The 30th anniversary of the election of the Howard government has induced a fair bit of reflection and reminiscing. John Howard and Peter Costello have been at the centre of most of it. Fair enough. They were the key players.
However there is a much bigger story to tell. They didn't do it on their own. We the people elected the members of parliament that gave the Coalition a majority and thus allowed them to form government. It was a stunning victory. The Coalition won 94 seats with a huge influx of women into parliament.
Dame Margaret Guilfoyle and then Liberal federal president Chris McDiven had worked tirelessly to encourage and help female candidates. Sure, policies and campaign skills played a vital role. But the Dame delivered the dames.
Without all these members there is no government. There is no juggernaut of change led by Howard and Costello. We the people voted for the members. It was our doing. What followed was a few years of tough political debate and of serious budget restraint.
Only a couple of ministers faced the barrage of thousands of demonstrators. I was one of them. It was politics live. Not from a news desk or a lecture theatre ... from the street. The others watched it on the news.
Even more remarkable is that after a few years of that and the promise of a new tax we re-elected that government. We voted not in our own narrow personal interest but in the national interest. How things have changed.
No doubt that government, of which I was lucky to be a part, deserves credit for the work it did. Costello's comment "no net debt to no net worth" is telling. But paying off all that debt could only happen because we re-elected that government. We were collectively agreeing to fix what we knew needed fixing.
Our system might operate more effectively if we nurtured the realisation that "the government" is actually "our government". It's not some rent-a-crowd installed by others to boss us around. Using "the government" seems to ignore the very real connection between it and us.
We might have a richer more meaningful political debate if we referred to governments as being our government. It would be a constant gentle reminder of who is responsible to whom. Referring to our government would not only keep highlighting in their and our minds that we are the gatekeepers. It just might serve to amplify the point that the government is made up of our representatives to do what is best for all of us. We're in this together. We're not in it to watch a screaming match between two teams. Describing governments by their political persuasion only suits the political parties.
Equally, prime ministers appear to enjoy referring to "my government". In a sense it is. We elect the members. The party with the majority elects a leader. That person selects a ministry and tells the Governor General they can form a government. But the fact remains we decide which party gets a majority of the members.
These teams that pass in and out of office seem to sometimes forget that they're shuffling around our money. It's hardly magnanimous. Saying one or other party will give you one or other benefit overlooks this vital point.
Driving home the fact that these guys are shuffling around our money might make more of us realise a stark reality as well. Whatever we get from the government of the day comes from fellow citizens. Taxes paid, revenue collected on our behalf. It is not from some secret stash of "the government".
Cast your mind away from the heady business of forming government and back to winning those seats. For all the publicity and glory that goes to the leadership, they get the job because of the tireless, sometimes soul-destroying, efforts of marginal seat holders.
If you're a candidate in a marginal seat you are not at the centre of the national debate. You're out there everyday being booted around by one lobby group after another. You're chasing funding for playgrounds, schools, roads. And if you happen to win the seat you get thrown back into the bull pit to try and win it again at the next election. There's no national stage for you. You just provided one of the seats. The building blocks on which governments rest. These guys don't get enough credit, let alone respect. They deserve both. It's on their hard work and shoulders that governments rise and fall. They put into practice what living in a democracy means.
Don't imagine that just because they don't get the public credit they don't understand their vital role. They understand it only too well. If they win by 300 votes every petition with anywhere near that number of signatories is thrust onto a minister's desk with pleas that their seat be saved to help keep us in government and you as a minister. Forget that the 300 signatories might be never going to vote for the candidate anyway.
Former Senate leader Fred Chaney reminded me of just how important these wonderful combat troops are when I complained about a Tasmanian marginal seat holder going into the chamber dressed as a chicken.
He said I should love the guy because he was a marginal seat holder and without guys like him I'd never be a minister. It's on only on the shoulders of "lowly" marginal seat holders that the likes of Howard and Costello get the chance to shine. It cuts both ways. If Howard and Costello were weak and ineffective, these guys might not get elected and re-elected. They need each other.
There are other key players. Party organisations play a key role.
Lynton Crosby was campaign director and later headed the organisation. He neither seeks nor is given the credit he deserves for the role he played. The organisation is meant to run campaigns. Some do it well, others not so well. In the 1998 campaign I was the duty minister in the campaign office. (You're the one who fills in for a minister who's on a plane or who doorstops the relevant line for the media. The dogsbody.) Lynton was the consummate professional. Tireless, endlessly courteous to staff and volunteers alike and calmly determined. He went on to greater things. But very few people get the chance to effectively play a part in changing the course of history, grab it with both hands and make it seem like a walk in the park. If you know him and had the chance to work with him, you're dead lucky.
The public service also played its role. Yes there were a few egregious examples of public servants who just couldn't break the loyalty or affection they'd built over 14 years of working with the Hawke-Keating governments. They were horrific but at least not in vast numbers. But then there were the consummate public servants. David Phillips was a senior bureaucrat in higher education. He introduced himself as being a Labor voter, offered to stand aside from the task of helping me find enormous forward savings to ensure I had confidence in the advice offered. The upfront honesty was right up my alley. His incredibly detailed knowledge coupled with his deep understanding of how the sector worked allowed me to get the job done.
The one time I didn't listen to him proved costly. There was a dinner of vice chancellors and he advised not attending. It would be, he said, a trap. It was. They separated me from my chief of staff. That allowed them to massage what was and wasn't said at the table. Their story took hold. There aren't enough tines on a fork to describe their tongues. Good public servants, excellent ones like Phillips, are diamonds.
Yes. Honour and praise to Howard and Costello. Just don't forget the other players.
And pat Australians on the back for re-electing a government that wanted to fix our problems rather than play Father Christmas.
- Amanda Vanstone is a former senator for South Australia, a former Howard government minister, and a former ambassador to Italy. She writes fortnightly for ACM.
