In the final countdown to the Oct 9 ballot, most fast-food opinion polls say the deft Australian Prime Minister John Howard's chances of winning his fourth term still look 50-50.

Meanwhile astute bookies also give the opposition Labor Party little chance of knocking out Howard's conservative Liberal-National coalition.

Yet this election isn't about who best governs Australia; it's about Howard himself. Howard has been looking twitchier lately than when he called the poll on Aug 29. Then, as he declared that 'truth in government' as this election's theme, the retiring Captain Arne Rinnan slid the MV Tampa into Sydney harbour.

It was like a ghost-ship taunting Howard. The Tampa, SIEV4 and Iraq war disasters have shoved Howard's credibility, festooned since 2001 as 'mean and tricky', to the forefront of this campaign.

And the campaign - until recently bland, predictable and banal - has shown there is no shortage of loathing for the Howard government, plus a general distrust of politicians.

Instilling public distrust

Two weeks ago more than 400 senior academics, including 160 professors from Australia's universities, added their protest to the famous 43 ex-military and former diplomats and the 56 leaders of the medical profession. 'Moral preening' or not, all have called for more honesty in government.

About time, too.

Honesty is Howard's Achilles' heel - like his best mate US President George W Bush. And it's no accident that Howard wears the ironic moniker 'Honest John'. In the 1980 election, as treasurer, Howard duped taxpayers with his 'fistful of dollars' promise.

Since then he has been trying to shake off the sobriquet. In 1995 Howard eulogised: 'Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.'

Even Howard mustn't believe his own spiel. Before the 1996 ballot, he pledged he would 'never, ever' introduce a goods and services tax. In 1998 he changed his mind, and made the GST that few wanted a reality by 2000.

Howard's dishonesty is telling. Ask Senator George Brandis, lieutenant to desperate wannabe prime minister, treasurer Peter Costello. Brandis apparently called Howard a 'lying rodent' after the SIEV4 disaster.

The SIEV4 and Tampa crises probably better defined the Howard government as 'mean and tricky'. Then there's dodgy Howard's unswerving loyalty to Bush and his war on Islamic terrorism. Howard gladly purchased and peddled Bush's lies about Iraq's WMD stockpile and its links to al-Qaeda. And for sticking by his 'great and powerful friend,' Washington speedily rewarded Howard with a bilateral free trade agreement, even if it mostly favours America's 'free traders'.

With such impeccable 'strong leadership' credentials, how can Howard possibly lose? After all, it is by such strengths of persuasion - ideological and populist at best - that Howard has been urging Australians to feel 'relaxed and comfortable' about themselves, especially when faced with a nasty neighbourhood in Southeast Asia.

With murderous anti-western Islamic terrorists lurking in the region, US deputy sheriff Howard has again mindlessly threatened pre-emptive strikes upon these sovereign states. And both Howard and his Foreign Minister Alexander Downer keep tripping over each other, as they have over their foreign policy fluff and gaffes, to look more idiotic, immature and amateurish.

Standard fare

On the domestic front, Howard is a master dodger too. It's here that Howard loses what Bush recently called the 'Texan walk', with pumped chests. In Howard the bravado slumps - quite telling by his body language and nervous, artificial smiles. But make no mistake of his arrogance.

Domestic issues like burdening Australians with one of the world's highest taxes despite meagre tax relief, most of which has benefited the rich, are Howard's standard fare. In the last eight years Howard's 'reforms' have gutted health, education and social policies. His reforms have created and embedded a class society. And as one of the world's richest countries, Australia can't even look after its aged, its poor and unemployed, and he has plainly ignored Aboriginal Australians.

Which explains why the next few forecasted budget surpluses will be close to zilch, having already been spent on promises now that in most cases will either be gutted or discarded. But Howard's election promises, already worth A$6 billion - or at A$200 million a minute at his official campaign launch 30-minute speech last weekend - will bury future surpluses, especially if the economy turns sluggish. The economy's growth cycle is in its 14th year. That's one thing in Howard's favour - the economy. Or so it seems.

Sure, it has been rip-roaring away, but not because of Howard's reforms. Reforms may have created more jobs but unemployment is stuck at 5.7% - too high for the world's best performing economy. And more and more jobs are short-term contracts and casual - barely adding to workers' sense of long-term economic security.

Moreover, the previous Keating-Labor government had started the real reforms. Still, it hasn't stopped the often goofy-looking Treasurer Costello, with his ridiculous two-thumbs up pomposity, repeatedly stealing the credit. Howard calls him Australia's greatest treasurer ever. Costello has turned up the rhetoric, consistently referring to Australia as the world's newest 'miracle' economy.

But what saved the economy from being struck down by the Asian tsunami in the late 1990s was the pre-emptive strike on interest rate policy by the Reserve Bank of Australia. For that the RBA went thankless.

Wild promises

More, Australia's prosperity isn't being underscored by robust export growth but by the Howard government's manic pump priming. Equally manic has been the property bubble induced paper wealth that has, in turn, driven up highly risky personal debts by consumers still hell-bent on an equally manic spending binge.

The Reserve Bank has warned that such unsustainable spending risks higher inflation and higher interest rates. That's what high growth rates do, no matter how well the government's statisticians calculate to hide real inflation numbers.

Equally, as Howard pisses up against the wall 'projected' budget surpluses through his wild and woolly promises, the budget bottom-line will at some point risk triggering upwards the interest rate lever. If long-bond rates are now fetching lower effective yields, that's a sign the economy is slowing. So interest rates won't change.

However, sustained budget deficits and a worsening current account, now at six percent of gross domestic product, will put upward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on the dollar, making export incomes even harder to achieve. And if the US economy tanks, hold on to your hats, although it's more likely to stay sluggish.

All this hasn't stopped Howard from dishing out more of his dishonesty. As on the national security front, mean and tricky Howard has also been scare-mongering Australians of the greater risks of interest rate rises, possibly to where they were in the late 80s and early 90s, if they vote Labor back into power.

Economic credibility

Howard conveniently forgets that under his watch as treasurer in the Fraser government, interest rates rose to 13 percent and the budget was in chronic deficit. Howard hasn't the economic credibility that he claims to hold. He hasn't fiscal probity either, given that his grand promises seriously threaten Australia's prosperity, especially among the debt-laden mortgage belt.

Voters need to remind Howard and the opposition Labor Party that the point about budget surpluses especially when they're based on spurious calculations and predictions, and against which politicians plaster their policy promises - is that they must deliver the human dividend.

Labor says it'll end Howard's social cannibalisation and return Australia to its egalitarian old self. But like the idea of 'mateship', Australian egalitarianism is myth. Only blissful ignorance and mindless parochialism will buy that sort of bunkum.

In the last days of this election campaign, both sides will ramp up their frenzied auctioning for votes. Howard and Latham are frenetically out-bidding each other continuously with grand policy promises on taxation, health, welfare and education. Even the environment. Suddenly they're all greenies.

But scrutinise their election promises and one sees more half-baked policies being churned out and faster than a sausage-making factory. Worse, none of these policy promises are without any realism, much less a vision of the future. If these policies are crafted as designer sausages, chances are they're laced with salmonella.

With class lines more clearly dividing Australian society today than at any time before, more and more Australians won't be able to heed Howard's mantra of feeling 'relaxed and comfortable'.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.