Politics: Fat Wallets And Weak Hearts: The Post-Election Malaise.

Well, gosh golly darn it, the Liberals are back. Now, post-election, it seems laughable that most pundits - myself included - were predicting an incredibly tight race. Now we know that Latham and his Labor boys were beaten so brutally that it’ll be a wonder if they can keep from self-imploding over the next three years. This will be an incredibly ugly three years for the Labor party, as they realise they have to rethink things; health, education and the workplace are out, economic management is in.

The party, whether the signs show publicly or not, will be in turmoil. You can only get your collective arse whipped by the Australia people for so long before it starts to really sting. There will clearly be casualties, and there will obviously be horrible in-fighting. Just a couple of days after the election result, bespectacled left-wing stalwart – and Labor’s leader in the Senate since ’96 - John Faulker placed his head on the chopping block, admitting that he was partly responsible for Labor’s loss. The presumption is that he was partly behind the Tasmanian forestry policy which explicitly represented an alliance with the Greens (an alliance that most election analysts are saying may have cost Labor many of their votes). The fact that the man has clearly delivered for the Labor party for eight years has been ignored. After all, as Echo & The Bunnymen sang, heads will roll.

Labor members, and ex-members, will spend the next few weeks randomly placing blame on anything they can. We’ve had excuses from anonymous ex-Labor members, ex-Beazley Chief Of Staff Michael Costello, backbencher Graham Edwards, and many more. Here are some of the reasons they’ve claimed for Labor’s loss: Latham’s leadership (or lack thereof) and inability to gain the confidence of the Australian people, Labor’s lack of economic policy, the predominance of the Union movement in the party dictating policy, the deifying of Gough Whitlam, the perceived mediocrity of Shadow Ministers Kevin Rudd, Martin Ferguson, Kim Beazley, et al. The list goes on. Everyone’s up for having a crack, and if they keep it up Labor will go most of the way to securing another terrible loss in 2007. The party is clearly – and unsurprisingly – lacking the one thing they need right now: confidence.

Lack of confidence isn’t exclusive to Labor members: many Australians are feeling its wretched effects. For the 4.6 out of 10 Australians who voted for the Coalition, there are 5.4 who didn’t, and they’d all be well within their rights to shed tears into their pillows every night for the next three years. Australia – as a nation – is going to be severely damaged by Howard’s fourth term, and much of the damage will be irreversible. Much has been made of the Liberals scoring control of the Senate, and with good reason; Howard has effectively been given carte blanche to go buckwild with policy-making. The full sale of Telstra, media and marketplace deregulation, etc. are all go’ers. Howard says he won’t abuse the power, but that’s not hard to pick as a terrible, albeit necessary, lie. Our one hope is that the damage Howard will wreak on our nation will make people vote differently in ’07.

Now, with the election behind us and the results known, Australia faces some tough questions about where we’re going and what kind of country we want to be. Unfortunately, most of the answers seem like they’ll be based around the idea that any lies, half-truths and terrible deceits are acceptable as long as there’s the vague possibility of our wallets getting a bit fatter. We haven’t grasped yet, as a country, that a fat wallet won’t help you if your heart is weak.

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