Did Miss Gillard's aging failing ailing "brain" fail to function and warn of the obvious dangers of crossing no-mans land into 4 Corners enemy territory ? Maybe Miss Gillard is suffering from health problems ? Are Miss Gillard's advisers plotting against the red witch ?
The sword and the stilettoReturn to Jack The Insider Blog
Last night’s Four Corners program on the political assassination of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has sparked further tension in the government.
The show will add to the prospect of a return to the Lodge for Kevin Rudd. Certainly, we can safely conclude that Kevin Rudd is not the type to die wondering.
For all the noise, Kevin Rudd declined to be involved in the program in any formal way and when approached by Four Corners while out and about, deftly straight batted questions about his ambitions. That said there was nothing new in the program; the only glimpse of the previously unseen was the allegation that someone in Ms Gillard’s office had prepared a victory speech for her some two weeks before Mr Rudd was toppled as PM.
The obvious question is why did Prime Minister Gillard agree to be interviewed for the Four Corners program?
On radio this morning, she said that she had been approached by the Four Corners reporter, Andrew Fowler to provide her view on the government’s progress since 2007 and hinted at the fact that the interview was something of an ambush.
It beggars belief that any review of Labor in government since 2007 would not at some point touch on the abrupt termination of Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership in June 2010.
Whether your preferred metaphor is own goals or self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the foot, it is further evidence that Julia Gillard’s office is dysfunctional. Any media manager who couldn’t see what was coming should undergo a brain function CT scan and a hearing test in that order. Of course, the buck stops with Ms Gillard who was happy to sit down and be miked up for the interview.
Beside the disclosure of the speech being prepared in advance – and really one must wonder how a speech containing a string of platitudes could have taken any longer than ten minutes to knock together - there was nothing else that was revelatory in the program.
It did serve as a reminder of the utter political brutality of people like Senators Mark Arbib and David Feeney. I’ve been around long enough to remember when Mr Arbib was a young up and comer, extolled as a genius by his adherents in Sussex Street.
All I can say is that it brings to mind Gore Vidal’s famous quote that Andy Warhol was the only genius he had ever known with an IQ of 60.
Put simply, Mark Arbib’s political career as an operative is littered with poor judgments, bad decisions and dark, behind-the-scene machinations that have invariably inflicted unnecessary pain on the party he is bound to serve.
The Rudd Government was not spooked by bad polling or stuck in a morass over policy. While many polling companies had the government behind, others had it marginally in front in June of 2010. Certainly, as polling goes in the life of any government, the situation was far from irredeemable.
And while Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership was in a funk over how to proceed on an ETS and a mining tax, the government had plenty of shots left in the locker to fire off.
I have no doubt that Kevin Rudd would have won an election in 2010 and a whole host of people including former Prime Minister John Howard have expressed the same view.
Regardless of what one thinks of Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard, this was an act of bastardry by the factional powerbrokers who acted as they did because they could. In many ways, Kevin Rudd was the architect of his own demise but the factional bosses had a range of possibilities open to them, including issuing the then PM with a stern warning and telling him he had lost the confidence of the caucus.
Alas, diplomacy and frank discussion are not their strong suits. They prefer the sword and the stiletto.
No doubt the conspirators would claim that they acted in the best interests of the party and a caucus frustrated and angry by Kevin Rudd’s overbearing leadership style.
At some point around 8.00pm on the evening of June 23, 2010, Rudd became aware that he did not have the numbers to survive a spill on the floor. At that time he beseeched Julia Gillard to give him more time to turn the polls around.
He had asked to be given three months. Ms Gillard took the offer back to the factional heavyweights and within an hour was back in Mr Rudd’s office to turn him down.
That was that for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. And Julia Gillard has been scrambling around seeking legitimacy ever since.
The other stark reminder was that Tony Abbott’s role in the drama was virtually incidental. Too much has been made of the force and effectiveness of his tactics in the six month period since he had become leader in a party room spill in December 2009.
When the movie or tele-series is made as no doubt it will, Tony Abbott’s role will be of the walk on variety; a cameo that one could easily blink and miss. If this sordid tale was ever made in to a piece of theatre produced by the local primary school, Tony Abbott could play a tree; existing in the background but inconsequential to the tragedy going on around him.
Mr Abbott should claim Kevin Rudd as a notch on his belt for that is how politics works but one could say the same of Wayne Swan and the notches on his belt which include Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull.
No, this is a squalid story that could only be played out by Labor; a party struggling to find a sense of itself while being ruled by Machiavellian warlords whose ruthlessness knows no bounds other than the exercise of power for its own sake.
In mid 2009, the Rudd Labor Government held a commanding 15 to 20 point lead over the Opposition. An election at or around that time would have dispatched Labor’s traditional rivals, possibly forever.
The Labor Party now faces the prospect of a landslide defeat in an election just four years later and with it a long stretch in the political wilderness.
Indeed, it may lead to political extinction and if so, we will be able to mark the time that the once great Labor Party stumbled into the darkness and who is responsible for delivering it to oblivion.http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/jacktheinsider/index.php/theaustralian/co...
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