Australia 2004: Costello v. Beazley

[Smid]

Latham won the leadership ballot by a single vote, if I recall correctly... so Beazley winning the leadership is extremely plausible.

Latham was a very risky pick - he was highly undisciplined... this is the guy who, as a backbencher had referred to the Government front bench as "a conga line of suckholes" - so the implosion was never completely unanticipated. Virtually anybody else in the Labor Caucus would have done better than he did. As it was, the Government only just managed to get a majority in the Senate - there was Russell Trood (Lib), Barnaby Joyce (Nat), Pauline Hanson (One Nation) and Drew Hutton (Greens), fighting it out for the final two Senate spots. The final few distributions had the totals:

Trood: 250,535
Hanson: 197,275
Joyce: 254,589
Hutton: 267,665

Hanson was then excluded, and her preferences flowed:

Trood: +85,215 (335,750)
Hanson: -196,597 (678)
Joyce: +87,110 (341,699)
Hutton: +22,914 (290,579)

So Trood and Joyce were elected, as they passed the quota of 323,611.

The Greens were just under 33,000 votes (and preferences) short of winning. If Labor had done better, there is every likelihood that the Greens could have won that final spot (one of those final two spots would still go to either Joyce or Trood, but the other could easily have gone Green). In other words, it wouldn't have taken much for the Coalition to have not won the Senate, even if Costello retained the Prime Ministership in this scenario.

[Smid]

In real life, Labor tried to make the election about trust/integrity of government, due to the children overboard inquiry, the GST (despite the fact that Howard took it to the electorate), and Rudd's unsubstantiated claims about the government's involvement in the AWB scandal.

The Coalition turned that around, with Howard asking during the "election announcment" press conference, words to the effect of "the question the Australian people need to ask is 'who do they trust to manage Australia's economy and keep interest rates low?'"

I read an article after the election that post-election focus group polling showed that Labor's advertising of "vote for Howard, get Costello" had somewhat backfired, not because people didn't believe it, but because they credited Costello with the economy, and the Coalition was strongly supported in issues polling as the party to better protect the economy. I think this is an important point to note when considering this scenario.

I think that in this scenario, the Coalition would still try to make the economy the main issue, because it was such a strong positive for the government. They wouldn't be able to run the "L-Plate Latham" ads, but instead would probably remind people that Beazley had been Finance Minister back in 1991. The ads that actually ran, one of them showed interest rates under various Labor Prime Ministers, and one showed how much interest repayments would go up if the interest rate rose by a certain percentage - finishing with "and if they rose to the average level when Labor was last in office" - I think with Beazley as leader, you'd find a "and if they rose to the level when Kim Beazley was Finance Minister" interest rate comparison in there.

Labor, on the other hand, would try to make it about IR, given Costello's involvement in the Dollar Sweets case.

Here are some of the actual Coalition ads that ran during the 2004 election campaign. Some of these would not take much adaptation to make them a Costello vs Beazley election campaign ad.

Mark Latham and Interest Rates

Wish Me Luck

Interest Rates and Labor

Mark Latham and the Liverpool Council

Mark Latham and Council fees

Economic Journey


As you note, without a Senate majority, there would be no Workchoices legislation. By 2007, with the US economy becoming increasingly wobbly, here's an article where he warns of an upcoming "economic tsunami" in the lead up to to the 2007 election, thus I think you'd find economic stability being the theme in 2007 as well. Of course, the world economy continues to decline after then. Assuming that the Australian economy gets by recession-free, as it did IRL (predominantly due to the mining boom, fuelled by Chinese economic growth), the 2010 ads (and indeed, the press conference when the economic statistics are release) would probably have Costello reminding people that when Labor was last in office, we had the "recession we had to have" but that under the Costello Government, Australia withstood the largest economic crisis since the great depression, without slipping into recession.