WI Bob Hawke not ousted in '91?

Would Howard have become Liberal leader and beaten Hawke in the next federal election? Or a Coalition PM Andrew Peacock?
 

Cook

Banned
Keating knocking off Hawke didn’t prolong that government, the Liberal’s desperate attempts to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory did it for them. My feeling is that John Hewson would still have become Liberal Leader and then lost the unlosable election.

Then Howard would have walking in on the following election as per OTL.
Labour was well and truly on the nose by that stage.

Australians change governments on average every ten years. The only time they get rid of a government earlier is when they are truly incompetent (Gough).

The longer after ten years that a government survives, the bigger the swing against them is at the next election.
 
Labor was on a low when Keating took over completely re-invigorating the government.
It was highly unlikely that labor could have won in 93 without a major change of some description.
It was Keating that successfully destroyed Hewsons GST credibility.

So my guess is that Hewson would have become PM in 93 but would not have been able to handle the office and make way for Costello or Downer the rest of the party being totally against Howard or Peacock for causing party instability
 

Cook

Banned
Kim Beasley and John Hewson to me will always be alike, people that members of their own party think are great but who the public have no confidence in.
 
Hewson was already Opposition leader by the time Keating rolled Hawke; Fightback!, the Coalition's manifesto for the next election had already been launched.

Keating did a very good job at whittling away at the proposed Goods and Services Tax, although he had more than a little help from the leader of the Opposition himself being such a poor salesman, and, surprisingly for an economist, a very weak policy communicator.

Tony Staley, president of the Liberal Party at the time, later went on the record saying he thought Hawke had one more election victory in him, and I tend to agree with him. I don't think that the demoralisation the ALP experienced under Hawke's last year or so as leader was 'fixed' by Keating assuming the prime ministership (I'm just old enough to remember these events. The change in leadership was what the Americans call a 'hail mary pass', it wasn't a cure all. I'm not convinced that the switch to Keating was considered a political masterstroke by anyone until after the '93 election.)

I think Hawke would've changed the narrative, turned it against Fightback! to almost the same extent as Keating did. Enough to win? Labor increased its vote in '93, so I think Hawke wins another squeaker (along the lines of the slim victory of '90) as long as he follows the same strategy. Though shear personal longevity probably costs him a few seats, what with people being even more tired of him than they were of the world's greatest treasurer.

Anyway, there is a strange political mythology about early nineties PK somehow being the right kind of unpopular to Hawke's wrong kind of unpopular. This mythos was created by the press gallery after the election to explain why the entire media establishment couldn't possibly foresee the Coalition losing the unlosable election. I'd argue that the election results of '98 give us the real story as to how '93 turned out the way it did: only an incumbent party can hope to win a mandate to bring in a value-added or consumption tax.
 

Larrikin

Banned
Beasley and Hewson

Kim Beasley and John Hewson to me will always be alike, people that members of their own party think are great but who the public have no confidence in.

There is a big difference between Kimbo and Hewson - that being that the fat man was a very, very, very good Minister. That said, and admitting I'm a Beasley fan, he is not and never was, PM material.

Hewson never served in a Govt so we don't know how he would have done as a Minister, but I doubt he would have gone anywhere near as well as Beasley.
 

Larrikin

Banned
93 election

Anyway, there is a strange political mythology about early nineties PK somehow being the right kind of unpopular to Hawke's wrong kind of unpopular. This mythos was created by the press gallery after the election to explain why the entire media establishment couldn't possibly foresee the Coalition losing the unlosable election. I'd argue that the election results of '98 give us the real story as to how '93 turned out the way it did: only an incumbent party can hope to win a mandate to bring in a value-added or consumption tax.

The 93 election, although deemed "unlosable" by the Press Gallery, was actually won by them for Keating. It was the first time that they played the biased games that we saw in the last Federal Election here. I was working in a Federal Govt PR unit at the time, and amount of arse covering of Keating being done by the PG was unbelievable. It was also the election that the ABC outed itself as the broadcast arm of the ALP.

Hawke would have had an easier time of winning that election that Keating, because overall he was a hell of a lot less despised than Keating, and the PG wouldn't have had to work as hard getting him up.
 

Cook

Banned
Beasley was a disaster as a defence minister.

Getting back to the main issue, the ’93 election was definitely lost by Hewson rather then won by Keating.

For the ALP it would have been better for them to have lost that election, they would not have spent so long in the wilderness afterwards. Especially since Hewson’s win would have meant that Howard would never have got a shot at the big ticket.

The same could be said for the Howard – Latham election. A loss for the Liberals then would not have been as pronounced as there loss in ’07 was. Not that that would have been a good thing for the country, Latham gave all the signs of being mentally unstable, but clearly the Howard government was looking tired by that time, by ’07 they were a spent force and the momentum of change was well and truly with the Labor Party. Bill Hayden’s proverbial “Drover’s Dog” could have won it for them.

Here’s an interesting alternative time line for someone, Mark Latham becomes Prime Minister and the ANZUS alliance collapses shortly thereafter.
 
Australians change governments on average every ten years. The only time they get rid of a government earlier is when they are truly incompetent (Gough).
Y'know, technically, in the 1975 election Fraser was the incumbent...

Here’s an interesting alternative time line for someone, Mark Latham becomes Prime Minister and the ANZUS alliance collapses shortly thereafter.
...Why?

The truth is that if Latham became Prime Minister he'd have to resign within a few months anyway, just as he did in OTL when his cancer came back. By January 2005 -- February at the latest -- it's Prime Minister Jenny Macklin.
 

Cook

Banned
Fraser was a caretaker Prime Minister and in 1975 Whitlam’s Labor Party suffered the worst electoral defeat of any Party in Post War Australia.

Why would the ANZUS alliance collapse under a Latham government? Just Google his statements, then Google New Zeeland's David Lange.
Strangely enough Latham's been a pretty sharp political observer lately.
 
The 93 election, although deemed "unlosable" by the Press Gallery, was actually won by them for Keating. It was the first time that they played the biased games that we saw in the last Federal Election here.

Heh, at least other Australian Rightwingers put the date for the meeja going feral back to the Whitlam era (or the Broader-Vietnam-to-Dismissal era as I think of it.)

I'm surprised that someone who claims insider status isn't familiar with Gough's expansion of the appointed bureaucracy (ministerial staffers), and said bureaucracy's relationship with the New Journalism that was pioneered by This Day Tonight at Aunty, Willesee at Nine, and at the 'The Age' edited by the legendary Oz equivalent of Ben Bradlee whose name escapes me [it was Graham Perkin]. Then there was a certain national broadsheet which backed Gough strongly in the 'It's Time' campaign, with its proprietor privately advising ALP federal secretary Mick Young on how best to fight the Coalition in Labor's campaign--'The Australian'.

Larrikin said:
I was working in a Federal Govt PR unit at the time, and amount of arse covering of Keating being done by the PG was unbelievable. It was also the election that the ABC outed itself as the broadcast arm of the ALP.

I won't bother attacking your partisan bias, Larrikin, but the notion that the meeja was in the tank for the ALP in 1993 & that that was why Fightback! lost is a particularly dangerous thing for conservatives to believe (oh, and it is just plain wrong. How did a commentariat that was almost universally predicting a Hewson Liberal victory turn around and 'elect' the despised Paul Keating? Wot, did they put a gun to Doctor John's head & force him to go to pieces in that Mike Willesee interview? How does that work?)

The fact is that only a Howard-style small target strategy would've worked in '93. Federal Labor was never going to meltdown like the three state ALP govts kicked out in '92/'93 did, by losing all their administrative skills, or indeed like the Howard govt did with their own leadership skills in the leadup to the 2007 election (can you imagine the factions who supported PK allowing him to put off a challenge until Christmas 1992?)

Blaming everthing on the meeja is for conservatives like what blaming everything on the teh Murdoch Press is for Leftwingers. A fool's errand.
 
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Cook

Banned
The sad thing about “True believers” of the Right and the Left is their belief that if they loose an election it must have been stolen.

Neither side has any divine right to rule and regular changes in government are healthy. Things are always improved by competition. The Australian public generally can be counted on to make the right decision when asked.

The other thing about “True Believers” is they tend to forget Spell Check when they get excited.


;)
 
For the ALP it would have been better for them to have lost that election, they would not have spent so long in the wilderness afterwards. Especially since Hewson’s win would have meant that Howard would never have got a shot at the big ticket

Maybe. It all depends on how much of Fightback! could have passed a senate which had the Democrats and the Greens as BoP parties. Keating foolishly committing Labor to not vigorously blocking that manifesto if they had found themselves in Opposition (though I could be wrong on the details of that, it was a throwaway statement about how Hewson would get everything he wanted if elected, IIRC) could have given ideological cover to Fightback!

This is all subjective, it depends on how much economic deregulation etc above and beyond what Howard would do in OTL one prefers. It also depends on whether these AH nineties Libs have the requisite imagination to replace a faltering Hewson with a more competent Howard (or Peacock).

Cook said:
The same could be said for the Howard – Latham election. A loss for the Liberals then would not have been as pronounced as there loss in ’07 was.

Maybe. But I think erratic (incompetent?) Liberal Opposition leaders like Turnbull and Abbott are a little bit too natural to the modern Coalition, whereas Latham was an anomaly in modern Labor.

I think a lot of what I've written here today belongs in Chat.;)
 
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Fraser was a caretaker Prime Minister and in 1975 Whitlam’s Labor Party suffered the worst electoral defeat of any Party in Post War Australia.
Whitlam's my favourite PM. Can you imagine what Australia would be like without the Whitlam government? Australia would still be a Dominion, we would still have conscription, there'd be no public healthcare, no Racial Discrimination Act, no Aboriginal land rights, homosexuality would still be illegal...

Why would the ANZUS alliance collapse under a Latham government? Just Google his statements
I have. I can't find anything that would jeopardise the ANZUS treaty. Especially within a two-month window.
 

Rush Tarquin

Gone Fishin'
Well, I'd like to contribute more to this thread but my knowledge of the topic is restricted by the fact that I was so young I thought Hawke was some kind of monarch at the time and I haven't done a lot of reading about Australian politics before Keating. I do remember him breaking down and crying on television on a number of occasions near the end, the reasons for which I only learned later.

I do think Keating would be an extremely effective leader of the opposition if the ALP lost and Hawke left, though that won't necessarily get people to like him. Not a foregone conclusion that he would be leader either, since he'd have to get back from the backbench. In that sense it depends how Hawke was 'not ousted' and whether Keating still attempted another challenge.
 

Cook

Banned
Interesting point Rush.

A defeated Hawke would have resigned as leader and probably resigned from parliament, as is usual practice with defeated Australian Prime Ministers.

Certainly Keating would have had the numbers in the party room to become Opposition leader if he wanted it. The question is would he want it straight away or would he prefer someone else take the position initially and then he step in after Labor began it’s recovery. He was a very good political tactician after all.
 
What? My spelling is perfect. :p ;)

Apparently expressing support for Whitlam is as exteme as writing that the elections of '93 and '07 were determined by corrupt media influence.

Though I think you're wrong about the Whitlamite reforms not happening if his government hadn't been in office. Those policies would have dribbled in over the next decade under the governments of a post-McMahon Liberal PM and then Hawke.
 
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