Why the media fascination with Peter Costello? Why the obsession with virtually everything the former treasurer says and does these days -- from his guest appearances on Q&A and Lateline on the ABC to his morning walks around Parliament House and his facial expressions during Question Time?
According to the conventional wisdom, Costello's alleged leadership ambitions and his "destabilising" influence on the Opposition account for the constant public interest in John Howard's former heir apparent. Today's Newspoll showing Costello is the preferred opposition leader over Malcom Turnbull merely confirms this interest. But I suspect other factors are at work.
For one thing, he's a larger-than-life personality. At a time when Question Time is devoid of colourful characters, even Labor partisans would concede the towering 6ft 3inch Costello rates as high as the other great parliamentary performers of the post-war era -- from Robert Menzies and Jim Killen on the Coalition side to Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating on the ALP side. As Barry Cohen, a former Labor minister, has acknowledged: "Not only can he be hilariously funny -- an immensely valuable asset when things are tense in Parliament -- but he has a great sense of theatre and in full flight can rally the troops from the depths of depression."
It has been said that politics is show business for ugly people, and as veteran Canberra journalist Laurie Oakes recently said of Costello, he knows "the best way to get the attention of voters is to interest and entertain them -- not bore them silly." Whatever one thinks of his politics, Costello is anything but boring. Bear this in mind the next time you see the Prime Minister, whom Tony Abbott recently called "a toxic bore", dominate Question Time.
Another reason why Costello occupies the hearts and minds is that he really does care about the policy direction of his party and nation. In recent weeks, he has criticised the Government's $42 billion fiscal stimulus package as well as its plans to implement a carbon pollution reduction scheme and beef up union power in the workplace. On each occasion, the Member for Higgins has helped encourage the shadow cabinet to support more conservative positions.
On emissions trading, he has justified opposition on the grounds that it would cost jobs, lower growth, raise energy prices and export our energy intensive industries to China and India. On industrial relations, he called for amendments to Labor's plan to restore union power to levels not seen since the 1980s, a move that was not part of its electoral mandate. And on the stimulus package, he said it was not only too big, requiring too much debt to pay for it, but also that it was a very mushy, weak form of stimulus relying more on old-style Keynesian pumping priming on Labor party pet projects instead of income tax cuts that actually change incentives to work and invest.
It is too soon to tell whether he is right, but the point here is that he is taking the issues seriously enough to argue the case publicly and privately, and forcefully and coherently. So much so that some commentators suggest it is Costello who is driving the Opposition's policy agenda.
To the extent that this is true, it is a healthy reminder that, in a Westminster system, policy can still sometimes derive from the parliament, not the executive, that backbenchers who represent their constituents and branches should play a significant role in the nation's law making process. When I made this point on Lateline on Friday night, host Leigh Sales countered that Costello's behaviour was more likely related to his possible leadership ambitions. Perhaps. But the point here is that the former treasurer (and other so-called militants in the Liberal party room) is merely contributing to parliament and opposition policy making. What is so odd about that?
And yet the Member for Higgins can't win. When Costello was relatively quiet on the backbench throughout last year, some journalists (such as the Sun Herald's Kerri-Anne Walsh) complained he hindered the Liberal party and should leave parliament. When he has been speaking out and contributing to policy in recent weeks, however, the same journalists insist he still hinders the Liberal party and should just leave parliament. In other words, Costello is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
Which brings me to the third and final reason why Costello attracts so much attention: his presence in parliament is a reminder of the good times over which he and John Howard presided from March 1996 to November 2007. With unemployment rising, the national debt and budget deficit increasing, and the economy descending into a serious recession, it is no wonder Labor polling research, according to journalist Peter Hartcher, shows a nostalgia among focus groups for Costello.
Sure, his dozen years as treasurer coincided with a bullish economic cycle, fueled in part by the commodities boom. Still, by any reasoning, there is much to praise and little to criticise in terms of what was actually done on Costello's watch.
There is also a lot to be said for his economic narrative. He was the only senior political figure in Australia who predicted the global financial crisis a year before Wall Street's crash. On at least half a dozen occasions between the US sub-prime mortgage collapse in September 2007 and the federal election two months later, the then-treasurer warned that the sub-prime crisis would "create other problems around the world". In late October, he forecast a "huge tsunami would roll through the financial markets, as the sub-prime home lending debacle ran its course in the United States". "The collapse of the sub-prime US lending market," he said at the Coalition's campaign launch on November 12, "is now having reverberations around the world."
At the time, several Labor activists and media commentators took issue with Costello's warnings of a financial tsunami, claiming that he was running a scare campaign and that the Coalition's economic arguments for re-election were increasingly incoherent. But far from being incoherent, Costello was being intellectually consistent, and he has since read the national and global economic landscape better than any other parliamentarian. When Labor was calling for tighter fiscal and monetary policy -- read big spending cuts and higher interest rates -- to contain some imaginary inflation dragon, Costello was calling for looser fiscal and monetary policy -- read big tax cuts and lower interest rates -- to protect Australia from the global recession.
So that's my case for why Costello arouses so much interest. He possesses something of that indefinable and all too rare quality of leadership that the Romans called gravitas; he commands policy substance; and he has a compelling economic narrative. Whether Costello turns all of this into a leadership bid remains to be seen. But at least it explains why he is a constant source of public interest and scrutiny.
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