"The pendulum and the pit — Faulkner, the election and the exhaustion of mainstream politics, part deux":
Labor was let off the hook by the simultaneous rise of Rudd and the hubris of Howard. Rudd’s one man political movement — writing essays on the German theologians, proposing grand theories of the crash, starting a thousand hares running etc — was impressive at the time, but in retrospect it vindicates Rich Hall’s observation that while it’s impressive to play guitar and harmonica at the same time, once you strap cymbals to your knees it’s all over.
One could see that in Rudd’s farewell speech. Some found it moving. I found it, I must say, passive aggressive, a long statement of ‘look what you’ve done to me’. Rudd’s concrete achievements are numerous and that shouldn’t be diminished as the right wing press are eager to do, but his inability to summarise or synthesise them in that speech was a tiny picture of what it must have been like to work for. Every detail provoked further detail, until the object was lost.
So if people who really are concerned by the miniscule number of people arriving on boats can’t see through it, then they really are pretty tragically manipulable, and the cynical base on which the Labor party works is correct.
But politically, Labor has nothing else. Once the Rudd circus left town, there’s just a bare big-top shaped piece of earth, and Wayne Swan and a ukelele.
Campaigning on the Opposition’s territory, in the penumbra of conservative fears, is a big risk – based presumably on the assumption that Gillard’s lead on Abbott as preferred prime minister will do the trick. One of the difficulties for Labor in campaigning against Abbott was that it could not paint him as the true jesus-creeping self-flagellating Waringah Mullar Omar that he is, alienated from the majority of Australians, when Rudd was in charge because Rudd was equally , well, non-BBQ material.
God knows who to barrack for in this one— it’s England v Germany all over again. There’s a great advantage in Labor having this whole strategy repudiated — even from a rightward trending electorate — and the political bankruptcy of the party and its grim leadership. On the other hand, the taxidermy of Tony Abbott…. In either case, nothing’s on offer one could start to get excited about. Which at least means you can kick back and watch it over a drink or two.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/thestump/201 ... s-part-ii/