There has been a lot of speculation about the causes of the big drop in the government’s popularity in the latest Newspoll. As someone with a strong interest in this type of research, I was curious to explain why it should be such a major drop. After all, the net result of Kevin’s Asylum seeker utterances was that he sounded very like Howard, with some minor difference. These did not seem enough to cause the big drop per se. It needs a much bigger issue than the relatively minor differences.
Even being seen as weak, as such, is not necessarily enough. But there are clues in there. Think about the so far extra-ordinary difference between the party votes. What if it was based on seeing Rudd as more ethical than Howard? Maybe it was the glow of him appealing to our better angels by at least appearing to take the high moral ground. Now he has tried being amorally tough to appeal to conservative voters.
So I suspect the loss of the exceptional difference was the slip back to earth of those voters who now realise he is just another expedient political animal!
After all, closer two party preferred is the norm for voters who see little difference, and maybe we are now back to the reality: whoever you vote for a politician gets in
2 Comments
Absolutely correct. I was told in February by an ALP insider that Rudd and Evans were trying to build their illegal Asian solution to keep refugees out and locked up in foreign jails and have been picking away at the scab of their putridness ever since.
I have been astonished to read estimates where they gloat about having cops and spies illegally in Asia, not to track down criminals but to trace the movements of refugees who they then have arrested and locked up.
It is not only a crime to do this it is highly unethical.
He is a snivelling hypocrite and that is the bottom line.
The reaction in Adelaide, still shell shocked from Woomera and Baxter, when he told 9 year old Brinda to get stuffed was electric.
PTSD set in with hundreds of thousands of us, Leon Byner on 5AA said he was supporting the genocide in Sri Lankan camps and the ABC told him he was inhuman.
He has f…….d up, and I am proud to be one of the few people who knew enough to unravel the filth.
Ironically, for all the pious ranting that people can stay in Indonesia they are now bringing to Australia the refugees turned back by Howard and stuck in Lombok ever since.
We all saw them on Deb Whitmont’s 4 Corners program. Same people, still there, still in shocking conditions.
8 years of their lives stolen by our need to break the law.
Earlier in the year I saw a letter in the Oz which, I suspected at the time, summed up the roaring approval of Rudd from so called “middle Australia” or whatever. The letter said that Rudd carried on like a bit of a dag sometimes, but that essentially “I feel Rudd cares and Turnbull doesn’t”.
If that’s as typical as I think it is, then Rudd has been on pedestal that’s nothing to do with competence and everything to do with helping old ladies cross the road. It was only a matter of time before St Kevin started losing that halo.
A little bit of realpolitik and down he goes off that pedestal, henceforth to be measured on competence like everybody else. Which is not good news for him.