Tonight is not our night. It is not the night we are hoping for.’ These were the words of the Australian Labor Party leader, Mark Latham as John Howard led the Liberal-National Coalition to its fourth consecutive federal election victory.
Indeed, it really was not the night for the Australian Labor party. Despite pre-election opinion polls showing a neck and neck race, the Coalition secured a comfortable victory with 40.9percent of the vote compared to Labor’s 37.7pecent. Many observers view it as a ringing endorsement of the government’s economic management.
Both Mark Latham and John Howard made the economy a central issue to their campaigns, vowing to keep interest rates low and the budget in surplus. Howard, who has been Prime Minister since 1996, has presided over a period of great prosperity and voters appear to have thought that Latham was too inexperienced and could jeopardise the country’s booming economy.
When Mark Latham became party leader in December last year, he was Labor’s youngest leader for more than a century and he set out to champion what he called ‘policies for people’. In just three months opinion polls showed Latham’s personal approval rate was the highest for an Opposition leader in 29 years.
Following last month’s election victory, John Howard is destined to become Australia’s second longest serving prime minister after Sir Robert Menzies. From the moment he took power back in 1996 he has driven his government and policies forward in the face of strong, sometimes violent opposition, on gun control, aboriginal land ownership, welfare spending and trade union reform. In 2001, with what looked like certain electoral defeat looming, Howard adopted a tough new stance against immigrants – refusing to allow a Norwegian ship carrying 400 asylum seekers to dock in Australian waters.
Whilst for most Australians the election was about ‘bread and butter’ domestic issues, Iraq was the key issue for international observers. John Howard took a huge political gamble when he committed Australian troops to the US-led war in Iraq despite massive domestic opposition. Mark Latham, who opposed the war from the start, said he would bring the troops home by Christmas, a stance that drew criticism from US President George Bush.
Many observers feel that Latham made his announcement on bringing Australian troops home spontaneously in the wake of the Madrid bombings and the defeat of the conservative Spanish government. This populist approach allowed John Howard to attack Latham’s stance as ‘cut and run’ which would undermine Australia’s relationship with the US and the UK, and damage Australia’s international reputation.
The impact of the 2004 Australian federal election does not end down under. John Howard is one of tripartite of leaders who backed the Iraq war that remain in control – their allies in Spain and Poland have already gone. The Iraq war has distorted normal political allegiances so much, that there would have been an audible sigh of relief from many on the centre-left of British politics when the rightwing incumbent John Howard defeated an Australian Labor Party whose leader had called for the country’s troops to be withdrawn from Iraq.
The election was seen by many as the first test for leaders that backed the Iraq war. If Howard had lost the election then this would have had global repercussions and would have left Tony Blair looking isolated internationally, reducing the so called coalition of the willing to just him and George Bush. The outcome of the Australian election also lends weight to the theory that Iraq will not be a deciding factor for voters in a likely 2005 General Election in the UK.
However, an element that could clearly have been a determining factor in the election result in Australia that is not applicable to the UK, is the impact of compulsory voting. Prior to the polling day, the result was too close to call, with many asserting that the election would be decided by the 35 percent of Australians who said that they had not made their mind up who to vote for. This begs the question that had it not been compulsory for the undecided electors to go to the polls then could the political landscape have been altered?
There are those who argue against compulsory voting in the UK as an infringement on civil liberties, yet, the manner in which the 2004 Australian federal election played out possibly illustrates that requiring people to take part in the democratic process is not the thin end of the wedge of a totalitarian society — on the contrary, it engages people who would otherwise not take part in, and be ignored by, the political process. Moreover, it makes politicians and political parties seek to engage with the electorate as a whole, rather than only with those who vote, right up until the polls close.