The media is a dunce. Today it’s chock-o-block with declarations and crowing that Labor’s leadership woes are settled. They’re not. And Rudd has done his chances of winning the election no harm either which is, after all, what it’s all about.
Today’s media coverage is much like that which transpired a few months ago after Julia Gillard tore Tony Abbott to pieces on the gender issue. The entire press gallery damned the performance as cynical and hypocritical, even as the polity loved it. It’s the same this time. In refusing to run in yesterday’s ballot, Rudd will grow more popular still with voters. He refused point blank to do to Julia what was done to him. Rudd just elevated himself above politics in moral terms, in integrity terms and in leadership terms.
Yet the press gallery, which seems to have no morality, integrity or leadership can’t see in others what it has none of in itself.
A year or so ago I had a serendipitous beer with Barry Jones, former National President of the ALP. I asked him what he thought the chances were of Malcolm Turnbull knocking off Tony Abbott. His answer surprised me. Mr Turnbull, he explained, was an unpopular figure in his own party. Personal allegiances matter in politics, he said, and pegged the chances of a Turnbull rise quite low as a result.
The same dynamics dog Kevin Rudd. He is too unpopular with his own colleagues, or he would already be back in the top job. But that does not mean he’s a dead duck now. It only means that the pain of imminent loss in Labor is not yet sufficient to overcome they’re dislike of the man. Rudd has now set the polity against that dislike and in politics the polity wins.
Yesterday was a masterstroke by Rudd. It is Julia Gillard that is now the dead duck and the Australian Labor Party if it does not wake up.
