The Canberra press gallery’s record is so bad that Wendy Wedge is starting to think that John Howard should be written off because the Gallery are eulogising him as a master politician.

Well what’s different is that he is losing his underdog status and the Press Gallery members are starting to come to some odd conclusions.

During 2001 when he was miles behind the polls Wendy advised everyone to avoid writing him off prematurely and predicted in broad terms how we would win the election.

Now, when all the pundits are pulling together their year end and year forthcoming reviews things look a bit worrying.

You see Wendy has always worked on the basis that whatever pack mentality and groupthink applies at even given time in the Gallery is almost always wrong. The safest thing is always to back against the Gallery consensus belief.

For instance, according to the Gallery consensus, Keating and Labor were gone for all money and John Hewson was going to be implementing his far-sighted Fightback program straight after the election. Dead wrong.

Now at the time in another life and in another publication Wendy was not brave enough to challenge this completely but did get brave enough to suggest that perhaps it was premature to write Paul off for which she got drowned out in guffaws.

Immediately after the election it was a totally different tune. Now the Gallery groupthink said that Paul was going to be there until the new millennium when he would preside over the inevitable transition to the republic. Dead wrong again.

In the lead up to the election like generals fighting the last war the Gallery kept insisting that it would all be close. Dead wrong again as Howard won by a landslide.

In the lead up to the one after that the assumption was that Howard would get back in comfortably although it ended up being closer in vote terms than the famous Calwell-Menzies election which made Jim Killen’s apocryphal telegram into an imperishable part of political folklore. So the Gallery was wrong again.

This year’s election was so easy to predict that even Blind Freddie (although not Gary Morgan and a lot of the Gallery) could get it right.

But my John Howard has got a new problem the Gallery is starting to embrace a new conventional wisdom.

This one recognises as Wendy always has that the man is a political miracle worker of the first order and that he should never, never be written off.

But it also claims that he is actually remaking Australia in his own image and dictating an entirely new political agenda.

Now just occasionally some people do remake the world as we see it. The enduring nature of the Napoleonic legal code is an obvious example which would spring to most Gallery minds. Lenin hopping off that train at the Finland station would be another one.

In the Australian version of this John Howard has stopped the train, reversed it and is now steaming back to the 1950s.

The trouble is that, generally speaking there ain’t that many individuals who change that much in this complex and confusing world. And there ain’t that many which can make much difference to a small country at the arse end of the universe, as Keating so eloquently put it, when culture, economics etc etc are driven by all sorts of global trends.

So, Wendy’s hero is a political genius who can win elections and frustrate perhaps even for a decade the deeper shifts which occur in society. He will go down in history but like his hero Robert Menzies probably not change it much.

Now all of this is so self-evident that Wendy feels embarrassed even mentioning it except for those end of year reviews and predictions which keep cropping up.

Because, if the Gallery is so persistently wrong, and the contrary view to their consensus is an unerring predictor of the future, then those banal reviews could be significant.

Indeed, sufficiently significant to make Wendy worry that it might finally be time to start thinking about writing off the man who should never be written off.

Of course, next year in Australia does see a total eclipse of the sun. In all the great (albeit racist) African adventure movies of the past this was just the time when the hero befuddled the superstitious natives and with a single bound leapt free.

Who knows, perhaps John will use it do the same to those superstitious natives deep in the Gallery jungles on that Australian hill?

Feedback direct to Wendy at wendywedge@start.com.au