The Australia Way: In clover ... or ready to croak

By GREG ANSLEY

Near the town of Tumbarumba, bordering Kosciusko National Park in the heart of the Snowy Mountains, lives a small endangered amphibian called the coroboree frog.

Though not well known outside this almost spiritual range, which Banjo Paterson wrote into the Australian psyche with his ballad The Man From Snowy River, the frog's precarious existence reflects the possibly even more dubious political survival of Prime Minister John Howard.

Every day, when the Tumbarumba Shire Councils road gangs go out to work they are required under environmental laws to ensure that no coroboree frogs are buried or squashed by graders or trucks.

In the evening, when loads of dirt and road materials are dumped for the next day's operations, the gangs must also check that, as well as frogs, none of a particular local species of clover is crushed beneath the mounds.

The frog and the clover are only the shallow end of a deepening pool of discontent.

Locals complain that while environmental law increasingly constricts their lives, they are excluded from the jobs associated with it, that plain country common sense is trampled by degree-driven rulebooks, that national parks such as Kosciusko are havens for destructive plagues of feral animals, and that bans on highland cattle allowed the growth of tinder to fuel bushfires that destroyed thousands of hectares of forest.

Yet these have been wins for environmentalists, who for years despaired at the destruction of the Snowy's hillsides and flora by cattle, timber milling and the broader impact of economic development of marginal land.

It is a conflict of beliefs, emotions and politics that has been repeated across Australia, adding to a broader sense of alienation and betrayal that has undermined traditional loyalties and redrawn political maps.

This year, when John Howard takes the nation to the polls on a date yet to be announced, those passions will blaze.

They have already ignited in Western Australia and Queensland, where the splintering of the conservative vote, the resurgence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party on the right and the Greens on the left, and an explosion of independents hammered Howard's state colleagues.

Howard will also face the revitalised Democrats under a youthful new leader, Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, and a Labor Party that for months has consistently trounced the ruling Liberal-National Party Coalition in opinion polls.

And whoever does win will not hold absolute power. This will be manipulated by minority parties in the Senate, whose support can never be taken for granted.

This election, possibly more than any other, will articulate the changes that have overtaken Australia in the past 20 years and help define the nation's path into the 21st century.

The old certainties have gone, politically, socially and economically.

Australia is now agonising over a future in which traditional perceptions of identity and place will be increasingly challenged by new dynamics within and outside its borders and which will inevitably influence its relationship with New Zealand.

But Australia is also a confident, optimistic and capable nation of increasing diversity and vitality. Its ability to confront its own warts is apparent in the new National Museum in Canberra - a celebration of indigenous culture and immigration on one hand, and, on the other, a stark portrayal of Aborigines wrenched from their families by the state, and including an enlarged neo-Nazi poster advocating the slaughter of migrants and refugees.

Prime Minister Howard and Labor leader Kim Beazley are the political cusp of this new Australian age.

Howard, aged 61, the Methodist son of a World War One veteran, is a man at the tail end of Imperial Australia, embodying the blend of nationalism and anachronism that marked much of the Australian character in the second half of the 20th century.

A man of staunchly conservative values - God, monarchy, nuclear family - he oozes a sense of blandness and stability that appeals to large tracts of suburban Australia.

He is also a man of considerable political skills, demonstrated by his survival from Treasurer in the 1970s Coalition Government of Malcolm Fraser, through spells in the wilderness that would have broken lesser men, to a Prime Minister able to win office on the promise of a new GST.

Kim Beazley, 52, son of a former federal Labor Minister and a Rhodes Scholar who wrote his masters degree on superpower rivalry in the Indian Ocean, is an appealing giant of a man at the head of the baby-boomer charge.

He rose, with fellow West Australian Bob Hawke, as Labor broke its cloth-cap image, dumped much of its socialist dogma, and abandoned icons of state ownership in an upheaval that reshaped Australia.

But Australian Labor baulked at the slash-and-burn approach of its New Zealand counterpart, carefully manoeuvring its factions and isolating the hardliners with a process of gradualism that kept the party intact and geared the nation to a more moderate pace of reform.

Beazley took over a party exhausted by 13 years in office, diminished by internal battles for power and led by the immensely unpopular Paul Keating.

He has rebuilt it and now holds a strong lead in opinion polls.

But this is no longer a simple battle of two titans.

Howard has been weakened by desertions from his party - sufficient in a federal byelection this year to give a previously blue-ribbon seat to Labor - and, more significantly, by the accelerating decline of his Coalition partner, the rural-based National Party.

National's losses are serious, driven by the belief that the traditional conservative parties have abandoned rural and regional Australia and its core values.

The main beneficiary has been Pauline Hanson, the erratic, xenophobic firebrand who stormed into federal Parliament in 1996 and outraged middle Australia with tirades against Aborigines, migrants, welfarism and the like.

Hanson almost vanished after the last election when she failed to win office, her large bloc in the Queensland state Parliament disintegrated and her party imploded under the weight of scandal and ambitious power-seekers.

She now faces serious charges of electoral fraud.

But this year she came back with a vengeance, putting MPs into the parliaments of Western Australia and Queensland, rolling right-wing protectionists into the broader campaign against globalisation, pushing her message directly in an aggressive internet campaign, and pulling her support back to its earlier peaks - or better.

Provided she is not convicted, Hanson remains a serious contender for the Senate, her legal difficulties reinforcing her air of martyrdom among the faithful.

Beazley has his own problems with the resurgence of the Democrats - founded by disillusioned Liberal Minister Don Chipp as a third force to keep the bastards honest - and the Greens, both of which nibble at the edges of his support base.

The Democrats hold the balance of power in the Senate, but went into fairly rapid decline after their decision to ignore grass-roots opposition and pass an amended version of Howard's GST.

Their fortunes have been revived by a palace coup that pushed feminist Natasha Stott Despoja into the leadership.

Stott Despoja, 32, is an articulate leader appealing to core Democrats and voters who want a third party as a check on Government power in the Senate.

Her major threat comes from the Greens and their support among advocates of causes ranging from rainforests to anti-globalisation.

With the added benefit of compulsory voting, these forces gain significance with the preferential and proportional voting systems that can give minor parties real muscle.

Government is decided by a majority in the House of Representatives, which is selected by preferential voting, in which voters nominate candidates by order of choice. The Senate is decided by proportional voting, based on the total number of seats won by a party in each state.

The Senate is rarely won by the Government. Instead, it is almost inevitably controlled by minor parties who hold the balance of power and can kill or demand major changes to proposed legislation.

After this year's election, power in the Senate will almost certainly be wielded by the Democrats or the Greens - or possibly by alliances of convenience between the two. But a highly volatile electorate makes it impossible to predict the shape of the next parliament.

Even Howard's much-prophesied political demise is far from certain.

Apart from his political skill and his ability to dispense electoral largesse, he can look to the example of Queensland Labor Premier Peter Beattie, who just a few months before his February election was all but written off, but who bounced back with a thumping majority that vaporised the Liberals and decapitated, the Nationals.

A quick and decisive end to the crisis swirling around the MV Tampa and its asylum-seekers off Christmas Island would add to his stature.

There is a whole grab-bag of other issues - the hardening of grey power, the growing gap between rich and poor, country versus city, globalisation, nuclear mining, reactors and waste, petrol prices, welfare policy, taxes, healthcare ...

There is also a rise of new nationalism, marked at one end by the mushrooming of consumer patriotism and the flag-draped logos of Aussie-first marketers like millionaire Dick Smith, and at the other by a growing revulsion at foreign mergers and takeovers that prompted the Government to block Shell's takeover of Woodside's huge Australian-owned natural gas operations off northern WA.

But the central issue will be the economy and who best can run it.

The GST's pounding of the housing industry and small business, a series of policy backflips and the added woes of a falling dollar and rising oil prices seriously dented Howard's clear lead as preferred economic manager.

But the Australian economy is a resilient beast, and its recent rebound from contraction to growth has pushed the nation's barely suppressable optimism back into gear, lifting, in turn, Howard's chances of another term.

With their voters' fervent wish for long and stable good times, and an equally strong distaste for the combative rhetoric of the Hawke-Keating years, Howard and Beazley will present themselves as moderate, restrained and responsible leaders with a sound vision of the country's future.

Their relative success will depend heavily on a media that thrives on conflict, its perceptions of winners and losers and a heavy emphasis on opinion polling.

Media debate drove the decision to block Shell's bid for Woodside, and gloomsaying reporting of a dip in economic growth late last year hammered confidence and raised real fears of further contraction.

Howard will need to convincingly argue that he is not yesterday's man and that he is still a superior manager, but Beazley will not be allowed to cruise to victory on Howard's back and will need to deliver his own strong vision.

Feature: The Australia Way