The road ahead for the new Howard Government will be even more difficult than it was the first time round. But getting its GST legislation through the Senate will not be the toughest task it faces.
Certainly, maintaining the integrity of its plan for overhauling our creaking taxation system will require all the political skills that the government can muster. However, with the appropriate mixture of determination, cajolery and finesse, it may preserve enough of its package to deliver the economic benefits that can come from reform. The danger is that by having to devote a great deal of time and energy to this package the government will continue to mishandle the really serious problem of legitimacy that it must also confront.
The Coalition parties bungled this problem after their landslide win in 1996. They passed up their greatest chance in decades to place their stamp on the social, cultural and economic direction in which the nation should move, and to convince Australians that a Liberal/National coalition is the natural party of government. So it is unlikely that they will do any better this time, when their share of the overall two party preferred vote has declined so markedly.
While some in the Liberal Party might still be deluded enough to think of themselves as "born to rule", an increasing majority of Australians clearly do not share this view. And even though the Coalition obtained sufficient primary and preference votes in seats where it counted to sneak home in last Saturday's election, it cannot really draw much comfort from the result. It is safe to assume that a significant proportion of the votes it received were only given grudgingly by people who saw the Coalition as the lesser of two evils.
Mr Howard is making much of the argument -- plausible enough as it goes -- that a government that takes a promise of new taxes into an election cannot expect to do well. The implication is that in the next election all the people who were scared off by the GST will return to the fold, either directly, or through their preferences.
But as risky as it was, the fact that Howard had to run on the GST was, in a sense, an admission of his government's failings. He needed to take something big to an election in order to counter the not unreasonable impression of a weak and timid government with little direction.
Howard and his party did not have the confidence to argue a lucid and morally respectable case on other issues of national importance which could have been the trigger for an election, such as native title, or the structural reforms necessary to reduce the disgraceful rate of unemployment. Furthermore, even the terms in which the GST was justified, that it was necessary to generate the revenue needed to maintain the kind of big government welfare state beloved by Labor and the Democrats, represented an intellectual capitulation to the government's adversaries.
The Liberals, and to a lesser extent the Nationals, have been unnerved by the fact that many of the most influential and outspoken people in the media, arts, universities and churches are basically hostile to liberal conservative values and approaches. A week ago, just before the election, John Howard stated that those who denounced him and his government for supposedly being divisive simply could not accept that there were legitimate conservative positions on pressing social and cultural issues.
This is a fair comment, but the blame lies just as much with Mr Howard and his party as with their detractors. It is not enough merely to tell people that there are morally respectable alternatives to the views promoted by Kim Beazley, Cheryl Kernot, Meg Lees and self-styled "socially responsible" clerics, or that -- as Mr Howard said in his election night speech -- the Liberals are committed to mateship, egalitarianism and tolerance.
These alternatives have to be spelled out and defended. They must be placed in a convincing framework which shows how they lead to courses of action which are more likely to resolve our problems than those presently on offer, and in a way that is consistent with egalitarianism, tolerance and the other values which most Australians embrace. But this requires a degree of intellectual imagination, moral assurance and capacity for social and cultural analysis that the Liberal Party does not seem to possess.
This deficiency is one reason why the Howard Government was so wrong-footed by its opponents' cynical exploitation of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. It did not know how to deal with the problem in a manner which would strengthen its own position while undermining both Hanson and the "politically correct" Keating groupies whose excesses had made such a major contribution to her rise.
Broadly speaking, there seem to be three kinds of people in the parliamentary Liberal Party. The first are the opportunists, who are found in all major parties. Although their core beliefs revolve solely around their own destiny, they are eloquent enough to persuade often naïve pre-selection committees that they are ethical human beings who can rejuvenate the nation as well as appeal to whatever target groups the party is currently hoping to woo.
The second are those who really do stand for something, but who are not good at developing the kind of principled but politically astute positions needed for success in the cultural battles their party must wage in order to secure its legitimacy.
The third kind seems unique to the Liberal Party. These are the people who genuinely appear to believe that their party has vacated the moral high ground, and that it can only be redeemed by adopting the Labor/Democrat position on a whole range of social and cultural issues.
Of course, an honourable few do not fit into this tripartite classification. But those who do are sufficiently numerous and influential to ensure that the Liberal Party is most unlikely to offer Australians a vision which could mobilise their hopes and enthusiasms in the foreseeable future.
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