Tuesday, November 20, 2001 It was December 13, 1975, and the symbolism was palpable. While Gough Whitlam, Australia's great reforming prime minister who had shoehorned decades worth of social change into a couple of years, was being booted out of office, Roy Fredericks was scything Lillee and Thomson for a blazing century off 71 balls at the WACA. It was, it seemed, one last, bold flickering of enlightenment before the impending darkness.

Last Saturday, for the first time in 26 years, Australia's voters again went to the polls on the same day their cricketers played a Test match at home. Again, the symbolism was irresistible. While John Howard, the ultraconservative leader who had campaigned on a bedrock of fear and xenophobia, was winning his third straight election, Australia's run of 23 Tests without a draw was coming to an end. The skies over the Gabba rained and rained and rained; a nation, it seemed, was weeping.

That is more a weather observation than a political commentary. After all, in John Howard and Kim Beazley voters were given the unappetising choice between a Dirk Wellham lookalike who passionately likes cricket and passionately dislikes asylum seekers, and a Greg Ritchie lookalike who quite likes cricket and quite dislikes asylum seekers. Rather than a contest for the worthiest job in the land, this was a shoot-out for the vacant middle-order slot - or that's the way it seemed.

It might feel trite to tie the escapism of cricket to the serious business of real life. But that is to underestimate the game's place at the heart of the nation's consciousness. It was evident yet again last week when the vanquished Beazley, clearing out his office, told journalists that all he planned to do between now and Christmas was sleep and watch cricket.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Australian politicians do nothing but sleep and watch cricket had you cast even half an eye over an election in which cricketing metaphors took the place of intellectual debate. Beazley won precious column inches when he pledged to keep Test matches on free-to-air TV. Howard hit back by describing his treasurer Peter Costello and close mate Tony Abbott as the "Glenn McGrath" and "Adam Gilchrist" of the Liberal Party.

"I would like to think," Howard went on, "that I might have some pretensions to being the Steve Waugh" - only to be rebuked by Labor's Daryl Melham that he was in fact "the Chris Tavare of Australian politics, always playing off the back foot, determined to occupy the crease but score no runs". Even Michelle Grattan, veteran hack of the Canberra press pack and someone who should know better, found herself diagnosing that Beazley was on a "sticky wicket" and that Labor had "played its shots as well as the wicket has allowed".

The glossy magazine Inside Edge strapped the political pads on too (sorry, this cricketspeak is catching) in its latest edition, awarding Howard a "cricket tragic rating" of 9/10 and Beazley 7/10. It was revealed that Howard bowls "jaunty offspinners" - what else? - and that Beazley once took 8 for 29 as a 15-year-old. More telling was their choice of childhood heroes. Beazley plumped for his cricketing soul brother Garth McKenzie: affable, hard-working, but never quite reaching the highest echelon. Howard nominated Keith Miller, whose portrait used to hang on the wall of his other childhood hero, Robert Menzies, the PM who wanted Australia to be white.

Their "campaign slogans" in the same article told you something about them, something about the country. Beazley professed scientifically that "nothing you can do in your life even remotely approaches what it takes to bowl a legbreak", while Howard opened his heart: "All my life I have regarded the captaincy of the Australian cricket team as the absolute pinnacle, almost, of human achievement."

He might be pleased, then, to learn of the parallels between his own remarkable reign and that of Steve Waugh. On March 15 last year, for instance, while Shane Warne was overtaking Dennis Lillee's 355 wickets Howard was busily torpedoing attempts to overturn the barbaric mandatory sentencing laws for property offences. On December 3, the day that Australia beat West Indies for their world-record 12th straight Test win, Howard stayed home as around 400,000 people in Melbourne and Perth marched in favour of Aboriginal reconciliation. Then a couple of months ago, on the same day that Australia beat England at The Oval to clinch a 4-1 Ashes victory, Howard's early Christmas present - 433 asylum seekers aboard the MV Tampa - approached Christmas Island. Howard told them to bugger off and an election that had seemed lost was suddenly won.

In his victory speech the other night Howard proclaimed that Australia was "a magnificent country". I would give up all the world records, I would happily concede defeat to New Zealand this week, if only that were true.

Chris Ryan is managing editor of Wisden Cricket Monthly and a former Darwin correspondent of the Melbourne Age.

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