The spin master has claimed he is not going to prosecute a left wing agenda. But is their evidence of his sincerity?
There is no doubt that Rudd's personal agenda is less about left wing idealism and more about pursuit of political power. Rudd's spin has it that he has cooled the globe and saved Aboriginal children without a single policy being implemented, or enunciated.
With a stroke of a pen, Rudd has cost Australia billions of dollars on carbon trade. With another stroke of the pen, Rudd has spent billions more on supporting an Aboriginal Industry which does not support Aboriginal peoples.
Rudd's bureaucracy has ruined lives of known rape victims. What will he do for Australia?
Saturday, March 01, 2008
What is This That Rudd Has Us Sitting In?
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One word from Rudd makes all better
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd has an astonishing faith in the power of spin. Just giving a speech, it seems, is enough to help feed the hungry children and keep them safe:
(I)n dealing with the profound and unresolved question of the first couple of centuries of European settlement, I believe we have helped change the nation.
Changed how? The terrible thing about that quote is that Rudd apparently believes it.
UPDATE
And The Age, Rudd’s most frantic media supporter, moans “Yes! Yes!” and repeats Rudd’s grandiloquent words as their own:
This is a Government that, like its immediate predecessor, understands the power of symbolism. Unlike its predecessor, it has not used that power to divide. The great symbolic moments of this first 100 days — the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the apology to the stolen generations — have in themselves already changed the nation.
Indeed, notice that it’s got colder already? Black children are safer than ever?
As for that claim that Rudd’s sorry was not used to divide - well, judge for yourself. And, by God, we still need answers to this indication that Labor has in fact played the most despicable politics with black lives.
But The Age these days is so blinded by ideological fervor that it is into projecting, not reporting:
On Monday, as the Rudd Government celebrates its first 100 days in office, the anniversary will be marked in a nation that is again experiencing a renewed sense of hope. It is not a partisan feeling.
It isn’t? Odd then, to read this:
A survey has found small businesses have little confidence in the economy and in the Federal Government. The Sensis Business Index (SBI) survey questioned 1,800 small businesses in the three months to February.
The Federal Government approval indicator dropped 34 percentage points over the quarter to a net balance of -5 per cent, in the survey’s biggest fall in its 15-year history.
We have entered a new age of spin.
Rudd says no to radical Left agenda
By Matthew Franklin
KEVIN Rudd has assured mainstream Australia he will avoid radical social and cultural change by resisting calls to broaden his reform agenda and by sticking to his election promises.
The Prime Minister warned that people had "elected the wrong guy" if they believed that once he was in power he would unveil a secret left-wing reform agenda or suddenly yield to pressure from sectional interests.
Calling for people to move beyond "the classical Right-Left divide", Mr Rudd said he had been upfront about his election promises and would focus on delivering them in full.
"There's nothing terribly complicated about me," Mr Rudd said.
"If you obtain the people's support, that's what you go ahead and do."
The Prime Minister made the comments in an interview with The Weekend Australian to mark Monday's passage of 100 days since he was elected.
He also said he had no interest in debating whether the private sector should be contracted to deliver government services, and foreshadowed plans to engage the private sector in his fight to improve the lives of indigenous Australians.
Tax-cut plans on track
He said that despite the threat to the economy of inflation, he would deliver his promised $31 billion tax-cut plan in full. And despite Opposition warnings of a possible wages breakout, he would also rewrite industrial relations laws as planned.
Mr Rudd will celebrate his 100-day landmark still riding a wave of public support for his formal apology to the indigenous Stolen Generations and his ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The latest Newspoll survey for The Australian, published last week, gave him a record preferred prime minister rating of 70 per cent.
In the lead-up to the election, the Coalition warned voters that Mr Rudd would be a captive of trade union leaders, state Labor governments and sectional interests, and that his pre-election claims of economic conservatism would quickly disappear after he was elected.
"Resume conversation"
The Prime Minister also faces a growing clamour from the Left for wider reform outside the promises he made in last year's election campaign.
A collection of 20 essays written by academics and thinkers released last week and edited by Robert Manne calls for Mr Rudd to "resume the conversation between public intellectuals and government".
The essays urge him to consider some politically risky moves such as scrapping 99-year leases on indigenous land, overhauling negative gearing, limiting first-home buyers' grants and introducing punitive laws on electricity generation and car emissions.
Yesterday Mr Rudd said he had no secret plans and gave short shrift to the wish list.
"I think they might have elected the wrong guy," Mr Rudd said.
Move beyond Right/Left divide
The Prime Minister said he was not worried that his approach would alienate the left wing of the labour movement, stressing that politics had moved "beyond the classical Left-Right paradigm".
"It just doesn't apply to the politics of the future," Mr Rudd said. "It's time to put some of these classical, and I think arcane, divides behind us."
Clearly defined objectives
Mr Rudd, whose wife, Therese Rein, built a successful job-placement company by delivering Job Network services for the previous Howard government, said the quality of government service was more important than the delivery mechanism.
Citing the example of his election promise to lift indigenous life expectancy and literacy standards, Mr Rudd said: "It's not who provides services to indigenous communities, it's who most effectively provides those services to deliver what isthe agreed national set of policy outcomes.
"That's where the real debate is. It's not in debates about public or private ownership or classical divides between Left and Right. The key thing here is to have a clearly defined set of objectives for the nation. Then the legitimate intellectual and policy debate for the country, given that we've been elected, is how we best reach those objectives."
High point
The Prime Minister said the high point of his first 100 days was the fact that he could "look the Australian people in the eye" and declare he was keeping his election promises, such as the Kyoto ratification and the indigenous apology.
"Why I say that is a high point is that the public have become exceptionally cynical about 'core promises and non-core promises'," he said, referring to his predecessor, John Howard. "I think we have to work incredibly hard, therefore, in order to maintain the public's trust in order to do the things you will need to do into the future."
Low point
The low point of his first three months had been the assassination attempt on East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta - a close friend.
Mr Rudd said he was surprised by the strong national and international reaction to his apology to the Stolen Generations. But he would not be truly satisfied unless he followed the apology with real improvements in indigenous health and education standards.
"I am also acutely conscious of the fact that to get effective local community buy-in, we're going to end up with hundreds of different solutions on the ground across the 400 remote Aboriginal communities across the country," he said.
"But the ultimate policy effectiveness will be measured against the targets we've set."
No to Robert Manne
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd protests:
The Prime Minister warned that people had “elected the wrong guy” if they believed that once he was in power he would unveil a secret left-wing reform agenda...
Ruud is claiming instead that politics has moved “beyond the classical Left-Right paradigm”. Which isn’t actually true, but reflects his true style: to pick policies that are popular and implement them like a bureaucrat.
There’s no explicit agenda with that, other than power. But the reality is that Rudd’s model of practical politics gives more power to the institutions of persuasion, and hence is more likely to reflect their dominant Leftist culture. Take the sorry and Kyoto.
UPDATE
But the agenda of the ministers under Rudd, on the other hand:
CONTROVERSIAL Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, who was refused entry into the US over alleged links to terror networks, is due to deliver a lecture on Islam at a conference sponsored by the Queensland Government on Monday.
Professor Ramadan - whose grandfather Hassan al-Banna founded one of the world’s most radical Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1928 - will be introduced by federal Labor Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs Laurie Ferguson at the Griffith University event, which has drawn $50,000 worth of sponsorship from the Bligh Government.
Professor Ian Buruma profiles his old sparring partner, suggesting why Ramadan appeals the Left that Ferguson represents:
The murderous tyranny to be resisted, in Ramadan’s book, is “the northern model of development,” which means that “a billion and a half human beings live in comfort because almost four billion do not have the means to survive.” For Ramadan, global capitalism, promoted by such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, is the “abode of war” (alam al-harb), for “when faced with neoliberal economics, the message of Islam offers no way out but resistance.”
To be a sworn enemy of capitalism does not mean you are a communist, a fascist, a religious fundamentalist or indeed an anti-Semite, but it is something these otherwise disparate groups frequently have in common. Advocating a revolt against Western materialism on the basis of superior spiritual values is an old project, which has had many fathers but has never been particularly friendly to liberal democracy. Ramadan’s brand of Islamic socialism, promoted with such media-friendly vitality, in conferences, interviews, books, talks, sermons and lectures, has won him a variety of new friends, especially in Britain and France.
My own view: It would be wrong do refuse Ramadan permission to come here and speak. Our defence of free speech should be more robust, and we should in any case have more faith in the ability of good ideas to defeat bad ideas - given time. Nor do I think Ramadan such a security menace that these considerations should be set aside in his case. Indeed, we’ll do more harm by making a victim of him.
But nor do I think such radicals, preaching values so hostile to those underpinning our freedoms and our material well-being, should be given the privilege and imprimatur of a welcome and introduction from a Minister of the Rudd Government. Or sponsorship via the Bligh Government.
Rudd may not have a Left-wing agenda, but his Government is fostering one nevertheless.
Nazis, slavers and global warming doubters
Andrew Bolt
It’s not enough, apparently, to liken sceptics of disastrous man-made global warming to racists who deny the Holocaust. So the warming faithful - like Salon’s Andrew Leonard - are considering another smear to shut up those with awkward questions:
Is there a moral equivalence between defending the institution of slavery and climate change denialism?
When I first considered this question, after having been alerted by Globalization and the Environment to the existence of a new paper comparing congressional rhetoric on the topics of slavery and the Kyoto Protocol, I was skeptical. The act of buying and selling human beings, it seemed to me, carries with it a stench of reprehensibility that greenhouse gas emissions, no matter how polluting, don’t quite measure up to.
But after reading Marc Davidson’s “Parallels in reactionary argumentation in the U.S. congressional debates on the abolition of slavery and the Kyoto Protocol,” I am willing to concede that there are some interesting congruencies.
Rudd’s velvet steamroller
Piers Akerman
AFTER just 99 days of the Rudd government, Australia is in the worst political position it has endured since the crisis days of the Whitlam government 33 years ago.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd went to the November 24 election claiming to have a plan to deal with all that ailed the nation.
Ninety per cent of the policies he revealed entailed agreeing with the Howard government’s conservative fiscal agenda; the other 10 per cent were to be taken on trust, except for a sprinkling of gestures designed to appease the Labor Party faithful - the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and the apology to the so-called Stolen Generations.
But for all the talk, it is clear now that Rudd had no plan other than to bluff his way into office and then take the bureaucrat’s favoured option and appoint committees to investigate and report on the problems.
By one accounting, the Rudd government has established a committee or review every four days, on average, since taking office. This is not leadership - it is an abject abrogation of leadership.
So, too, is the April gabfest of the best-and-brightest. Using his former Queensland government colleague Glyn Davis as the fall guy, Rudd has used his 2020 summit to duchess a number of influential Australians, who might otherwise be expected to offer reasonable criticism of his government.
In accepting invitations to the 2020 “ideas’’ bazaar, they will inevitably become part of the Government’s approach, whether they agree or disagree with its course.
It will be a brave individual who calls a press conference to outline his or her differences with Rudd’s velvet steamroller.
In its short term in office, the Rudd government has already done more to debauch the process of parliamentary democracy than any government in Australian history, through its introduction of the non-parliamentary Friday sittings of Members in the House of Representatives.
They are not only a nonsense, they are in all probability unconstitutional and illegal, though Rudd claims to have secret legal advice - which he refuses to release - assuring otherwise.
It would appear the Clerk of the House advised Deputy Speaker Anna Burke that her position was untenable, shortly before she closed the farcical faux sitting just after 2pm on February 22.
But what other conclusion could be drawn, when she was presiding over a gathering which did not apparently require a customary Question Time - nor, indeed, even a minister to be present? A sitting at which the Government prevented votes from being taken or quorums being called?
What exactly is the point of expensively assembling the trappings of parliament when the parliament does not have the capability of voting on anything?
Any vote called for during Rudd’s silly sessions will not be held until parliament sits again in a week or so, when members who were not present will be entitled to add their numbers, form a quorum and decide issues which arose last month.
The Monty Python crew could not have devised a more ridiculous situation nor one more likely to diminish the integrity of the parliamentary system.
The Opposition has correctly questioned whether the sittings are constitutional and whether they can attract the privilege accorded properly constituted parliamentary sittings.
If the Rudd government is willing to spend $1 million to stage each of these ridiculous opportunities for backbenchers to make speeches, it would be cheaper to have Hansard incorporate the papers into coverage of the regular sitting days and let the MPs return to their electorates and, hopefully, help their constituents with their problems.
Debasing the parliamentary process in this manner is not, in the short term, going to affect the lives of ordinary Australians, but it will, in the longer term, erode our nation’s proud tradition of parliamentary democracy and make it easier for successive governments to whittle away the parliamentary structure until it becomes an appendix of government, not an adornment of governance.
What should not be lost upon the Australian electorate is the reality that Rudd’s leadership of the ALP was entirely due to the machinations of the ALP’s Victorian Left and the NSW Right.
Given the current bout of examination of links between a group of corrupt Wollongong developers and members of the NSW Right’s hierarchy, that pedigree is worth keeping in mind because it is inextricably linked to a number of people who now hold senior and influential positions within the Rudd government.
The people of NSW will be unable to do anything about their government until March, 2011 and it is a safe bet that many of those close to the Wollongong disaster now will have migrated to safe havens in Canberra before then.
(In truth, what is most amazing is that NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption has actually taken on board a reference of this nature, given the whitewash it has applied to numerous other cases of alleged corruption.)
But with parliament itself at risk, who will be able to rein in the Rudd government, born of the Victorian Left, by the NSW Right, when it takes the bit between its teeth and starts galloping?
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