Julia has power but has she the passion?

POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallum

Comparisons, says Shakespeare’s malaprop clown Dogberry, are odorous. True enough; but what makes the current contrast between our Prime Minister and her predecessor more than usually noisome is the fact that while Kevin Rudd in his job as foreign minister is generally regarded as smelling like a rose, Julia Gillard, in the top job, is getting just a little bit whiffy.
Let us state immediately that there is very little possibility that caucus members will even contemplate tossing Gillard into the compost heap before the next election, and in the highly unlikely event that they did so, it would not be to reinstall Rudd: the irascible tyrant needs a lot more deodorising before the party room would even consider wearing him again.
But there is a growing perception among the voters that while they still feel relatively kindly towards their prime minister and would genuinely like to see her succeed, she may not be quite up to the job.
The problem may simply be one of communication: Gillard is just not getting through to her audience. She is controlled, plausible and clearly on top of her subject, but somehow she lacks the clear commitment, even the passion, which would make her message convincing. The obvious example is, of course, the carbon tax.
Her case is unassailable: even those who profess to find the science of climate change unproven agree that if you are going to halt the increase of carbon dioxide emissions, the only effective way to do so is to put a price on carbon. The only remaining dispute is about whether you do so through some kind of emissions trading scheme or through a direct tax. In Australia, politics decrees that the best approach into start with the tax and develop it into a trading scheme as conditions change. It is straightforward, effective and above all affordable; when a large part of the tax is returned to consumers as compensation for the inevitable price rises, the rich will barely notice the difference and some of the poor might even finish up ahead. Selling it should be like giving away free beer.
But Gillard, so far at least, has not been able counter Tony Abbott’s constant channelling of Hanrahan: we’ll all be rooned. This is partly because Abbott’s sloganeering seems to the incurious to be borne out by actual events. It’s still more than a year before any effects from the proposed carbon tax will kick in, but already prices, particularly electricity, petrol and food, appear to be going through the roof.
At least some of the increases are actually due to delays in implementing the tax, but Abbott and his colleagues have quite consciously and deliberately adopted the strategy of blaming the tax for everything: the big lie is, as always, the simplest approach.
And as scare campaigns go, it is going pretty well and it will continue to flourish unless and until Gillard and her colleagues can come up with some hard numbers to counter it. And by then, if Abbott can establish a public mood of fear and mistrust, it may be too late.
Having paid his respects to his personal God every evening, Abbott must also breathe a prayer of thanks to the fridge magnet that gave him the idea: I didn’t say it was your fault, I said I was going to blame you for it. And herein lies Gillard’s other problem: following Abbott’s diatribes about broken election promises she is seen not so much as a liar, but as malleable, even weak.
She responds too readily to pressure, from her colleagues, from her opponents such as the miners and now perhaps the pubs and clubs, and from the opinion polls. Her word cannot be trusted, not because she is, like Abbott, deliberately mendacious, but because she is just as likely to change her mind next time she addresses the subject. After all, she has certainly done so at least once about the whole carbon price issue, as Rudd rather unnecessarily reminded the world last week.
And the electorate’s disappointment is more profound because she came to the job with much good will and sympathy: our first female prime minister thrown in at the deep end, in hugely difficult circumstances and before she was fully prepared for the task. We had high hopes for her, and she has let us down. As Shakespeare put it in rather harsher context: Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. But if Gillard is getting a caning from the polls, it’s nothing compared to what the Greens are getting from the loony right-wing media – and yes, Chris Mitchell, we do mean The Australian.
The beleaguered party must feel that there is no justice. For years it has copped a hammering for being a single- issue party, a bunch of fanatical fringe dwellers with no idea or understanding of the real process of government. But now that it has developed a wider social agenda and is on its way to becoming a player with policies covering most aspects of Australian politics, it is lambasted for deserting its roots: get back to tree-hugging, scream the critics.
There are several reasons for the outburst of unbridled hatred from the conservatives, led by the usual Mafiosi of News Limited. One is simply the fact that Greens are a party of the far left, at least in Australian terms; this alone makes them unacceptable to the professional Tories.
The second, obviously, is that they are on the brink of assuming the balance of power in the senate, and like all minority parties in hung houses of parliament, will obtain clout far beyond their actual voter support. At various time this has been the case with the Country Party (now called Nationals), the DLP, the Democrats and even individual independent senators: Harradine, Fielding and Xenophon are names that come instantly to mind but there have been others.
This travesty of democracy is perfectly forgivable when the minority is on your side, but if it’s not, then expunge it from the face of the earth. But I suspect the real issue for The Australian, or at least for many of its columnists, is that the Greens are seen as anti-religious; they are pagan worshippers of Gaia or worse and should be stoned to death as blasphemers.
Actually there are quite a lot of seriously Christian greenies, an obvious example being Peter Garrett. But they don’t count; they are merely dupes in the grip of the godless communist juggernaut now running out of the control of its revered and selfless founders – the ones we used to despise as the nutters with fairies in the bottom of the garden.
See, it’s all perfectly logical, at least if you work for The Australian.