Genuine leadership is as foreign to each of them as is a genuinely new idea about anything. Beazley, as Opposition Leader, has the higher mountain to climb. Howard is the incumbent. Beazley must displace him. You feel, despite the relative evenness of the polls all year, it might well be easier to displace Beazley.
Health policy is a good example.
Labor previously opposed the Government's 30 per cent private health insurance rebate. All those extra millions, insisted Labor, should be going into the rundown public hospital system. All of it pumped into the private hospital system and the pockets of the system's medical fraternity. It must, sooner or later, destroy Medicare, Labor's universal health care system. It has been a constant of Labor policy since 1969.