Home is where the voting heart is

The spectacular victory by John Howard's Liberal Democrat party in the Australian elections - which brought them not only an increased parliamentary majority, but also control of the Senate - left many left-leaning voters feeling somewhat stunned.

"Well, well, well..." muses Grant Young in the Synapse Chronicles. "Bitterly disappointed would be an apt description of how I feel about the election. And pretty fucking scared about what's going to happen next. It's going to take a lot of work to undo what is about to happen - I could have handled the Libs in the House of Reps, but now that they also control the Senate, we have lost the last remaining safeguards that we had politically from the mess that the Liberals have been trying to inflict."

So where did Labor, the main opposition party, go wrong (again)?

George Wright

Chrenkoff offers to help non-Australian readers out with the answer to this one. "Labor tried to make an issue of the fact that John Howard, now 65 years old, did not explicitly commit himself to serving the full three year term as Prime Minister and would probably sometime in the near future step down in favour of his deputy, Treasurer Peter Costello.

"So Labor ran a campaign to the effect that if you vote for Howard, you will get Costello. What Labor failed to realise was that many (swinging voters in particular) were more concern that if they vote for [Labor leader] Mark Latham, they will get Latham."

Mr Howard's resounding win came despite mass protests against his administration's support for the US-led war. In the end, most commentators agree, Iraq was not as big an issue as expected.

Instead, voters made their decisions based on issues much close to home - and in particular their wallets.

As Antony Green, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, explained: "Howard nailed the key issue with his first speech of the campaign. His refrain, 'Who can you trust to maintain a strong economy?' and 'Who can you trust to keep interest rates low?', was repeated ad nauseam throughout the campaign, but that did not diminish their impact."

George Wright