Jan. 2005

Among the silly ideas we sometimes believe, there is none more fallacious than the 'fresh new ideas' of 'a younger generation' or a 'generational change' that win elections, and the 'two-time losers' who have no chance thereafter of winning anything. For Lyons, Curtin, Chifley, Menzies, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Howard won fifteen races against men younger than them. Curtin, Menzies, Calwell, Whitlam, Snedden, Hayden, Fraser, Peacock, Howard, Hewson, Keating, Beazley and Latham lost fifteen races against men older than them. And Downer and Crean prematurely succumbed before being tested at the polls by men older than them.

In Britain, moreover, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher and Major won eleven contests against their juniors. In each case the argument of experience versus inexperience, wisdom versus brashness or untested vigour, was decisive. With no ministerial experience the 'fresh-faced', 'new generational' Heath, Kinnock, Hewson, Downer, Latham and Brogden failed in their various bumptious bids for office. And although Hawke and Whitlam also lacked experience as ministers, one had been Opposition Leader or Deputy Opposition Leader for twelve years, the other a major union figure for eighteen years.

And the idea of 'two-time losers' never thereafter winning office is even sillier, I think. Menzies lost three elections and, most woundingly, his party leadership, and then his party, and two more elections on the numbers, yet came back at 55 to be Australia's longest-serving and smuggest Prime Minister. Chifley lost his seat and five preselections and yet became a successful Treasurer and a revered Prime Minister and Labor hero. Jeff Kennett lost four elections and, most woundingly, the party leadership twice, and yet came back to be the most praised and feared state premier of his day. John Howard lost an election, the party leadership and five party leadership ballots but came back, Lazarus with a triple bypass, to an unflagging, unyielding, somnolent, dreary success as Prime Minister. Winston Churchill lost his parliamentary seat twice and two elections as party leader, spent twenty-one years on the back bench and ended up a dauntless, epic world legend adored by right and left. Charles De Gaulle and Neville Wran...but why go on?

The simple fact is experience counts in most elections, and youth and freshness hardly at all. The very notion of 'youth and vigour' was invented by nervy Boston backroomers to speed their candidate John F. Kennedy, then forty-two and deathly sick, into the White House forthwith, lest his many ailments maim or discredit him in the next four years. Of the several new young leaders with fresh ideas that mimicked his valiant cool patrician charm a few, like Trudeau, Wilson and Dunstan, did pretty well and some, like Heath, Kinnock, Greiner, Bannon, Olsen, Goss and Keating, ended in rancorous ruination. Did youth do them any good? No, not really. And it gave them many more years to carp and whine and fester in exile. Youth, for them, was a big mistake, a tactical error, a booby prize. All now wish they had waited, or not entered the race at all.

This brings us to Kim Beazley, a patently unfresh, unyoung man of great experience already the age of Menzies at his second coming and, though ten years junior (as always) to Howard, yet senior to him -- by 19 years versus 18 -- in time spent in Cabinet or party leadership. In eloquence, ministerial record, debating skills, diplomatic skills, charisma, brains, wit and likeability he always outscores Howard -- but not, thus far, in wedge politics or media manipulation or populist backflips or moral questions lately deemed non-core, like the locking up of children. So how will he fare this time?

Well...it might be said, and said more plausibly now, that the times no longer suit John Howard. For it was he after all who helped kill 30,000 Iraqi children for no good reason and no good result; and 70,000 Iraqi adults; and this is widely known; and 40,000 tsunami victims (or so it could be argued) by selling off Radio Australia's broadcasting towers which might have warned them in time to run inland; and 3,000 East Timorese by refusing police protection for their needlessly slaughtered voters. This adds up to 143,000 people he had a hand in killing, or letting die (or so it could be argued), more than all the Australians killed in all our wars. More than all the Australians killed by, say, lung cancer these last nine years. More than the dead of Hiroshima. And this is widely known.

And he approved, did he not, the torture of Hicks and Habib and the torment, still unended, of the always innocent Bakhtiyaris in Woomera, Baxter and now again Afghanistan, and the million dollars they now must pay for their baseless punishment. And worse, he wants to sell Telstra; and further privatise health; and run down public schools; and encourage sexual harassers by letting them sack anyone they like. And this is widely known. Do the times still suit a man like this? I personally doubt it.

So Beazley, by merely talking sense and quoting figures, may well prevail this time round. No children-overboard panic will work against him this time, no deft sneer of 'ticker' from one forever clapping hands and whooping to George Bush's neanderthal war-dance, no charge that 'he flips and he flops' from one who does little else. And Beazley may beat him -- he may this time -- by even more than the 400,000 votes he beat him by in 1998, in votes but not alas in seats.

Or it may not come to that. For Howard may simply, sadly, sombrely, meekly shuffle off to Wollstonecraft or Hawks' Nest or Surfers Paradise, to nurse his grievously ailing wife, and procrastinate his memoirs, and cheat at dominoes, and reread the New Testament with shock and awe, and leave Costello to justify, with weakening smirks, the climbing interest rates, a war as vile as Vietnam, and an angry mortgaged aspirational outer suburbia baying for cheap and plentiful university places and hospital beds in vain.

He will be then, as he is now, six years younger than Beazley and looking pretty 'fresh' and 'new' and 'untried' and 'brash' and 'unreliable' after his next two deficits and five public fights with his brother, and flinging round blame in all directions. And pleading youthful error, and asking forgiveness. And frankly outclassed. By experience, intelligence and worthwhile, merciful policy from an older, more experienced and wiser man. It could happen. It's possible now at any rate, and we live in interesting, newly unageist, possibly changing, times.