POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallumIt’s time, in fact it’s well past time, it may even be too late, for a reality check. Australia, having been the only advanced country to avoid recession, is now experiencing the economic double of falling unemployment and falling inflation. Interest rates are a lot lower than they were when the government came to office and are unlikely to rise beyond what are seen as normal levels. Australia has the lowest debt in the industrialised world and the budget is forecast to return to surplus within three years. The mining boom has meant that some parts of the country are doing better than others, but everyone is doing pretty well and both business and consumer confidence ratings are high.
Seen from the point of view of the hip pocket, things could hardly be rosier. And yet the voters are preparing to vote the government that has presided over this happy state and is at least partly responsible for it out of office after one truncated term. Instead, they plan to install a mob of shop-soiled has-beens and wild-eyed never-will-bes whose policies consist of slashing government services, refusing to collect the taxes with which to pay off what it absurdly insists is unsustainable debt and sending asylum seekers to Nauru.
The government’s popularity has been falling for months, and it has now got to the point where the slide looks unstoppable. How has it come to this? Well, stand and take a bow, you factional bosses. These are the men (they are all men) who insisted that Kevin Rudd abandon his climate change stand, the retreat from conviction that started the rot. And when the rot set in, they demanded that he be replaced, precipitating a vicious split in the party that utterly derailed Julia Gillard’s already abysmal campaign for re-election.
Polling replaced principle; the views of a shonky focus group in the western suburbs of Sydney were considered more important than consistency, decency, commonsense and the ideas and ideals on which Rudd had been elected in a landslide less than three years before. Rudd’s real crime was summed up by one of his executioners, Senator Mike Arbib: “he has stopped listening to me.”
Julia Gillard, apparently, still is listening, and is likely to suffer ignominious defeat as a result. Rudd, to his credit, realised that the factions and their war lords were not only superfluous but destructive, and took them on early in his prime ministership; he has now paid the price. Gillard accepted their inevitability and dominance, and is likely to pay an even greater price.
But while the Labor Party might lose, the factional leaders can’t; safely ensconced in the senate seats into which the have inserted themselves, they have no responsibility to service an electorate and can devote all their energies to maintaining and enhancing their own power bases. This is their real purpose in life: they have no vision, ideology, imagination or sense of public duty. Their sole talent is supposed to be strategic and tactical – they are meant to know how to win elections. As has now been proved conclusively, they don’t.
Like all idols they continue to exist only because their followers believe, wrongly, that they have real power. They don’t. These be your gods, oh Labor.
In what must be the supreme irony, Labor is now turning to the leader it spurned, Kevin Rudd, to try and save a few seats from the potential carnage. Before entering hospital for the emergency removal of his gall bladder Rudd issued a statement indicating his willingness to join the campaign throughout Queensland and anywhere else for that matter.
Presumably it is hoped that this show of loyalty will at least ameliorate the damage done by the war of leaks and allay the resentment in the sunshine state over the dumping of the home town boy. All the signs are that the rejection of Labor has now gone far beyond such parochial limits, but desperate times demand desperate measures. Just how desperate is indicated by the fact that Gillard has said she is not only hoping, but praying, for Rudd’s speedy recovery so that he can get back on the trail.
If our proudly atheistic leader has retreated to the religious rituals of her childhood, she must indeed be in need of a miracle.
On a more cheerful note, wasn’t it good to see that hard but strangely attractive woman with the steel-capped black boots, Laura Norder, getting a gig in the campaign last week. Laura is normally only exhumed from her home in the political gutter during the dark days of state elections; she is, after all, a state rather than federal responsibility.
But having nothing better to offer, Julia Gillard invoked her to safeguard the populace against knives, knuckledusters, stun guns and, improbably, gas-filled dart guns for sharks – I’ll bet you didn’t know sharks carried guns. Not to be outdone, Tony Abbott summoned Laura to his side to help combat gang violence – if any gangs threaten violence, she’ll belt the crap out of them.
In the circumstances, reports that the Family First Party had approached the Australia Sex Party (Real Action!) to suggest a preferences deal seemed almost credible. And it was no real surprise to find Julia Bishop on television with the Chaser team, employing her famous death stare to best a garden gnome. Can this campaign get any worse? You betcha.
The former room temperature foreign minister Alexander Downer waited until Kevin Rudd was safely sedated, and then accused him of acting as a conduit for Downer’s own malicious, disloyal and possibly illegal leaks. When Rudd came to and said he might sue, Downer claimed to have been misunderstood. But Julie Bishop said Rudd had been known to swear, so that must prove something. And there are still two and a half weeks to go.
