The Australian - Editorial -

The case for leaving Rudd chilling out in the freezer

 The Australian   February 20, 2013

LET'S not beat about the bush. 
Like the neighbours of a quarrelsome couple, we have learned to read the signs: the muffled thumping of tables through the walls, raised voices and strained faces betray a Labor Party locked in another destructive argument. 
The challenge to Julia Gillard's leadership, should it come, will be squalid, self-interested and devoid of principle. 
The new leader's task will be to stem Labor's losses and hope that Tony Abbott lives down to expectations, gifting a diminished party an unlikely victory.

It falls to others to ask the important question: which potential leader has the courage to return Labor to the centre of public life? 
Who, if anyone, is capable of ending the futile class-war rhetoric, of standing up to the moral posturing of the progressive Left and governing for the many rather than the few? 
Can Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd or perhaps Bill Shorten rediscover the mainstream values, deregulating instincts and ordered administrative process of previous Labor governments? 

Or is the party condemned to drift from fad to fad, stunt to stunt, and from one contrived photo opportunity to the next, treating the public as supplicants to be served with big government solutions that sap ambition and deaden enterprise?

Whatever the Prime Minister's unforced errors in the past 32 months, Ms Gillard inherited the in-tray from hell. If Mr Rudd were to emerge from cryogenic storage, where he improbably claims to be residing, it would be impossible to disown the legacy he left her.

Mr Rudd could eat humble pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner from now until the election and still not wipe the plate clean, since his fingerprints are on the policies that created most of the present government's misfortunes.
His contribution to protecting our borders was to roll back a solution that worked and replace it with a policy vacuum, outsourcing migration approval to people-smugglers. 
He was in favour of pricing carbon, passionately as we recall, desperate to solve the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time. 
Then suddenly and without explanation he was against it. 
Now we assume he is for it again, but how will he persuade us that his days of political pawnbroking are over, and he would never again exchange principles for expediency?
Mr Rudd can distance himself from the latest excruciating episodes of the mining tax soap opera, but voters will not forget that entire fiscal farce was conceived on his watch. 
At any stage, he could have taken carriage of the resource super-profits tax from Wayne Swan, a man clearly out of his depth, yet Mr Rudd took little interest in its development. 
Prime ministers who wish to leave a legacy of reform cannot leave the details to underlings, even
if that underling is the Treasurer.
Mr Rudd will struggle to win credit for the half-baked hospital reforms he left sitting on Ms Gillard's plate like a badly cooked piece of chicken; Labor's reputation on health went backwards at the last election, and Mr Rudd's reappearance will only remind voters of his unfulfilled promises and grand centralised schemes that made no discernible difference to patients.
A credible challenger to Ms Gillard has yet to emerge. 
Mr Shorten's ambitions as a future Labor leader have gone backwards with the fortunes of the government in which he serves. 
He cannot escape his share of the collective responsibility, for he too has demonstrated a penchant for the applause of sectional interests and has yet to grow the spine of a serious reformer. 
His statements suggest he would wind back labour reform if he could. 
Like his leader, he puts too much weight on the support of the party's industrial wing that fills the party's coffers and too little on the contractors and small businesses that contribute to the wealth of the nation. 
He must learn from Bob Hawke; an apprenticeship in the union movement should be used to study the ways of business and learn how to bake a bigger pie for all.
Greens leader Christine Milne's melodramatic gesture yesterday of handing back the wedding ring and breaking the alliance between the Greens and Labor should encourage Ms Gillard to put daylight between the parties at every opportunity, but it is another reminder of her misjudgment in tying the knot in the first place. 
After 30 years searching for common ground between deep-green environmentalists and the aspirational middle and working-class voters in the suburbs, Labor must give up or risk being lured further into Gingerbread Land.
Whether Ms Gillard, Mr Rudd or Mr Shorten is best positioned to hold the seat of Lindsay, sandbag Banks or stem the tide in Queensland is a matter of conjecture, and of little importance to anyone outside the politicians standing for election or the boffins in party HQ. 
The only question that matters is how Labor can again become a party of the centre, a task for which Mr Rudd put up his hand before the 2007 election, and quickly put it down again after. 
Ms Gillard's speech to the Australian Workers Union on Monday was damned by the applause of an audience which that same day was singing Solidarity Forever. 
Even when it represented most workers, the union movement was a dangerous ally, a special-interest group taking care of some workers at the expense of the country as a whole. 
Ms Gillard's catchcry on Monday was "We are Labor". 
Two decades ago, it was clear what that meant. 
Today, the electorate, and many in the party, would struggle to define it.

ends

I am in awe of people who can write such informative, persuasive, humourous pieces. Pity they do not credit the writer. A great effort.