Politics: The Numbers Game: Howard Got Lucky.

This will be an election fought largely on the economic battlefield. Despite a terrible mass ignorance of basic economic principles, the Australian public are, with some serious prodding from John W. Howard, proclaiming themselves number-crunchers. They demand low interest rates, low taxes, low inflation and low unemployment. They often have no idea how one informs the other, but who can say no to some pseudo-empirical, vaguely comparable way to test the two parties? 'Not I,' says the Australian public, 'not I.'

Latham hasn’t shown it to the public yet, but he is a man who knows his numbers. From his formative days as an economics student at Sydney University up until his current state as an brutal economic rationalist, he lives and breathes economics. He dreams about tariffs and drools over low unemployment figures.

He’s also spent a good proportion of his life under the tutelage of Gough Whitlam, that archetype of everything good and right about Australian politics. And yet, whereas Whitlam emerged from the shitstorm of the Vietnam war with extraordinary social policies – such as introducing Medicare and impressive arts funding – Latham is cut from a very different cloth. He’s hellbent on balancing numbers and ensuring productivity. He’ll have no qualms about grabbing welfare recipients by the scruff of the neck and brutally throwing them out of Centrelink offices across Australia. He is a confident economist, and he will beat those who disagree with him like dogs.

The fact that Latham is such a well-versed economist makes it bizarre that Howard has been able to so consistently embarrass him during this campaign. Howard has spent the past few weeks decrying the Labor leader as a buffoon who will lead Australia in to a quagmire of cashlessness. And Labor sits idly by, blushing everytime Howard sucker punches them.

Howard-voters should keep in mind that Howard and Costello have had it easy when it comes to the cash. They've been blessed with the kind of world economy most leaders would kill for (and many probably have). Tariffs have been abolished (by Keating, no less), the Australian dollar was low for years, and globalisation has been in full swing. Australia managed to stay largely unhurt by the post-9/11 slump the world encountered. And Australians have been swiping their credit cards like little zombies of unsustainable consumerism.

Voters who laud Howard for his government’s economic work miss the point. In many cases, they were reaping the rewards of Keating’s deregulation of industry, and in most cases they were simply capitalising on what the economic cycle gave them. It’s been easy for them – instead of trimming the fat from the budgetary pork chop, they just cut out the middle, which unfortunately was packed with healthy goodness like education and health.

Voters who are hoping for low interest rates from Howard are going to be terribly disappointed. Whether we like it or not, interest rates will go up in December, and Australia will face yet another recession ‘we need to have.’ There’s no escaping the cyclical nature of economics. Even Howard – who as treasurer under Malcolm Fraser saw interest rates of 13% - would have to attest to that.

(Originally published in The Brag in the Fear & Loathing column).