Election Rant by Alan Ramsey

A small book turned up last week entitled How to Kill a Country. It was written by three Sydney academics about our "free trade" deal with the United States. They could as easily have been writing about what, spare us, happened on Saturday.

How on earth could we have put this scheming, mendacious little man and his miserable claque back in office for another three years? Worse, how could we have brought them to the very brink of absolute control of the nation's entire parliamentary process and authority?

Very easily, as things turned out, to the cost of the rest of us and our national self-respect.

For almost nine years this Government, incompetent in most everything except mediocrity, debauched its word and the people's trust, along with voters' gullibility, their ignorance, their taxes and, in the end, their greedy self-interest.

It deceived and dissembled about joining us with Washington's military adventurism in Iraq, and it went on deceiving and dissembling, irrespective of the heightened threat to our national interest, to keep our minuscule presence there purely for the political pleasure of George Bush and his cronies.

Then when we reached the one time every three years of a people's audit, 4.6 in every 10 of us turned round and said, thank you, gimme the money and flog us for another three years. Most times, despite the thick and the avaricious and those who feel it's just all beyond them, we get it right as a nation.

Not this time. This time we've really buggered things. A politically immoral man who, by any civilised measure, disqualified himself from public life, has been given a pat on the back and even more power. This time the people's will has got it dreadfully wrong.

Now we all have to pay for the comfortable idiocy of the manipulated minority. And it is a minority: the 46 per cent who voted for the Coalition, or 4.6 in every 10. The other 5.4, in the main, wanted something better, and were denied by a lowest common denominator system in which all the spoils go to a degraded 50 per cent plus one.

I thought we had more brains, more self-respect. I was wrong in thinking enough voters "just might" see through the confidence trickery of John Howard, master illusionist and toad of a human being. I apologise for nothing.

However, don't get snowed by the spin merchants about the size of the Government's win. Howard's real achievement is the Coalition's Senate victory. In the House of Representatives, Labor went into the election with 63 seats, the Government 83, with three independents and one Green MHR.

By midday yesterday, with a bit over 10 million votes counted in an electorate of 13 million, the most likely result, after the doubtfuls are finally sorted, is that Labor will have a net loss of between one and three seats, no more.

Labor's loss was great in votes, not seats. It's primary vote (38.3 per cent) is only marginally better than under Kim Beazley's losing leadership three years ago (37.8 per cent). What is different this time is the Liberal Party (40.3 per cent) out-polling Labor in primary votes (as distinct from a joint Coalition vote of 46 per cent).

That happens rarely: twice only in the Liberals' 60-year history, the last time, ironically, in the Fraser victory of 1975 that buried the government of Latham's political father figure, Gough Whitlam.

Still, Latham's time will come. Believe it.