It wasn’t long ago that the upcoming federal election in Australia seemed to be Tony Abbott’s to lose. With Julia Gillard as damaged goods, the Opposition leader appeared poised to win one of the biggest electoral landslides in political history. Think Clement Atlee and Labour’s demolition of Winston Churchill’s Tories in 1945.
But recent polls have seen the lead of Australia’s conservative coalition parties narrow dramatically, raising the spectre of another hung parliament, if not a narrow Labor victory on 7 September.
What happened? What accounts for Labor’s resurgence in just a few weeks?
Well, simply put, Kevin Rudd is not Julia Gillard. Three years of broken promises and embarrassing missteps had fatally undermined the Lady Macbeth of Australian politics. Feminists and Labor partisans blamed an alleged culture of misogyny for her downfall.
The reality, however, was that she had grossly misjudged middle Australia, whose centre of political gravity is well to the right of Gillard’s cosmopolitan Melbourne constituency. Her ventures into gender wars and class-war rhetoric to divide workers, for example, merely turned off swing voters and highlighted her political incompetence.
Add to this Rudd’s return to the premiership, and the Australian people broadly felt that a wrong had been righted. After all, Gillard had been knifed by the very man she had backstabbed three years earlier.
Moreover, Rudd is politically savvier, distancing himself from much of Gillard’s unpopular record and adroitly recognising the best route to retaining power is to fight Abbott on his terrain. By repackaging Labor as tough on border protection and soft on climate mitigation - positions that resonate with a clear majority of Australians - and subjecting Abbott’s economic costing plans to sorely needed scrutiny, Rudd has turned this election into a serious contest.
But one can concede all this and still believe Labor is unlikely to win on September 7.
Why? Because, as the Spectator Australia has editorialised, Kevin Rudd is a complete and utter fraud.
During his first time in power from December 2007 to June 2010, Rudd espoused so many different positions, often repeatedly and stridently, that he left the impression that his positions were always suspect. Nothing has changed since his resurrection a month ago.
This is a man who once defined himself as an ‘economic conservative,’ committed to low public debt and free-market reform, but who once in office took an interventionist and big spending approach to almost every economic issue he addressed, only now to have the gall to lecture his conservative opponents for threatening Australia’s Triple-A credit rating.
A man who once pledged to turn back the boats of illegal arrivals in 2007, but who ended John Howard’s tough regime against people-smugglers in 2008, before preaching a ‘hard-line’ policy against ‘evil’ traders in human misery in 2009, then warning Labor not to ‘lurch to the right’ on illegal immigrants in 2010, before now pushing an even tougher policy on asylum seekers than Abbott has contemplated.
A man who claimed global warming was ‘the great moral challenge of our time,’ but who dropped the evangelical language as soon as the Copenhagen debacle changed the (political) climate at home and who now seeks to legislate a much lower carbon price than his unpopular predecessor’s hugely unpopular tax.
Such have been the twists and turns of his ideological odyssey that it is impossible to know what Rudd stands for. He is a man of many masks: who can say they’ve seen his real face?
Then there is his frankly weird demenour. When the bloke next to you at the pub starts referring to himself as ‘K. Rudd’ and utters cringe-inducing Australianisms like ‘Happy Little Vegemite’ and ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle,’ you excuse yourself and leave promptly.
Add to this that he is widely loathed by many of his own colleagues – several high profile Labor politicians have publicly called him ‘disloyal,’ ‘dysfunctional,’ a ‘saboteur,’ a ‘pyschopath’ with ‘no Labor values’ – and it’s a fair bet the Australian people will come to their senses and not be fooled a second time on 7 September.
Tom Switzer is editor of The Spectator Australia.