The inept Kevin Rudd has no future as Prime Minister of Australia – he will be displaced and fairly soon. He is an arch hypocrite and wind-bag who has been revealled as such on countless occasions and who is now trying to demonstrate that he has backbone by backing a ludicrous tax on the resources sector that will damage Australia’s resource sector and our international credibility as a place to invest. The tax is a confiscation of equity in existing Australian resource projects and a deterrant to develop new projects. It will not prevail as all logic dictates against it – the few economists who backed it should be ashamed of themselves – a miracle $9b annual transfer that has no disincentive effects - how pathetic as these gurus put politics ahead of logic. As the contradictions on the impossible Rudd position tighten there will be increasing pressure on Julia Gillard to challenge Rudd as the incompetent Labor politicians begin to worry that they may lose their opportunity to continue to pig-out at the public trough. I think Gillard would be an improvement on Rudd – almost any replacement would be – but she is a populist, ignorant Laborite who will damage Australia. Lindsay Tanner is a better choice but he won’t be given the gong.
Am I pre-maturely celebrating a Tony Abbott win? Not at all. On the basis of his recent populist hysteria he is worse than Rudd though it may be at heart he is simply a conniving political being who will say anything to gain power and then reverse his positions to suit more credible logic. The Greens – well I’ll probably vote for them but what a bunch of clots they were in rejecting the ETS in the Senate. Bob Brown’s critique of the Afghanistan involvement after the two Aussie soldiers were killed sickened me.
Australian politics is in a desparate state. Time for a new party or movement. I hope the disasterous Rudd is displaced but fear his immediate replacement and fear the Coalition alternative to a Labor Government.
Update: I inadvertently deleted some comments on this – I deleted the post inadvertently but could restore that but not the comments. The results of the NSW Penrith byelection confiirm my views. Rudd (and of course the NSW Government) is finished.
Muy buen artículo. Nos vemos
ur a fag
Buenas tardes!. Muy buen artículo, te agregaré a mi lector de noticias. Saludos!
Harry, I’ve bookmarked this piece of partisan fantasy so I can point it out to you after Rudd is reelected with an increased majority.
Harry, you’ve taken the latest opinion poll and then suffered from premature extrapolation. Perchance you’d like to blame Rudd for Australia’s dismal showing in the soccer as well?
DD, You claim – “with an increased majority”. Now just who is being partisan given the state of the opinion polls? I assume there will be some return towards the government as the election approaches but I cannot see an increased majority. In any event I reject the claim of being partisan because I don’t back the opposition.
Uncle Milton, Its more than one opinion poll. I think the idiocy of the Australian media in exaggerating the possibilities for Australia in the soccer does have something to do with Kevin Rudd. Lack of realism lies at the core of Rudd.
Derrida, whether Labor can survive this nitwit promoted far above his level of competence remains to be seen, but they must get rid of him now the genie’s out of the bottle- http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/RSPT-Labor-government-politics-tax-pd20100615-6FAF2?opendocument&src=rss
Swan will clearly have to go too in the shakeout, albeit if Gillard’s to take over the reins, she’ll have to be kept on a very tight leash by the wiser men of economics. Best to let Rudd and Swan do the quick backflip on the RSPT and then give them the boot, a la Turnbull and the ETS. A week’s a long time in politics as one drover’s dog knows only too well.
The newspaper media is beginning to lose it’s grip on shaping public opinion and this RSPT nonsense is a prime example and so is the phoney leadership issue. If you think much of the electorate gives a toss one way or the other then it’s because you’re part of a diminishing old gaurd still reading the OZ. Rudd’s slump in the polls has virtually nothing to do with the RSPT and it will be swept out of the publics mind before the election. The CPRS is also history so it will be interesting to see what gets proposed next.
In one sense you’re right Michael, in that a soft target mining tax has some considerable electoral appeal. However taken in context of all Rudd and the inner sanctum’s ill thought out policies, it’s just one more nail in the coffin. Too many failed policies lacked real substance or intellectual rigour and simply appealed to the gallery. It started with Fuelwatch and Grocerywatch and the inevitable climb downs, unless of course the Govt was prepared to go down the lunar price control path. Virtual free home insulation to all-comers with a $1600 taxpayer handout also invited the inevitable as did the free computers for every school-kid promise. The BER scheme was all about monuments for Ministers and local members to open, dressed up as another ‘revolution’. To ramp up a very specialised sector of the construction industry lacked the same common sense with the inevitable fallout and still to come in early July will be the thousands who miss the Govt’s ‘free’ solar cutoff deadline. Just another reminder of populist but ill-thought out policy on the run. On top of that, the death toll of boat people now tops 170 and they’re scrabbling around for motels and mining camps to take the Pacific overflow when we’d done the hard yards to stop the death toll and people smugglers. It’s just another example of heart on the sleeve and no brains, with the inevitable trade-offs becoming apparent over time. And to top it all off with the centrepiece of such an ethos, they back a loser with a global ETS and have to back away from the great moral imperative of their time. Now whilst Rudd’s not the only one to blame for all this, he’s the man in charge of it and now they’re looking for a scapegoat as the media sense the punter’s disgust and ridicule of it all. In that sense the media seldom lead public opinion but just reflect the general mood. Deep down Rudd’s colleagues would know what’s going down out there in voterland and they’d be very worried with the feedback they’re getting now.
You couldn’t possibly have imagined when Turnbull was Opposition Leader backing a Rudd CPRS, that right now Labor would be agonising over ditching Rudd, in much the same way as the Coalition were with ditching Howard for Costello before the last election. That’s the way it is but has Gillard got the gumption to call it because by all accounts she’s got the numbers and the Media can sense it now. The wolf pack can smell bludd and a stricken sheep. You only need listen to his hitherto sycophants in Marr and Flummery recently to understand that.
My comment wasn’t partisan. I don’t like Rudd much, though I think claims that he’s incompetent are off the mark. My distaste for him comes from elsewhere.
My claim he’ll get an increased majority is a positive, not normative, judgement. It may or may not turn out correct, but unlike your forecast I added nothing about whether he deserves it. It’s just where I’d put my money if I was a betting man.
Those miners would serve their own interests well if they thought ahead to how they’ll deal with him when the ETS is revived in the second term (with a Green BoP in the Senate, too). Which may perhaps be why their public hysteria has become more muted lately – though clearly they haven’t yet got the message to tame journos like Bartholomeusz and Gottliebson.
Tame the journos like the KGB? Fair dinkum derrida, these boys are the ones out there quietly plugging the glaringly obvious arithmetic http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Olympic-Dam-BHP-Kevin-Rudd-RSPT-pd20100616-6G93C?OpenDocument&src=mp
while the miners have to tread warily knowing full well they’re up against pure politics and playing to the gallery. On that point I’d sure like to know Henry and Treasury’s culpability in this spur of the moment, smash and grab scheme. Was it their advice or did Rudd go it alone? If it was mostly/all Henry and Co, then heads should roll in the public circus.
If you think you have a democracy in Australia, think again! Where’s the democracy in a nation that forces its people to vote (that’s called a dictatorship) and then gives them a free plasma TV to encourage a vote in their favour. You cannot have a democracy where you are handing out money to people who do not need it. Wake up Australia – ask what you can do for your country, not how much dinero the government will put in your back pocket.
We have Government by media in this country unfortunately,and this distraction cripples politicians to effectively govern.
Rudd is on the skids mainly because of his ego and his aquiescence from his evangelic climate change position and of course his misjudgement of the electorate over the proposed mining tax.
However for those of us leaning Labor people it is a shame as Labor generally has the perception to see the spectrum of the more egalitarian and humanitarium aspects of life.
Canberra is a cocoon unfortunately,and this distortion alters the prism from which politicians view the state of the nation
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