RUDD’S WAY: November 2007-June 2010
by NICHOLAS STUART
Scribe, 2010, 294 pages, $35 (pb)
RISE OF THE RUDDBOT: Observations from the Gallery
By ANNABEL CRABB
Black Inc., 2010, 314 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Remember the 2020 Summit?, asks Nicholas Stuart in Rudd’s Way, his account of the Labor Government under Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. This early offering from the Rudd government was billed as the ‘chance to shape the future’ but, like the other visions of hope unleashed by the end of the conservative time-warp of the Howard decade, the 2020 Summit, a “very big PR stunt”, turned to dust.
It joined the ranks of the other failed gimmicks, Grocery Watch and Fuel Watch (which were touted as tools to ease financial pressures on ‘working families’) whilst the graveyard of busted hopes began to overflow with the collateral damage of the ‘Building the Education Revolution’ (not always delivering value for taxpayers’ money) and subsidised home insulation (trailing deaths and house fires in its wake), and the outright environmental betrayals of pulp mill approvals in Tasmania and expanded uranium mining approvals in South Australia by an Environment Minister whose impotence in Cabinet proved vastly more real than the ‘impotence of the pure’ he had renounced outside of it.
The list of failures grew steadily. Rudd’s declaration that he would go after the “remuneration of risk-taking financial executives” had little to show in practice, plans for more childcare facilities were jettisoned, the war on childhood obesity was left disarmed by exempting the food industry from legislated behaviour modification, political democratisation (fixed-term governments and a republic) were quietly dispensed with. The Resources Super Profits Tax was a doomed fight picked with profit-bloated mining companies by a party manifestly not up to infringing on the prerogatives of capital.
One apparent point of difference between the Howard and Rudd governments - Aboriginal affairs – proved illusory, as, despite Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generation, the Howard-initiated intervention in the Northern Territory “ground inexorably on”.
The outstanding failure of the new broom, however, was action on what Rudd had declared to be “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” - climate change. The Government backed a Byzantine, shonky emissions trading scheme (“entirely based on the worst of capitalist mechanisms – trading to make money”) which was “extremely attentive” to the concerns of carbon-polluting industries and which was unceremoniously shelved when it was wedged between the denialists and the Greens in the Senate. The government also relied on a single international forum (Copenhagen) rather than investing in renewable energy to reduce dependency on oil and coal.
Three years of opportunities squandered across the board had exposed Rudd as a “hollow man”. Stuart notes that Rudd was central to the flaccid results of Labor in office – his personality flaws, the Presidential centralisation of power in his hands, his need to dominate and micro-manage, the sentences that went on forever yet didn’t arrive anywhere. What Stuart rarely explores, however, is that the core of the problem was not Rudd but the politics of social democracy. By not going outside the spectrum of policy acceptable to capitalism, the Australian Labor Party inevitably sided with the capitalist class. When the coup came by the ALP Right faction and its ‘left’ mascot, Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, after polls had shown Rudd’s stellar approval ratings crashing, nothing much changed, except further towards the right.
Annabel Crabb, too, observes the degeneration of the Labor government in Rise of the Ruddbot, but with lashings of satire. Rudd’s circumlocutory ‘wall of sound’ oratory, “so paralysing in its tedium” that hearers dropped like flies. ‘Peter Garrett: Every Show a Sell-out!’, the new promotional headline for the Environment Minister’s gigs of the once radical rock musician. Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch, the “promotional gewgaws” of Labor’s 2007 publicity material, discarded like “cheap gimmicky toys”. The great test of climate change flunked.
Julia Gillard, writes Crabb, is not the ‘dangerous socialist’ of Liberal demonology, the “hatchet-faced union moll” of their advertisements. The ambitious and pragmatic Gillard may have been “ helmswoman of the Australian Union of Students” in the 1980s but if the now Prime Minister were to revisit this university role there would be “fearless and bloodcurdling marches on the administration block, demanding an incremental correction of past funding injustices – ‘What do we want? GRADUAL CHANGE! When do we want it? IN DUE COURSE!’ or ‘Two! Four! Six! Eight! Yes, we are prepared to wait!’”.
Crabb is clever, an entertaining writer easy on the ear, but what does she stand for? Well, more compassionate treatment of refugees, perhaps, but also “a sensible revisitation of the nuclear issue” as the solution to global warming, a reception black hole for her otherwise sharp satirical antennae.
Unlike Stuart, who at times engages with the theme that commitment to a market-based economic system may be key to understanding Labor’s failures, Crabb doesn’t shake off the analytical blinkers which blind much of the commentariat to the political corruption of Labor arising from its embrace of capitalism. Her satire may dance like a bee but it stings like a butterfly.