http://www.theage.com.au/national/turnbull-factor-puts-coalition-in-front-20080921-4l0e.html

2PP: 52-48

Primary: ALP 41%, Coalition 42%

PPM: Rudd 56%, Turnbull 33%

Hmm… for a narrowing such as that to occur is really strange. The article doesn’t doesn’t what the last ACN 2PP was… does anyone have a record?

All you have is a One Party State all over again instead of the National Party now its the ANC and yet the ANC are moving from one corrupt leader to another corrupt leader.
So long as there is a One Party State in South Africa, nothing will change.

You can’t exclude most of a nation from political, social and economic power for decades and then expect them all to suddenly adhere to the very same democratic principles that were denied them. It took centuries for all the major democracies to develop (including our own) and the stories of their births are riddled with conflicts and corruption.

I don’t deny South Africa has her problems, but the stewardship shown by Mandela and Mbeki to take South Africa from racist regime to a reasonably functional democracy that despite its setbacks, flaws and incompleteness is moving in the right direction I count as the single most effective transition to democracy the world has ever seen.

Show me a country that has done it better, or in a shorter time frame, or with less bloodshed, or without the corruption that comes with a sudden freeing up of social, economic and political capital. The US? France?

You effectively just condemned a nation of people for not being far better at building democratic institutions than we have ever been. It takes decades if not centuries to set up a free society and then put in place the political, social and economic institutions that curb the abuse of those very freedoms.

We still struggle with it here and we’ve had 220 years to work on it and that was on the back of a further 200 years work in England before we even started.

South Africa has her problems, and there is corruption. But at least they haven’t recently started a war on false pretences that has killed 500,000 people.

So get over it!

Interesting your comment about the pressure of being PM. Some leaders have cracked a bit under the strain of it all. I’m not sure that Gordon Brown’s coping all that well, for example.

First time I’ve ever watched it. The man’s popular. No denying it. All this business about “oncer Rudd” is deluded wishful thinking.