By Kevin Rennie:
With the mainstream news headlines predicting the beginning of the end for Kevin Rudd, theangle’s Kevin Rennie details why reports of the prime minister’s political death are greatly exaggerated.
This has been written to provide some balance to the current coverage of Federal politics. It took four opinion polls (Morgan x 2, Essential Research, and Newspoll) before the mainstream media and much of the online commentariat noticed that the ALP is leading the coalition. Even then the headlines were about Abbott’s popularity sneaking up on that of Rudd:
TONY Abbott is closing the gap on Kevin Rudd and increasingly being seen by voters as a possible Prime Minister.
Yesterday’s exclusive Newspoll in The Australian newspaper reveals Mr Rudd’s stocks have fallen 3 points to 46 per cent while Mr Abbott’s rating has jumped 4 points to 37 per cent.
New poll has Tony Abbott looking stronger against Kevin Rudd
This all fits in nicely with the perceived wisdom that Kevin is gone and should be replaced with Julia Gillard. At an ALP forum in Melbourne on Friday night, the Australian’s moderate economics writer and media personality, George Megalogenis, suggested that people may vote for Rudd hoping they will get Gillard sometime during the next term. By Monday morning all that was left of this scenario was the headline in his Meganomics blog: Is it time for Julia? Not a machiavellian whiff in the post, just some statistics from the polls.
Labor always had trouble with the reverse spin that a vote for John Howard was really a vote for Peter Costello. The electorate just doesn’t seem that interested in this kind of artifice. They knock ‘em over one at a time. They’re not just waiting to get at the next one in.
The ABC’s 7.30 Report ran the groupthink line on Monday night but at least identified the cause of Rudd’s decline, the dumping of the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Anyway, perhaps we can now get back to some real political debate now. Well not if the Nationals and Wilson Tuckey have any say in it. Most of the opposition rhetoric is about Rudd doing nothing but it costing a fortune. It is Nationals’ leader Warren Truss’s only line (who?). And in a week that gave us Paid Parental Leave and the National Broadband Network deal with Telstra. Could this man be our next Deputy Prime Minister?
Meanwhile the de facto Nationals’ leader, Barnaby Joyce, should be figuratively horsewhipped by the media for his attack on Rudd’s whoring with ‘pimp’ pollsters. http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-run-by-polling-pimp-joyce-says-20100620-yp7k.html Is that the only way he can keep himself in the spotlight? I defy anyone to remember the last strong policy idea he has had. Maybe it was when he was Finance spokesperson, suggesting that Australia cut overseas development aid spending to trim the deficit.
In the wake of David Marr’s Quarterly Essay, Power Trip, exploring the Prime Minister’s subconscious, there is a new book examining the government’s response to the global financial circus. Shit Storm http://catalogue.mup.com.au/978-0-522-85729-0.html is by Australian journalists Lenore Taylor and David Uren. Taylor’s remarks on Monday’s ABC Radio Breakfast program were very revealing. As Rudd and Wayne Swan were planning their economic stimulus package, the media were consumed with Costello’s leadership ambitions.
It is hard to take the mainstream media seriously, given their lack of depth or understanding. And it is not confined to economics. The press gallery pack think, and I use the term advisedly, with one mind.
These days the germ (pun intended) of most political analysis seems to start at the Australian. Their use of ‘audacious’ to describe the plan is bound to be the new ‘authentic’. Even then this morning Oz piece was obsessed that much of the discussions took place over the phone. Heck! I’d use the crikey word but that online site have also embraced the Rudd’s a dud storyline. Bernard Keane’s article ‘2010 election: Labor’s challenge bigger than just beating Abbott’ is anything to go by. At least he’s got the right story identifying what the enxt elction is all about: “It’s several large, wealthy transnational companies — Rio Tinto, BHP-Billiton, Xstrata, News Ltd — versus Labor”. Or has he? We’ve had a succession of one-issue election themes so far this year. Health and Climate change are just two.
Back to Warren Truss. Today’s headlines should be about the split in the coalition over parental leave, given their opposition to Tony Abbott’s proposed scheme:
NATIONAL Party MPs will not campaign for Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme at the election, saying it is geared towards city voters and damages the opposition’s economic credibility.
Nationals set to fight Abbott on leave plan
http://www.theage.com.au/national/nationals-set-to-fight-abbott-on-leave-plan-20100619-yo2n.html
However, it appears that this is a non-core policy. http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/no-split-on-parental-leave-issue-truss-20100620-yoll.html
The Nats apparently won’t be fighting it the way they opposed the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Finally Wilson Tuckey, the man who never quite says what he means or is it means what he says. His latest disgrace fits well with many of his past faux pas. His linking of the missing plane in Cameroon, carrying six Australian mining executives, with the proposed Resources Rent Tax is about as low as gutter politics gets. Anyway I retract any suggestion that he ever said anything, as he has already had to explain himself:
“I don’t want [the tax] to be portrayed as the cause of the tragedy, because that would be dreadful,” he said.
“What I’m trying to say is we have a tragic example of where the mining industry is now focusing its attention, no more, no less.”
Tuckey attacked for linking missing plane to tax
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/21/2932565.htm
Perhaps Tuckey should focus his attention on retirement.
The next coalition politician who accuses brothel-keeper Rudd of not playing fair when he ‘attacks the man’, testosterone Tony, had better not step in front of my shopping trolley.
Gawd! Can’t get away from it. As I write ABC TV’s Australian Story has an updated profile on Julia Gillard, ‘the Prime Minister in waiting’.
I agree completely – but I would go a bit further. I think that press gallery journalists actively dislike Kevin Rudd, because he ignored them and got on with governing, but they love Abbott, because he used to be one of them.
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