Reconciliation and Range Rovers.

“I’m convinced we are dealing today with a new alignment of ideas and individuals; a coming together of forces I have not witnessed in 32 years of public life.

As always, the Australian people themselves are the best guide.”….. John Howard

The PM is right in more ways than he probably meant to let on.

That alignment of individuals is the blue and white collar workers on the one hand, and affluent professionals and their spouses on the other. The former make up the seats that provides the Coalition its governing majority, the latter makes up the seats that provide the Coalition its very existence.

Over the last few weeks, Liberal polling has seemingly been undertaken in seats like Kooyong, Goldstein, Higgins, Wentworth, North Sydney, Ryan etc. We know this, because my email box gets filled up with people telling me that they’ve just been polled, where they live and the name of the company that polled them. These seats aren’t just “seats” in the normal meaning of the word; they are the very heart of the Liberal party that pumps leadership blood and fund raising capability through the body of the entire organisation.

Without those types of Range Rover seats, there is no functioning Liberal party.

Let’s cut to the chase here – this is no Howard conversion on the goat track to Damascus, this is Howard as he has always been when he not only finds himself in trouble, but when he has an absence of good advice to temper his usually ill-conceived political reactions.

The underlying political objective of this sort of backflip-dressed-up-as-leadership is as transparent as it will be counterproductive.

The political problem Howard faces is that the Liberals are dangerously bleeding votes in their heartland seats, but for a completely different set of reasons that they are bleeding votes out in the rest of the electorate. While non-core seats held by the Liberals are getting hammered by Workchoices, housing affordability, childcare issues, the age of the government and a couple of dozen other issues, the core Liberal heartland seats are bleeding for a different set of reasons – indigenous affairs failure, dog whistling blowback, Iraq and the general 11 year rejection by the government of anything resembling small “L” liberal values. As long as the ALP had leaders that gave these people an allergic reaction, they were always going to suck it up and take it – simply as consequence of there being a powerful lack of alternatives. With Rudd being a viable proposition, however temporary, these voters can and are now exercising their ability to vote according to issues that are important to them.

This has resulted in the worst possible Catch 22 situation for the Liberal party. Any attempt to shore up their vote in those heartland seats, seats that provide the very foundation for the Liberal party being a viable political organisation, have the unfortunate consequence of alienating Coalition voters in regional and outer metropolitan seats. For every vote in North Sydney that can be regained by symbolic gestures on reconciliation, there is a vote lost in Flynn or Herbert. Yet, in those seats where the Range Rover count is low, the economic policy program of the Coalition no longer resonates – pork is expected, tax cuts are assumed and middle class welfare has become viewed as a right. Workchoices hangs over these electorates like a dark cloud and neutralises to a large extent any potential gain from Coalition economic policy initiatives. The only weapons left in the armoury are the rhetorical ones, the culture war spin-offs of dog whistling politics and various flavours of socially conservative finger pointing.

Yet for every Coalition initiative that tries on this rhetoric to shore up their vote in Flynn and Herbert, a vote becomes lost in Goldstein or Kooyong.

Thus we have Howard and reconciliation – trying to walk both sides of the street on an issue that he hopes can pander to enough of the heartland voters, while jumping through hoops to frame the issue in a way that won’t alienate the non-core seats. But make no mistake here, if it comes down to a choice between the two, the non-core seats can go and take a running a jump. Firewalls have centres – that’s the point of them.

But the framing of the speech, the fluff that’s supposed to temper any negative reaction in the non-core seats is a waste of time. The only Burke most voters in Herbert and Flynn are familiar with is Don Burke. The TV news reports will carry the reconciliation message and the insertion of blackfellas in the Constitution – the framing doesn’t get a look in when it comes to 15 second sound bites. There’s the usual Crosby-Textor strategic prism to view this through (although if they were behind this, they’ve gone more troppo than Howard himself). Howard trying to boost his personal standing via enhancing perceptions of his leadership, showing that he has ideas, demonstrating flexibility and policy adaptation in the face of a changing world etc etc.

But in the regions, all that positioning guff will just flow past a lot of the conservative punters like an afternoon breeze. The only thing they’ll see is “Backflip”, “stands for nothing”, “betrayed my trust”, “will do anything to get elected” type thing. Especially when the government starts using gay rights to shore up their heartland seats as they are planning to do shortly.

If the only thing stopping these people from voting for Rudd is Howards conservative values, and if it looks as if he has ditched them to try and win an election (a reconciliation and a gay rights agenda will ensure that perception) – there is nothing stopping these conservatives, these conservatives that have voted for both Howard and Beattie for example, from voting for Rudd.

“If Howard is like the Labor Party on social values, then what’s in it for me?” becomes the key question in the non-core seats with a sizeable conservative population… i.e. Qld. Well, it becomes the question for those that won’t punish Howard as a matter of principle for betraying them.

And for those punters that start asking “what’s in it for me?“, for many the answer is simple – no Workchoices.

Howards reconciliation is born from his need to maintain the medium and long term viability of the Liberal Party. The fact that the firewall is now more concerned with protecting the Liberal heartland highlights the sheer desperation of the governments electoral position.

Thursday night was good timing – it allows tracking polls to be undertaken today and tomorrow, and if the first impression of Howards announcement is good, he can call the election on Sunday, or even Saturday afternoon and use the reconciliation speech as momentum to launch into the campaign. If the reconciliation speech went down like a lead balloon, he can still recall Parliament to try something else.

Yet, even in the heartland seats, once the first impressions have faded, this reconciliation agenda will turn out to be a meaningless gesture to the voters whom are its target.

“I’m the first to admit that this whole area is one I have struggled with during the entire time that I have been Prime Minister”

And this gets to crux of why it won’t work. Howard isn’t the first to admit, he’s the last to admit, and everyone of his target audience knows it. After the first impressions wash out of the system, it will be treated with the cynicism it deserves.

I’m not sure how many more of these fluffed strategies that result in a lose/lose situation the Coalition can take. It’s as if Hawker Britton have been running Coalition strategy on behalf of the Labor Party for the last 6 months.

Song of the day is Speed of Light, by uber-rockchick Britt Black from her album Blackout.

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