JPantaleo
My question is, what if Howard won in 2007? First of all, how would he have been able to do it?
Two ways he could keep the Coalition in;
A. act as
intelligently flexible as many people mistakenly thought he could
or
B. just keep trusting the fates.
The first would include Howard not running so hard in 2004 on rhetoric that stressed continued access to easy credit for home buyers, notably, "On balance interest rates will always be lower under us than under Labor," and ditching those ridiculous campaign graphics showing what rate people were paying on their mortgages under frigging
Whitlam. That they couldn't tailor this message for select groups, instead going with the blunderbuss approach, shows us the entire Liberal apparatus wasn't much chop by the time of that last victory.
WorkChoices was always going to be unpopular, so unless you go back generations and fundamentally change this society then there's only one way to avoid the backlash that policy generated. Don't introduce it. Don't have Howard win a senate majority in 2004. If it never existed then it can't add to the Coalition's woes.
For point
B there's the vague long term threat Latham might have posed to the then Opposition if he hadn't become leader until after a Beazley-led defeat in 2004.
All this needs is for Biffer to become ALP leader before Christmas, '04, and hold that job through the end of the
three year term, at which point he can implode on cue, lose an unwinnable election, and give Lazarus one more successful heart bypass.
Would he have retired in 2004 and give the leadership to Peter Costello?
Nah, the old man wasn't going anywhere--
from The Herald Sun's Glenn Milne November 16, 2008
JOHN Howard has revealed he considered handing over the prime ministership to Peter Costello at Christmas 2006.
Speaking frankly for the first time since his election defeat, Mr Howard says the Sunday Herald Sun's revelation of his hitherto "secret leadership deal" with Mr Costello in 1994 convinced him to stay on.
In The Howard Years, which begins as a four-part series tomorrow night on ABC television, Mr Howard says he was seriously contemplating retirement when the so-called "Wallet Gate" story broke and changed his mind.
He says revelation of the so-called 1994 "deal" on the leadership meant he would look as if he was being forced out of office - something he could not contemplate.
"My position was that, all things being equal, I would go before the next (2007) election," Mr Howard tells the series' narrator, Fran Kelly.
"I never fixed on any symbolic date. I knew that in order to give Peter a fair go it had to be not less than about a year.
"So that either meant right at the beginning of 2007 or it meant around Christmas 2006. I felt, when I did address it in my own mind, I felt at the end of 2006."
But on July 9, 2006, the Sunday Herald Sun revealed that early in 1994 - in the dying days of Alexander Downer's then Liberal leadership - Mr Howard and the then Deputy Leader Costello came to an agreement.
They agreed that if Mr Costello gave Mr Howard a clear run at the leadership, and if Mr Howard won the next election, there would be a handover to Mr Costello after two terms.
The agreement was witnessed by another senior Liberal, Ian McLachlan, who made a note and stuck it in his wallet - hence the term Wallgate during the subsequent furore.
The revelations prompted an unprecedented leadership stand-off between Mr Howard and Mr Costello.
In The Howard Years, the former prime minister says: "What altered the whole dynamic of the leadership issue in 2006 was the McLachlan affair.
"I felt this (Wallgate) had altered the situation and made it more difficult to go.
"What a departure at that time would have looked like was that I was being pushed out because of some allegedly broken deal.
"Well there was no way I was going to tolerate that and there was no way a lot of people around me were going to tolerate that."
Mr Howard's version of events regarding his private intentions over retirement is backed by key confidantes who spoke to the ABC.
how would the Liberals responded to the global financial crisis, the U.S. election and global warming?
The responses to those pressing questions would've been all over the place--the portfolios respectively being held by Costello, Downer and Turnbull.
Fun times, with senior ministers (Downer aside) who would be getting very antsy.
If they'd been re-elected this is when things would've started slipping, big time.