Howard's way

The Australian is suggesting a Federal election will be called this week for October, and that John Howard will stay on as Leader.

For all the poll driven speculation that Howard might resign before an election, I just can't really see what sense it would make in light of the polling not so long ago that had indicated that Peter Costello would lose votes for the Coalition rather than gain them. If the likes of Andrew Bolt and even Janet Albrechtsen are going to let the polls determine who should lead, shouldn't they at least be consistent and accept Costello's polling as relevant too?

And as was noted by Lenore on Insiders today, Costello would surely be 'tainted' by his past support for all major government policies, and you can't imagine him being leader for a month and coming up with any significant new direction.

I find Andrew Bolt's input into Coalition fortunes particularly galling. He has painted himself into a corner on greenhouse scepticism, and I would bet money that his columns on this have influenced some in the Liberal backbench to maintain scepticism, which in turn (as conservative Harry Clarke argues) has almost certainly harmed the government's attempted message to the electorate that it does take greenhouse seriously now. Thus having helped create one problem for the government, Bolt blames Howard for staying around too long.

For what it is worth, I think the arguments for Howard resigning just don't pass muster.

As I said a few posts ago, I reckon the Liberals have to come up with some surprising and new policy initiatives during the campaign to make up ground. I hope the policy boys & girls have been hard at it while Howard has been otherwise distracted by APEC (which, incidentally, I can't see giving the government any significant bounce. The security level is going to be seen as overkill, and the Federal government will probably get blamed even though it was the New South Wales Labor controlled police who were seen as being rough with a couple of protesters on the TV last night . I think John Howard probably just can't believe his run of bad luck lately.)

UPDATE: Tim Blair and Andrew Landeryou come out in support of Howard staying on. Yay.