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The Victory - Pamela Williams
The Victory -
Pamela Williams
Used softback: .1997 edition ex-library in good condition -clean book
- tight binding - no other marks tears - loose or
missing pages
The Inside Story on the Takeover of Australia
John Howard won a sweeping election victory against Paul Keating�s Labor
Government and became Australia�s 25th Prime Minister in 1996.
This is the inside story of that Election Victory
The Victory
by Pamela Williams
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, 370pp, .95
ISBN 1-86448-405-5
Review by Jason Falinski from the
Centre of
Independent Studies
This is the first book in Australian politics that attempts to give readers an
inside look at a Liberal Party federal campaign. There have been others that
dissected federal campaigns from afar, and there have been inside accounts of
Labor Party campaigns, but never an inside account of a Liberal Party campaign.
This alone makes Pamela Williams�s book worth reading, but fails to live up to
expectations.
When Williams addressed the Sydney Institute last year she was asked why the
Liberals had changed their minds and let her cover the story from the inside.
She said she did not know. This sums up the narrative of the book � startling
facts and mind boggling stories that simply leave the reader wondering if there
is more. Given the unusual access that she had to the Liberal campaign it is
disappointing; there is a remarkable lack of intimacy between Williams and the
Liberal campaign. (Although this would be less surprising if, as I have been
told, she was only invited to one campaign strategy meeting, and then only for
the first twenty minutes.)
In fact, from this reader�s point of view, she gets closer to the drama of the
ALP campaign in spite of not being �inside� it. Nevertheless, even here there
are vital pieces of the puzzle missing that must have occurred to Williams. For
example, when Keating�s office was vehemently arguing that Gary Gray (the ALP
National Secretary) should open an attack on Howard, his team, and their past,
Gray resisted. He was resisting this attack so vigorously that he went so far as
to deceive Keating�s office about his
intentions.
Separated by thirty pages, both Andrew Robb and Mark Textor (the Liberal Party�s
Federal Director and its pollster) comment that the Liberal Party was vulnerable
to this line of attack. In fact, Robb was sufficiently concerned to have a mock
campaign prepared by the Liberal�s advertising agency to try to anticipate
Labor�s attack and plan a counter. Williams had all of this information, and yet
she failed to consolidate it and draw some obvious
conclusions, such as that Keating was right and Gray was wrong.
Williams records the now well-reported �Captain Wacky� nickname earned by
Keating, and Gray�s decision simply not to spend money on advertising in the
last week of the campaign, without remark. Surely this was a large problem: the
ALP�s campaign head was openly deriding and ignoring the wishes of its leader.
If Gray thought Keating so bad, why did he not do what the Liberals had done and
agitate for a change in leadership, or go himself? Yet, search as you might,
there is no analysis and no comparison between choices made in the two camps.
There is no serious discussion of the legitimate protest of Keating�s office
that Gray had no answer to the government�s falling popularity. In the entire
book only Russell, Watson and Keating enunciate a possible election strategy.
The strategy involved reinventing welfare and the public service along similar
lines to what Bill Clinton was doing in the United States. Keating failed to
implement the strategy because he felt it was too late in the day to implement
it and it would have been seen as cynical.
That is it. Regardless of Gray�s criticism, Keating�s office were the only group
of people in the book who worked out an ALP campaign strategy. Gray could only
tell them how bad things were. As Andrew Robb has admitted to this writer, the
strategy would have worked; in fact, the Liberals were expecting it about a year
earlier. So there you have it: Keating and Robb thought of the same strategy,
but not Gary Gray, the one person responsible for an ALP re-election campaign
strategy. Remarkably, Gray escapes any criticism from Williams.
In comparison, what hope did the Liberals have of Williams noticing the little
things that make up a campaign, such as a Liberal crying in the campaign
headquarters after a bad day? Where was the analysis of the drama and the
emotional roller coaster that is a federal election campaign? Surely this
demanded further investigation; it must have been a pointer to a highly charged
atmosphere in Liberal Campaign Headquarters.
Williams�s book suffers from the �too many spin doctors spoiling a story�
phenomenon. How she could have believed some of the nonsense on the Liberal side
about who was responsible for aspects of the campaign is beyond me. And
certainly, on the ALP side, the account of the �Letters Affair� in the last days
of the campaign does not sound right. Reading Williams you are left with the
impression that Willis�s office, known for their thoroughness and caution, were
guilty of rushing in where angels fear to tread, while all the time the ALP
National Headquarters, which had sent Carmen Lawrence out earlier in the
campaign to denounce Howard with a faulty media transcript, were preaching
caution. Willis clearly was not part of the �off the record� briefing sessions
that everyone, except Keating, appeared to be in on.
For all of this, Williams�s book does convey some important aspects of modern
day politics and political campaigns that are worth further analysis. She
accurately describes the strategy of modern political campaigns that have made
oppositions more dangerous than governments. By keeping yourself a small target,
and saving your campaign resources until the campaign, it is possible to make
enormous headway against any government. This strategy was first brought to
Australia by Petro Georgiou and used to get Jeff Kennett elected by a massive
majority; to date, it has only been used by the Liberals, not against them. One
worry in Williams�s description of the campaign is the now enormous amounts of
money required to run campaigns and the potential that could have, in the
future, to distort government policy.
Williams recently wrote a long piece in the Financial Review about the Liberals�
strategy to keep Howard prime minister and the manoeuvring of the Victorian
division. Once again, it was a good narrative, but failed to explain the
motivation and thought processes behind the strategic decisions being made. The
Victory does not give you the insight into the Liberal Party that you might hope
for, and the Labor Party account is reduced to Gray and others, making a
preemptive strike against the Keating tirade that never came. The Victory is a
good start, but more is needed, and this writer hopes that Williams gets the
chance at the next federal election to once again write from �the inside� of the
Liberal campaign.
Jason Falinski was national president of the Young Liberal Movement in 1997.
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