PM's Oil Gaffe

by Glenn Milne - Sunday Mail (Brisbane)

The Government's Keystone Kops performance over the question of whether oil is – or isn't – the reason we're staying the course in Iraq has reinforced the findings of internal Labor Party polling which shows voters now believe the war is a disaster for John Howard and Australia.

Iraq by itself is a problem for Howard. But there is a larger danger here for the Prime Minister. Labor has now set itself the goal of making Iraq, and the question of which party is better equipped to handle the country's national security, as indistinguishable issues in the run to the election late this year.

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson's performance last week went a long way to making that happen. In asserting that guaranteeing Australian oil supplies was one of the reasons for maintaining a military presence in Iraq, Nelson achieved two things. He neutered the impact of the Government's new defence policy statement and, in contradicting Howard, he made the Coalition look incompetent.

Not only the Coalition, but also the country. The contradictions between Howard and his Defence Minister ricocheted around the world, especially in the US, where the peace movement originally identified oil security as the secret motive for President George Bush's march on Baghdad.

Nelson's stumble was joy to the ears of Kevin Rudd and Labor. If the public messages sent out by the Government reinforce prejudices already bubbling away in the electorate, the Opposition is in business.

And in the case of Iraq, Nelson did just that, fuelling the perception that Howard had always hidden the real reason for us going to war in the first place.

The confusion supported the conclusions the electorate has already reached about the war. According to Labor's private polling, those judgments are:

• Voters are unhappy about Howard's failure to articulate an exit strategy. The fact that he now rarely talks about the war only strengthens the suspicion that he doesn't know where this adventure will end.

• This in turn feeds into voter concerns that Howard is simply too personally close to Bush, now seen as a damaged lame-duck leader.

• That does not mean that voters don't want to maintain our paramount alliance with the US. They do. But in that context voters believe Howard has failed to put Australia's interests first within that alliance.

• Voters remain concerned that we went to war on the basis of a "lie" – the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that were a direct threat to Australia's security interests. The Government's shifting of the national interest goalposts on Iraq – first WMDs, then regime change, followed by the need to support a democratic government in Baghdad, and now oil – will only harden this belief.

• And finally, voters believe that security in our own region is more important than troop commitments in Iraq in support of a US President on the way out.

If you wanted any further proof of the last point, you only have to look at Rudd's own defence policy update unveiled last week.

Emphasising the instability to our north, and Howard's neglect of the Pacific, it struck exactly that chord. That's why parties do internal polling.

Nelson himself has been damaged by this episode. Critically, Labor now believes it has a psychological bead on the Defence Minister's weakness.

In the Opposition's analysis, Nelson wanted the Defence portfolio mostly as a vehicle for his deputy leadership – and perhaps even leadership – ambitions.

But on getting it Nelson discovered a couple of vexing facts. First, as Defence Minister, you can't get around the electorates of backbenchers, as Nelson did when he was Education Minister, handing out money to schools. Second, it is Howard who really runs defence policy. The portfolio minister is effectively a junior.

Labor argues this combination has frustrated Nelson. So when he does get his moment in the spotlight, he goes for rhetorical over-reach, just so he's noticed.

Trouble is it has been, more often than not, the wrong over-reach. Last week it was oil and Iraq. In the past it has been comments comparing Iraq with Kokoda.

Dangerously for Nelson, he has now become the subject of ridicule. As one Labor frontbencher remarked on the Defence Minister's Friday trip to Indonesia: "The best thing that's happened to the Government this week is Nelson going overseas."

Or then there was the Government staffer who remarked to a Labor opponent: "Is Brendan still a paid up member of the ALP?" – a reference to Nelson's youthful membership of the party.

Say no more.