November 9, 2009 – 9:31 am
Rudd is a control freak.
His government is run along command and control lines (read Cameron Stewart’s interesting piece in last Saturday’s Australian magazine).
His media strategy is a campaign strategy.
Win the day, stay in front. Make your opponent the issue. Control the message. Make no mistakes.
This is the goldfish in a bowl approach. Every day is [...]
November 3, 2009 – 7:53 am
Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it.
Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not [...]
September 29, 2009 – 11:26 am
In a recent issue of the new york review of books (Sept 24), Tony Judt described social democracy as the “ideology that dare not speak its name”, such has been the decline of the political ideology that once dominated Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and ‘new deal’ America. (Obviously, Judt doesn’t read Kevin Rudd’s essays.)
This [...]
September 21, 2009 – 6:57 pm
A new light on the hill | The Australian
In Saturday’s Australian Tim Soutphommasane had a long piece on where Rudd and Labor stand in ideological terms. Part way through reading it I started to notice that there was a lot missing from his account of the ALP’s current relationship with its traditional ideology. What was [...]
August 11, 2009 – 8:37 pm
Changes of government typically result in a flood of new members into the House of Representatives, especially, of course, on the winner’s side. After winning the election in 2007, 32 ALP members sat, and spoke, in the House of Representatives, for the first time, 39 per cent of Labor’s representation in the lower house. The [...]
In an earlier “greatest economic crisis since the great depression”, 1975, I found myself happily and productively unemployed (I have never read so many novels so quickly ever again, sigh) in Hobart after a season of apple-picking in Huonville, a few pleasant weeks hitch-hiking around this delightful isle and a truly inspirational week walking through [...]
From my son: Rudd talked about a kid called Matt Jenkins who busted his arse to become a carpenter, “Matt the carpenter”, like “Joe the Plumber” at least it wasnt “Joesph the carpenter”
As Ben Eltham has pointed out in New Matilda the Ozcar saga is about nothing more than political tactics. Turnbull’s tactics blew up in his face when it was found that the email he relied on was a fake. At that point, he should have done what many politicians do in similiar circumstances and plead [...]
Godwin Grech, a hard-working and intelligent bureaucrat, has fallen foul of the gap between myth and reality in the senior echelons of Australia’s public service. The myth, fondly recounted by the mostly faceless senior bureacrats in Canberra, speaks of independence, impartiality and fearless advice. The reality is that your career only progresses if you do [...]
Last month, I was alarmed by the Rudd Government’s expressed intentions to arm us to the teeth at great expense in response to some supposed ‘China threat’. I wrote a stream of alarmed posts. Not only didn’t the Government’s position make much sense in strategic terms, but I just couldn’t see how we could afford [...]
