Australia's Prime Minister John Howard fought to salvage his "Honest John" reputation this week, taking the unusual step of issuing a lengthy rebuttal of the opposition Labor Party's claims that he lied.
With elections on the horizon -- though no date's been set -- Labor recently launched a sustained attack on Howard's credibility.
Over the weekend, Labor issued a so-called ``Truth Overboard'' list of what it claimed were 27 lies Howard has told the electorate during his political career, on topics from taxation to the spread of terrorism following the Iraq invasion.
Howard rebutted them all in a 12-page statement issued Monday night, and struck back by branding the Labor document false and misleading.
"In seeking to portray the prime minister as untruthful it uses selective quotes out of context," Howard said in a statement.
Labor accused Howard of lying when he said in 1995 that a sales tax would ``never ever'' be part of his Liberal Party policy. But he introduced the tax in 2000.
Howard said he had changed his mind, not lied.
"The implication is that a government cannot ever change its mind on policy," Howard said.
Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, with 2,000 troops sent to last year's invasion, has made trust a key factor in the campaign, said Australian National University voting behavior expert Ian McKinley. A majority of Australians had disapproved of the troop deployment.
"In this election campaign, the notion of trust and trust of leadership is going to be one of the most important issues," he said.
"Honest John" was originally a sarcastic tag when it was first attached to Howard during his stint as treasurer in the early 1980s.
But the leader has turned it into a key political asset that characterizes his predictability after 30 years in Parliament, his middle-class values and penchant for talking about issues directly with voters on talk radio shows.
"Truth Overboard" is a play on the so-called "children overboard" controversy, which blew up after the last elections in 2001.
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