Well, it's happened. We should have known. Remember those heady days late last year when the Liberal Party started cannibalising itself and
Tony Abbott somehow found himself in charge? Remember how good it felt knowing that the Liberal Party had just doomed themselves to three more years in the wilderness by installing into power a man who was about as electable as a side of ham? It felt good, didn't it? It felt right. Right like a dog riding a turtle.
God, the contortions I put my blog posts through so that I can include my favourite pieces of animal based YouTubery. And this is why I don't have a job at a major paper.
Anyway, let's just say that it has been quite the six months for public political opinion. And suddenly we find ourselves in the almost unthinkable position where the prospect of a closely fought election actually seems kinda feasible. Not necessarily because Tones has been advertising himself so well to the populace, but more because in recent months The K-Dogg has been overseeing the reasonably catastrophic collapse of quite significant portions of his election platform.
This list from February does not make for particularly heartening reading, especially considering it was published before the most recent round of policy disasters. They've even started asking Julia Gillard about her
leadership aspirations. The sharks are circling. Not a great sign for a man who even in 2007 could probably have best been described as "Not Howard".
In short, then, we could well soon be facing up to an election fought between an overly religious, arch conservative wannabe triathlete and a personality-less bureaucrat of purportedly intemperate temper who may well not actually believe in anything. I mean, say what you will about John Howard, at least the man was willing to kill some careers if that was what it took to ram through policy... Other people's careers, not his own. But Rudd, I dunno.
So, let's look at the state of play then:
The Emissions Trading Scheme
Last year this almost ripped the Liberal Party in two. Six months down the track and it's in danger of single-handedly dismantling Labor's political authority. The phrase that leaps to mind is
"Wha' happened?" Well, the Labor party got cold feet is what happened. Realising that they could never get it through the Senate as is, having no international mandate after the failure of the Copenhagen Conference and having already forsworn the double dissolution alternative, they really didn't have that many options except to
shelve the whole thing for a while/forever. But with that said, it did make them look particularly spineless at a time where public sentiment was already inclined to see Rudd as a man without convictions. Now he's a man without convictions AND without electoral support.
The alternative: Tony Abbott is currently fending off controversy over a claim he made to primary school students that the
world was hotter back in Jesus' day. I think there's a few chapters on it somewhere in Deuteronomy.
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Refugees
Ah, refugees. Every country has
that topic, you know. The topic that makes every elected official in that country join together in a chorus of blind hysteria and political one upmanship to prove to the world that they do in fact have a bigger penis than their opponent. In America it's terror, in the UK it's violent crime, in Italy it's Silvio Berlusconi. And in Australia, it's refugees. The instant the topic of refugees is broached by any party or any media outlet in any context, the leaders of both major parties can be guaranteed to step up like two drag queens trying to out "I Will Survive" one another.
Unfortunately for Rudd though, given the general tenor of Australian politics - which considers refugees like I consider Masterchef: unpleasant, unwanted and best ignored - he finds himself beholden to segments of the Labor party that actually want to treat refugees like humans. Meaning that his "tough on the most vulnerable humans on Earth" policy will never really work because the Liberals will always be able to go one better when shitting all over the victims of war and persecution.
The alternative: Tony Abbott recently claimed that
"millions" of asylum seekers might soon try and sail to our shores, an assertion as factually sound and compassionate as my claim that Justin Bieber invented AIDS.
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The Internet Filter
Bleeeeeeeeergh.
The alternative: Still undefined, but probably also bleeeeeeeeergh.
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The Insulation Scheme
I looked at this
a while back - when Peter Garrett was busy being being hung from a ceremonial gibbet in the town square - but there's no denying that for an otherwise minor plank of their environmental policy, this really could not possibly have gone worse for the Labor Party. Deaths, wasted time and money, another policy backflip and more unnecessary expenditure to undo the damage of the initial oversights: shit is going positively Wile E. Coyote in there.
The alternative: Well, now the Opposition is claiming
it has proof that Garrett's Department had evidence of the danger of the insulation scheme months before the first death occurred. For the Liberals, this pretty much makes up for Utegate.
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So, what is Rudd to do? Well, he can probably take some solace from the fact that no matter how much people might currently be pissed off with him, there are very broad swathes of the community that would sooner send nude photos to their parents than vote for Abbott. Also, he still has a budget to bust out. Maybe he'll give us all more free money.
But I think my favourite idea comes from
Jack Marx who suggests that at this point the only way Rudd can save his career from the depths of irrelevance is by making a strident, whole-hearted and election-oriented campaign for the legalisation of
gay marriage. And while this has about as much chance of happening as I do of getting through
the Lion King without crying, it's still a nice to entertain the thought that at some point Australian politics might actually be fought over by people of principle, in pursuit of some higher ideal.
That I agree with.
I.e. not you, Tony Abbott.