"The electorate will render its judgement accordingly".
John Howard's political hero, Robert Menzies, once said that if 12 people witnessed a car accident there would be at least six different versions of what happened. There are only two versions of what the Prime Minister was or wasn't told on the night of November 7, 2001.
Put simply, the first version is that of Mike Scrafton, a former Defence official who claims he said to the Prime Minister that there was no evidence of children being thrown overboard from an asylum-seekers' boat. The second version is that of Howard, who maintains he was told only that the evidence was inconclusive. To support his public statement that children had been thrown overboard the Prime Minister relied on a report from the Office of National Assessments. That report was later found to be incorrect.
For those who see duplicity in everything Howard does, Scrafton's comments have been taken as "proof" that the Prime Minister lied, but this ignores a number of issues. It is quite possible that Scrafton thought he was saying one thing while the Prime Minister understood him to be saying something either different or more ambiguous. Such misunderstandings are common and not just confined to politics. Even if Scrafton had been as definite in his opinions as he claims he was, there remains the issue that an Office of National Assessment report contradicted him.
One doesn't necessarily have to believe in the post-modern idea that "there is no such thing as truth" to appreciate the difficulty, or even the impossibility, of establishing precisely what was said and what was thought to have been said three years ago. As to the whole sequence of events of the children-overboard affair, the fact that the Senate inquiry into the affair split along party lines indicates at the very least that there are two, or more, sides to the story.
The effort of the Opposition and numerous journalists and academics to get to the truth of the matter is understandable, but will ultimately prove to be fruitless. The process by which politicians and governments, and indeed individuals in everyday life, make decisions is complex and isn't explicable in the few simple sentences demanded by the media.
The obsession displayed by some of the Prime Minister's critics in their pursuit of him about children overboard has blinded them to one obvious question. Does the electorate care? On the face of it, the answer is no.
This is not to argue that it is irrelevant whether politicians lie, or that the merits of any question are to be judged solely by reference to the opinion of the electorate about them. The point is that our system of government provides a mechanism for resolving disputes such as this through a democratic vote at the ballot box. Surveys conducted before and after the 2001 election indicated that if any one single event decided the outcome then it wasn't children overboard or Tampa. It was the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York on September 11. What these did was reinforce the public's desire for strength of leadership, which the coalition was perceived to have and which Labor wasn't.
Certainly an election is a blunt instrument for gauging the will of the community, but it is the best we've so far devised. If what Scrafton said to Howard is as important as those who are calling for the Prime Minister to stand down believe it is, the electorate will render its judgement accordingly.
Not every person concerned by the questions concerning children overboard is of the Left political persuasion, but it would be true to say that the issue has become totemic for the Left. The issue has been used to challenge the legitimacy of the Howard government. There is nothing unique to those tactics and such a strategy conveniently ignores the reality of electoral outcomes. Such an approach by the Left was applied in the 1950s against the Menzies government over the alleged manipulation of the defection of the Russian spy Vladimir Petrov. Twenty years later it was employed against the Fraser government following Whitlam's sacking.
The circumstances of the federal elections of the 1950s, 1970s and 2001 share a common characteristic. The public did not share the attitude of the Left in relation to the supposed malefactions of coalition governments. In each case, at the election immediately after the government was supposed to have committed its travesty, the government was re-elected. Perhaps those supposed travesties might have been more imagined than real.
Menzies came to within one seat of losing government, and Fraser was defeated in 1983, not because of the reasons for which they were hated by the Left, but because of self-inflicted wounds caused by poor economic decision-making.
That is the political lesson for Howard and Mark Latham. If Howard wins the federal election it will be because his economic management is trusted. If Latham wins it will be because the electorate has decided it is time for a change it won't be because of the revelations of the last few days.
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