HERE’S TO THE WINNERS

As Frank Sinatra sang ‘Here’s to the winners, those who move mountains, here’s to the glories still to be…’

On radio today I said:

And that’s for Neil Mitchell, Tony Tardio, Clinton Grybas and Natalie Florence who were all big winners for 3AW at the Australian radio awards at Crown in Melbourne on Saturday night.

And, of course, in six weeks time, we’ll be playing it again for either Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd or Prime Minister John Howard who finally put an end to the ‘phony war’ yesterday with a trip to Yarralumla to officially clear the decks for a federal election on Saturday, November 24.

An official six weeks campaign after a pseudo-election campaign which has been going for nearly a year since Rudd replaced Kim Beazley as Opposition Leader.

Howard running for a record fifth consecutive term in office. And next month voters will decide whether or not he has ‘stayed too long at the fair’.  And remember – as Paul Keating found out 11 years ago when Howard first got the keys to The Lodge that he never uses – governments get voted out. They don’t get voted in.

In that 1996 campaign Howard said Australia needed ‘new leadership’ after thirteen years of Hawke and Keating. You won’t hear him going down that track this time.

As he announced, finally, the election date, John Howard said Australia doesn’t need new leadership. It doesn’t need old leadership. It needs real leadership. And experience.

The first Liberal Party TV commercials – which at last the taxpayers aren’t paying for – hit the living rooms last night stressing that Rudd and Swann and Gillard are novices on ‘P’ plates.

The PM raised the union bogeyman. If you elect a Labor Government seventy per cent of their team will have a union background. And if you put Labor into Canberra they will occupy the government benches in every state and territory (as well as the national capital) for the first time in  more than 100 years.

And in the first sign that in this campaign the Libs will relentlessly try depict Kevin Rudd as a man of straw, who will change position when the wind blows, John Howard said yesterday: ‘Love me or loathe me… you know where I stand’.

I don’t know if people ever really loved him and a lot of traditionally Labor voters didn’t loathe him when he kept getting re-elected -- with an endlessly booming economy when other countries faltered.

But somewhere in between there’s the palpable feeling that it’s time for a change. John Winston Howard’s challenge over the next six weeks is to convince enough people that it is not.

Monday, October 15, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007