Further to that comment, for the time being anyway, the ALP is the natural party of government insofar as a slim majority of Australians default to Labor unless doubts about its leadership are significantly substantial for enough voters to buy the inevitable Liberal scare campaign. The NSW Libs are in real trouble but I’ll be surprised if any other state governments suffer too badly in the next round of elections. I think WA is in the bag.

The answer for the Libs in the longer term is, in my view, well canvassed in this article. Moderate Libs, stop voting Labor, your true Party needs you! The question is whether the Liberal Party organisation can recover sufficiently from the Howard years to ever be attractive to urban liberals in significant numbers again.

Howard should have gone at least 2 years before the election.

Much of the unwillingness to dump Howard was due to the prejudice oft repeated in the media that Howard was an astute political operator who enjoyed the support of ‘battlers’.

They may have voted for him but they were never fond of him.

Distrust of The Labor Party and/or their leader rather than intrinsically positive belief in Howard was the reason The Coalition was re-elected so often.

The Ruddmeister nullified that distrust very effectively.

All other things being equal second reason is ….. Simon Crean. Now I know this especially sounds out there but Crean as leader made the wise/lucky/prescient/flukey choice to oppose the invasion of Iraq in Feb 2003 when it really counted. Huge rally in Sydney that month. Then the jury was out all the way past Crean, past Latham, until Milky Bar Kid.

If there is accountability for anything in politics it has to be for a war that proceeded on a false premise. Whether Howard - Downer et al proceeding in good faith, is largely irrelevant. To get it wrong must be sackable. And they got it wrong as the WMD inspection team finally reported. And then they were sacked next outing.

I know there’s so much more to the skirmishing eg APEC not coming off as a LauraNorder PR triumph etc but I think these two things above are at the heart of things.

But, IMHO, they are also unable to face the other ugly fact that he betrayed Australia and all Australians more than any other leader ever has.

I can forgive the lying and attempts to restore what he believed was some balance in the industrial scene. Even the stupid and uncaring neglect of education and hospitals.

But, by co-operating with Bush and the fossil fuel industry to delay action on Climate Change for those 10 critical years, he put the lives of our children and their children at risk for the sake of corporaste profits.

That I can never forgive and I don’t understand why this is the elephant in the Australian room. If we continue to pretend that didn’t happen, the fossil fuel industry will succeed in doing it again - as they continue to try very hard to do.

Having read Kevin07 and this book, I must say I was disappointed that there was no analysis or in depth examination of the election. The book felt like it was written on the fly based on newspaper reports and personal observations (and an interview with Joe Hockey as credited). Disappointing.

Finally, I note that with the release of John Winston Howard in paperback I thought Howard’s End should have been included as an update to that biography. That the authors chose not to update that bio and release a slim volume on Howard’s End says a lot about the author’s motives…