrate he is unable to learn from those mistakes.

Rudd, on the other hand, is presenting a consistent message &emdash; that at this point the only thing to do about the whole misconceived enterprise is to plan our own exit from it. While his capacity for understanding military and foreign relations issues is untested, there is not much room for him to perform worse than Howard, and Rudd at least can learn from Howard's mistake.

Howard must have some idea of these limitations on the security issue by now, and will be seeking to move the topic of the debate. In 2004 his performance in the election was not due to winning on all issues overall, but due to determining the issues that would be used to decide the election &emdash; he brought issues where Labor was weak to the forefront of the debate, and pushed issues where he was weak out of the way.

Last time there was an obvious issue for Howard to latch onto - it was well known that interest rates were Labor's key weakness. This time around there is nothing that stands out so clearly. Howard cannot run the interest rates scare campaign again because he already knows the ALP have found a way to neutralise it, and the recent interest rate rises have not helped him on that score either. Home prices are down in the more populous States, especially in the "aspirational" districts the Prime Minister has been counting on, which combines with interest rates to make this group feel less well off than they did last time. Rental prices are moving up, which is going to make it hard for him to attract that constituency. While the economy is growing on paper, this is only due to rapid growth in the mining industries, and areas of the nation distant from those industries are experiencing either static or negative growth.

The Prime Minister is sure to come up with something between now and the election, but it is likely to be something unexpected or, as in 2001, a non-issue that he will play up to be something more significant &emdash; and preferably, from his point of view, more threatening &emdash; than it is.