Laurie Oakes : Hark, Hear The Turnbull Death Rattle

Brendan "Pensioners Eat Cheap Soup! Soup!" Nelson must have to steer clear of most newspapers and TV news these days, lest he risk choking to death on karma laughter.

Laurie Oakes explains why :

Now that Joe Hockey has indicated he would not leave the party in the lurch should Turnbull's leadership become untenable, you can hear the death rattle. No matter what he does, the muttering among Liberal MPs becomes increasingly ominous and the erosion of his authority gathers pace.

The public sees an Opposition racked by internal brawling and a leader lurching from crisis to crisis, so the polls get worse and Turnbull's position deteriorates further. The accepted wisdom is that the Coalition has brought all this on itself through a lack of discipline and Turnbull's ineptitude.

But credit where it is due. Turnbull and the Opposition would not have got into such a disastrous position without a great deal of help from Kevin Rudd.

Rudd has played clever and ruthless politics. Wedge politics. And he learned how to do it from an expert.

John Howard made an art form of using issues such as asylum seekers to divide the Labor Party. Climate change is for Rudd what Tampa and "children overboard" were for Howard. He has used the emissions trading scheme legislation as a wedge to open up a deep ideological fault line in the Coalition.

The only valid reason for Rudd's insistence that the ETS Bill must be passed before the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference in December is a political one - to wedge his opponents. And the strategy has been spectacularly successful.

Rudd long ago refined the Divide & Inflame techniques used so effectively by John Howard. The prime minister now does pretty much the same thing to Turnbull, month in, month out, that he did to Howard for the entire year leading up to the 2007 elections.

Rudd promised to fuck with the minds of the Liberal Party when he became the Labor opposition leader. Becoming prime minister only meant he got to have more fun breaking their spirit, and sowing confusion and paranoia amongst their ranks. So much so, the Liberal diehards are pulling away, distancing themselves, and have taken to claiming they are "Conservatives" instead of Liberals.


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Once Were (Political) Warriors

Prime minister Kevin Rudd has succeeded, once again, in getting the past and present stars of the Liberal Party to waffle on defending decisions made one, two and three decades ago. Just as he intended.

Dennis Shanahan in The Australian :

John Howard and Peter Costello have struck back politically and personally at Kevin Rudd's characterisation of their government as indolent and uncaring neo-liberals, declaring the Prime Minister has reached "new heights of political mendacity".

Stirred from his sick bed, Australia's second-longest-serving prime minister has accused his successor of politicising and demeaning 30 years of continuing Australian government reforms, including those of the Hawke-Keating era, for partisan benefit.

On Monday, Mr Rudd, at the launch of The March of Patriots, by The Australian's Paul Kelly, said the Howard government had been "indolent" and the Coalition could not claim to be partners with Labor in Australia's economic reforms of the past 30 years.

"The Liberals' failure to advance a framework for increasing national productivity is not a minor blemish on their economic record," Mr Rudd said.

"It reflects a fundamental failure of long-term economic reform and casts legitimate doubt over the extent to which the Liberal Party can be regarded as partners with Labor in the great project of economic modernisation."

Even social reforms that "endured through long periods of Liberal rule" survived, according to the Prime Minister, only because of political expediency and not because of any genuine support or belief.

Rudd has effectively pulled off this kind of caper, of forcing Liberals to go on the defensive about their most important claims to economic success and major reform, from the very first week of his leadership of the Labor Party. Rudd's strategy of getting the Liberals all hackled up succeeded all the way through the 2007 election campaign. And it's still working now for Rudd.

As John Howard proves, as he desperately seeks to remind Rudd that he used to be someone important :

In one fashion or another we are all political warriors, but we have a superior obligation to the national interest. That obligation obtains in opposition as well as in government.

No side of Australian politics has a monopoly of either virtue or merit. Each according to its own value system has attempted to improve the lot of Australians.

In failing to acknowledge this last Monday, my successor diminished himself, and not the Liberal and National Parties.

This 24 hour wonder must have been worth a few good laughs for Rudd.

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Rudd : I Will Not Say What You Want Me To Say No Matter How Many Times You Ask Me To Say It

By Darryl Mason

Why won't Kevin Rudd go on TV or radio and say the words "$300 billion", in reference to a possible future Australian debt?

Because Rudd knows that the Liberals are going to use any video or audio clip of Rudd saying "$300 billion" in their attack ads in the next election campaign, and he's not going to give that word bomb to them to use against him.

Tony Jones on Lateline almost managed to crack Rudd open on Monday night. Almost. He gave it a good go, but relented when time was running out. Jones should have taken the approach of the BBC's Jeremy Paxman and asked the question he wanted the answer to at least 14 times in a row.



Still, even then, if Jones asked Rudd "can you say $300 billion debt" 14 times, or more, Rudd wouldn't have said those words.

He learned a lot from the mess John Howard made of election promises about "keeping interest rates low" and "keeping interest rates at record lows".

Trying to pre-empt a Liberal Party attack ad this far out from an election is a pathetic, trivial thing for the prime minister to be worrying about when the economy is rupturing, but Rudd is a political animal, first and foremost.

The Liberal Party, even Malcolm Turnbull, a once formidable manipulator of minds and emotions, still don't seem to understand this essential psychological fact about Kevin Rudd : He was, is and will remain, a mind fucker. He hasn't stopped fucking with the minds of the Liberal Party since he took over the Labor Party leadership in late 2006. And short of a stroke, he won't be stopping the head games anytime soon.

UPDATE : Not only can Rudd say "$300 billion" he can also say "$200 billion", but he still didn't say those monumental levels of debt in any kind of sentence that the Liberals can make sure come back and haunt him, or harass him, leading into the next election, though no doubt they will surely try :

HOST: And Paul Keating had a problem with the R word. Do you have a problem with the B word, billion, I notice and this was on Lateline, you wouldn’t say $200 billion and you still haven’t said it. You say 200 and 300.

PM: That’s exactly right, $200 billion, $300 billion, all I was explaining to you is the actual comparisons which exist between it and the performance of other relevant economies around the world.