Okay, so I've broken my duck about talking politics. So now the floodgates open. I also figure I can't draw a comment out of my readers to save myself, so if this doesn't fire you all up you can all @#$%-OFF! ;)
Well, it's finally happened.
KRudd's personal persona has spilled into the public domain. I've only seen 'highlights' of the interview on the 7.30 Report, so it could have been taken out of context ARF!), but here is an example:
But Mr Rudd said his government had been the hardest working at the Copenhagen conference.
"(Climate Change Minister) Penny Wong and I sat up for three days and three nights with 20 leaders from around the world to try and frame a global agreement," he said.
"It might be easy for you to sit in 7.30 Report-land and say that was easy to do. Let me tell you mate, it wasn't.
This is typical of this fraud. He thinks working three days and three nights straight is 'hard work'. He works his parliamentary staff (by all accounts) harder than any minister (or PM) in history.
I've always been told that businesses need to 'work smarter, not harder', and KRudd is the antithesis of that. His 20/20 Summit was a stunt by a man with no ideas who cannot lead. He substitutes ideas and leadership with endless hours of huffing and puffing and inventing ways to talk without saying anything.
Last night's outburst, coupled with the polls which have turned against him, signals the end for KRudd. He is gawn. Latham styl-e.
1 comment:
Bernard Keane, writing at crikey.com.au, put it well:
What Rudd has managed to do in recent weeks is send the wrong signals to all kinds of voters, rather than any one group.
In abandoning his own emissions trading scheme, as well as temporarily freezing asylum applications from the two biggest sources of boat arrivals, Rudd has clearly alienated progressive-minded voters in favour of shifting to the right on the political spectrum. But the action also showed him to be ready to jettison his own principles, especially on the CPRS, having strongly supported the need for climate action previously.
That decision would ostensibly seem to attract more conservative-minded voters, who may have been amenable to the sort of scare campaign Tony Abbott had been preparing to run about the impact of the CPRS. But in revealing Rudd as a leader unwilling to stand by his most important values, it exposed him to a more dangerous perception -- of lacking core principles.
John Howard often declared of himself, in ostensible self-deprecation, "You may not agree with me but you know what I stand for." It was a lie -- Howard changed his position on critical issues repeatedly. The "never ever" man introduced a GST. The man who attacked Asian immigration ran the country's highest-ever migration program. The professed advocate of small government and lower taxes ran the biggest and highest-taxing government in history. The man who wanted to "gut" Medicare became its "greatest friend". But Howard's skill was to either hide fundamental reversals of position (by quietly but steadily lifting immigration and the size of government, for example) or argue they reflected a becoming capacity to learn on the job.
Until his 7.30 Report brain explosion last night, I'd have said the same thing about Tony Abbott.
Rudd has failed in this regard. Having singled out only a handful of critical issues on which to separate himself from Howard, it was incumbent on him to seal the deal with voters on each of them. He did it with WorkChoices and the Stolen Generations apology. But not on climate change. Having sold himself so aggressively as a conviction politician on climate change, his reversal -- and particularly his poor handling of it -- sent a clear signal to voters of all persuasions, and not an especially appealing one.
The result is both types of voters are unhappy with Rudd. Rudd has started projecting back to them, and they don't like what they see.
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