Peter Costello is maintaining the rage against John Howard and his Liberal Party colleagues by blaming the election loss on their reluctance to make him the leader. 

In a sign his bitterness has not abated in the three weeks since the election, Mr Costello used yesterday's declaration of the polls in his Melbourne seat of Higgins to say a lack of "renewal" had cost the Coalition the election. 

"As I moved around Australia there was no great enthusiasm for any policy differences between Labor and the Coalition," he said. "To the extent you could pick up any mood for change, it was a mood for newness." 

Mr Costello said the Coalition had not lost because it had done a bad job, and the economy Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan inherited made them "the luckiest lotto winners in the history of Australia". 

Costello Still Sulking Over Lost Chances 

It’s fortunate for the Liberal Party that its leadership does not believe that its recent hiding at the ballot box can be explained away by the same simplistic & superficial reasons offered by poor petulant pete.  

And fortunate to for the future integrity of Australia’s system of government that the Liberals are at least prepared to try & understand the root causes of that catastrophe, rather than opt for the easy option & simply blame John Howard for the whole thing. 

Whilst it’s doubtless true that Howard’s stubborn determination to cling to power (hubris) contributed to the destruction of his government, I for one think that its demise was a function of the convergence of a broad & complex range of factors. 

Even blind Freddy had come to see that the Howard government was serving only narrow sectional interests: more importantly, ‘the battlers’ recognised it. A government prisoner of its own spin; a government that had no credibility on defining issues such as the environment; a government that attempted to bludgeon the states into submission; that saw co-operation as weakness; that thrived on ‘the wedge’, divisiveness, fear & exclusion; a government that had lost the capacity for pragmatism, never mind principle; a government of slavish compliance to a bankrupt American foreign policy mindset; a government of deceit & trickery; of gimmickry & shallowness; a government consumed by appearance over substance; survival without renewal.  

A tired, vacuous & despairing administration, devoid of any capacity to inspire or offer hope; a government that saw justice as an inconvenience; compassion as a failing & Australian values to be hung like cork baubles from its cocked hat.  

A shameless mob that ranked everything in terms of its economic value & anything without economic value as worthless.  

A government finally rendered irrelevant by the Australian people’s desire to live in an equitable, positive & inclusive society, rather than being reduced to the status of helpless, stranded passengers, as the so-called ‘hugely successful economy’ rattled-on by; an electorate that finally refused to be fooled or bought.  

The elephant in the Liberal Party room is not its capacity for succession planning but rather a profound challenge to build relevance.