The NHJ campaign in Bennelong is getting unprecedented levels of media coverage. Saturday's Financial Review featured a full page look at John Valder's ambitions. It makes for compelling reading.

The battle in Howard's backyard

Robert Milliken

The Valder campaign has an unsettling edge. It could be unprecedented for the serving Prime Minister to face a move to unseat him from a party elder statesman. John Valder, a former president of the Liberal Party and one of Sydney's best-connected fund-raisers, stands before a meeting in Cammeray, in the city's lower North Shore Liberal heartland, and says: 'The Howard government has become grubby. It's tainted. John Howard started out as Honest John. He basked in that. Now people laugh. He's perceived as Grubby John.'

Valder was speaking to supporters last Tuesday on the strategy for their campaign at the forthcoming federal election to oust John Howard as the MP for Bennelong. He wants the coalition returned, but without Howard as leader. 'We're trying to bring the Howard era to an end,' he says.

The townhouse, which Valder's daughter has loaned for the meeting, has morphed into a campaign engine-room. The dining table is piled with bumper stickers, T-shirts and shopping bags bearing the words 'Not Happy, John!'

The Valder team has taken this as their campaign slogan from the title of a recent book by Margo Kingston, a political journalist, slamming the Howard government. Penguin Books, the publishers, gave them permission to use the title as their 'brand' in a smart marketing cross-over exercise.

Over coffee and lamingtons, the supporters digest calculations of voting patterns scrawled on a presentation board. More scrawlings list issues that Valder says dominate feedback to him from people fed up with Howard's prime ministership: 'Debasing the public service', 'Demonising refugees', 'Uni funding', 'Tampa', 'Kids overboard', 'Ministerial code of conduct', 'Guantanamo Bay', 'Calling people The Mob'.

One item is 'Kirribilli House', the public residence overlooking Sydney Harbour which John and Janette Howard have made their home for the past eight years instead of The Lodge, the Prime Minister's official residence in Canberra.

Valder says: 'I've been astonished at how many people are really angry at the way the Howards have taken over Kirribilli House, particularly women.'

As speculation mounts over when Howard will call the election to seek a fourth term for the coalition, cracks have started to break through the rockface of Howard's tight political culture. In the same week the Valder group convened, 43 of Australia's most distinguished former military and diplomatic chiefs issued a statement challenging Howard's credentials on 'truth in government' and accusing him of 'deception of the Australian people' over the Iraq war. The events were unrelated; but the issues were the same.

The Valder campaign has a slightly more unsettling edge for Howard. It could be unprecedented in Australian politics for the serving Prime Minister to face a move to unseat him from a party elder statesman with Valder's clout. Valder is not standing himself, but is urging Bennelong voters to throw their weight behind any candidate standing against Howard. They include Andrew Wilkie, the former intelligence official who resigned in protest over the government's handling of pre-Iraq war intelligence, who is standing for the Greens. 'Our primary objective is to prise Liberal voters in Bennelong away from Howard,' says Valder.

At 73, Valder seems an unlikely figure to take this on. He is from the heart of Sydney's conservative establishment. After starting work in 1949 as a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald, he became a stockbroker for 30 years, including three years as chairman of the then Sydney Stock Exchange. In the 1980s, the Liberal Party tapped his talents as a fund-raiser, which led to his becoming president of the NSW branch in 1982 and federal president three years later.

These were the federal Liberals' wilderness years, when Hawke-Keating Labor ruled. As fellow North Shore Sydneysiders, Valder and John Howard formed political bonds of sorts. The bonds started to strain after Howard achieved his 22-year ambition to become prime minister in 1996.

They finally snapped over an issue that has become a hallmark of Howard's prime ministership: the government's failure to intervene in Washington over the incarceration in Guantanamo Bay of the two Australians, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib. Valder saw their prolonged imprisonment, without charge, as a gross violation of human rights, and Canberra's refusal to lobby for justice as reprehensible. This issue and others engineered by Howard Tampa, the incarceration of asylum-seekers, Iraq became touchstones for Valder's conclusion that the Liberal Party had been robbed of its old compassionate conservatism. This is what has motivated his campaign.

He says: 'The move towards autocratic leadership and the threat to democratic principles, has been almost a creeping disease under Howard. We want to recapture the Liberal Party.' How realistic is his ambition of a fourth coalition government, without Howard? Bennelong stretches from the prosperous suburbs of North Epping and Carlingford to the harbourside districts of Gladesville and Putney.

Mike Sprange, who has joined Valder's campaign as a number-cruncher, says it is 'immensely doable'. There was a swing to Howard on the two-candidate preferred vote at the 2001 election.

In the neighbouring seat of Warringah, held by the Health Minister Tony Abbott, there was an anti-Liberal swing. Sprange calculates that a Warringah-sized swing this time in Bennelong would make Howard vulnerable. He reckons it would take the loss of 6000 after-preference votes to unseat Howard.

It is an improbable task. But there are straws in the wind that Bennelong's voters do not always sing to their sitting MP's tune.

At the 1999 referendum on a republic, Bennelong and Warringah were two of the few electorates to reject Howard's call to keep the Queen. Both voted yes to a republic by almost 55 per cent. Valder concedes it is a big step from that to persuading traditional Liberals to vote Labor or even Green. He says a well-known legal and Liberal name is 'considering' standing as an independent, which could draw votes from Howard.

Of the reaction to his campaign among the 68 federal Liberal MPs, Valder says: 'About 20 will be happy because it says exactly what they think. Another group will be luke warm. A large group will want to chop my head off.'

He could not care less. Timing, money and networking are now his priorities. Valder is being helped by Peter Shenstone, an old friend with sharp, if ironic, political marketing credentials. Shenstone once worked for a market research company that came up with the winning It's Time slogan for Gough Whitlam in 1972.

They are kicking off with a Not Happy, John! rally at Ryde Civic Centre, in the heart of Bennelong, on August 24. Brian Deegan, former Adelaide magistrate, father of Bali bombing victim Josh Deegan and independent candidate against Foreign Minister Alexander Downer in the seat of Mayo, is due to be master of ceremonies. Valder has launched the campaign with $20,000 of his own and donations are starting to follow.

There is still dispute among Valder's supporters over whether the campaign should stop at Howard or target as well his more controversial ministers such as Abbott, Downer and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock.

One organiser, Baiba Mangalis-Ford of Epping, says: 'I've lived in Bennelong for 18 years and felt impotent. Last election I wrote Tampa all over my voting card. John has pulled me into something exciting and energising.'

Valder suggests with a chuckle the excitement is all too much: 'When I was Liberal Party president I was the media's villain. Now I'm on the other side of the tracks, I'm their darling. I can't cope with this!'