The challenge for Australia

Will our political leaders pass the test set by the Jakarta bombers?

The murderous creeps who conceived of the car bomb outside the Australian embassy in Jakarta almost certainly do not understand it, but they have presented our national political system with an enormous challenge. Will we pass the test? Will we be able to see the issues related to the bombing - Islamist terrorism, the war in Iraq, our relations with regional neighbours - clearly through the fug of electioneering? Or will our national discussion collapse itself into provocative sound bites and tit-for-tat taunts of "I told you so"?

In the 24 hours after the bombing, both sides of politics showed admirable restraint in their public comments. The Prime Minister on Thursday afternoon was matter-of-fact and presented an unvarnished response. Yesterday morning, he maintained the tone, making the sort of concession that would have been inconceivable in the highly charged atmosphere of the 2001 election campaign. "By definition, almost, if you can't stop attacks occurring by intelligence it is an intelligence failure," he told ABC radio.

Mark Latham, also on Thursday, expressed his sorrow and anger, and refused to be drawn further under questioning from journalists. It was interesting to compare his capacity to resist the lure to say more and, as a consequence, stray into a self-defeating, ill-judged criticism of the Government, with the relative incapacity of his two immediate predecessors in the Labor leadership, Kim Beazley and Simon Crean, to do the same.

Beazley and Crean on several critical occasions said too much on matters of national security - think back to Beazley's "failure of policy" attack on the Government when a refugee boat sank, killing hundreds, during the 2001 campaign, which gave Howard the opportunity to be appalled and offended - when holding fire was the best course.

Will our national discussion collapse itself into provocative sound bites and tit-for-tat taunts of "I told you so"?

By the same token, Latham at least picked up the dice even if he didn't roll them yesterday morning, when he left open the possibility of the bombing becoming part of an election campaign debate on national security.

He told the ABC: "Obviously, we will have the (televised leaders') debate on Sunday and in the context of a national election campaign it is possible in general to talk about national security strategies for the future. Our policy positions with regard to the region, with regard to homeland security, are well known and we'll continue to advocate the policies that we believe are important for making Australia secure in the future.

"But I certainly won't be seeking to link our general policy approach . . . to this particular incident, this particular tragedy, unless there's information that arises . . . that would draw some sort of connection."

Both leaders will be skirting around the bombing as a domestic political issue for the next day or so. But as Latham observed, it will have to feed into tomorrow night's debate; there is no way it cannot.

Words will be like bullets. Publicly, Labor and the Government are right now saying all the right, unprovocative things - or to put it in its proper election context, not saying all the wrong, provocative things. But anyone who thinks that either side does not have campaign staff examining the bombing from every angle, sifting through the issue for an advantage and noting the elements that could be damaging, is living in a dream.

The Government sent Philip Ruddock into the field on a reconnaissance mission last week to see how the fear card would play and he came back with some bad grazes and a bullet in the thigh. His attempt to put Labor on the side of people smugglers and the child murderers in Beslan went down like a wrought-iron kite in the media and in the electorate.

The Jakarta bombing could change voters' willingness to listen to that sort of message, with emphasis on the word "could".

The truth is that the discussion of Australia's relationship with the rest of the world, which is really what the national security issue is all about, has moved on since it played such a decisive role in the last election. A number of things have happened: the Bali attacks; the invasion of Iraq; the assimilation of a number of asylum seekers into Australian society; there has been a greater focus on the policy of putting children in detention.

If the Government's recent tentative moves in the direction of a more lenient approach towards children in detention and the granting of temporary protection visas are any guide, public perception of these issues has changed.

The point appears to be that it is easy for politicians to stoke fears among some voters in the short term but much harder to maintain those fears over the longer term.

Even so, the important question remains: will the bombing play through the campaign all the way to October 9? So far, with the shock of the event still fresh, the public comments by politicians have been largely confined to the leaders.

But that will not last for much longer. And there is no shortage of voluble backbenchers with strong views either way - some who will want to link it directly to the Government's invasion of Iraq, others who will want to link it directly to Labor's planned pull-out from Iraq - who could push the discussion of the bombing into more difficult, visceral territory.

Throughout the early part of this year, as Labor's opinion poll ratings climbed and stayed high enough to give the ALP a chance of victory, senior Labor politicians including Latham volunteered in private that the one thing they feared was an "external event", something that would instantly change voter perceptions.

The Jakarta bombing was the sort of thing they were talking about, and soon they will find out if their concerns were well-placed.

In late August 2001, only two days after the Tampa was intercepted, I talked to a leading ALP politician about Labor's election prospects. He was confident the ALP would win, despite the avalanche of talkback radio support for the Government's actions in repelling the boat people. Once voters worked out how much the Government's new approach to asylum seekers would cost, he told me, this support would dissipate.

A few days later, the first post-Tampa opinion polls were published. They registered a massive, unprecedented swing to the Coalition. Pollster Gary Morgan found them so extraordinary, he went out and re-interviewed, only to get the same results.

The election had already been fought and won by the Government, 2 months before the actual polling day.

All the major polling organisations are taking soundings weekly throughout this campaign, so it won't take long to find out if this "external event" has had a similar effect.

Shaun Carney is an associate editor of The Age.
scarney@theage.com.au