Friday, midnight
An interesting day. A man from Icon says he will make Mel read the Fred Hollows script and he would make a wonderful Fred if he wants the role, and Icon are now doing miniseries and he will read our Murdoch script Paper Tigers too.
Later for five hours I drink with a Labor backroomer and a journalist in Surry Hills. The Labor backroomer says Gillard is finished and Rudd likely, very likely, to be back as Prime Minister in a month in a desperate attempt to ‘save the furniture’ when Labor is inevitably defeated in an election that might be as close as October this year. We argue about this.
If Rudd were back, I shout — unanimously affirmed, let us say, by Caucus in June after the Budget fails to give Gillard a bump, which is possible — the following things will happen.
Swan, the world’s best Treasurer, will go to the back bench. Roxon, conqueror of Big Tobacco, will go to the back bench. Shorten will either lose all credibility and become Rudd’s Treasurer swearing ceaseless loyalty or, more likely, go to the back bench. Crean will announce he’s quitting politics and stay on for a year as Minister for everything. Gillard will announce that she wants to spend more time with her hairdresser and quit politics, staying on perhaps in her now marginal seat, the one where the car workers are losing their jobs, Altona, till the election this or next year.
Rudd will be sworn in as Prime Minister, replace Carr with Bowen as Foreign Minister, and make the abashed and baffled Carr Arts Minister. Carr will announce he’s leaving at the end of his term and recommend Wedderburn get his seat. Wedderburn will refuse it wanting the Representatives. Arbib will put his hand up. Carr will stay on, and attend opera a lot. Paul Howes will disaffiliate the AWU from Labor, or try to; or, at 30, leave politics; or be driven out of it. John McTernan, missing his family, will go home to England, thus halving the Labor backroom’s IQ overnight.
The Telegraph will then, within a week, run a story, What Really Happened At Scores, which will allege Rudd rubbed his nose in the cleavage of a stripper. It will be as false as the alleged Strauss-Kahn rape in the mouth of a woman twice his size in two minutes flat but it will do him harm and Labor’s figures will revert to where they are now, on 27, and then go lower.
By then it will be July 31. Rudd will continue to promise he will be less chaotic and self-regarding this time, he just needs another chance and his wife and family are praying for him. The Queensland polls will show in that state a surge to 25 percent of the Katter Party with Labor on 15. Labor will be looking at 17 seats at best in Federal Parliament. By July 15 Oakeshott will be sick of it, wanting to get home to his young family and announce he will support a No Confidence motion.
The figures, even money now, will depend on Slipper and Thomson. One more sexual allegation, false but Murdoch-driven, will cause Slipper to leave Parliament with his pension, forcing a by-election. That by-election, in September, will be lost and Brough be the new member and immediately embraced by Abbott as his new Shadow Foreign Minister. Abbott will bring on a No Confidence motion and Brough will vote for it. Rudd will advise an election on, say, December 1, 2012. That is, seven months from now.
Many, many Labor members will lose their seats or not stand, and Rudd will lose his and Smith his and Swan, if he runs, his. Among the seventeen left standing will be Shorten, Garrett, Combet, Albo, Clare and Plibersek and, in the Senate, Carr. Carr will be asked to swap with Garrett and be Opposition Leader and refuse. ‘I hate,’ he will say, ‘being Opposition Leader and I will never do it again.’ Clare will succeed Shorten as Leader after the 2014 Double Dissolution defeat and six years after that quit politics at 48. Howes, at 37, come in from the cold, will replace him. By then the Katter Party will outnumber Labor by 18 seats to 15.
Tony Abbott will enjoy twenty years in power after abolishing compulsory voting and retire in 2033 at 75. The Labor Party will be by 2025 in irreversible decline, like the Democrats five years ago. John Faulkner will write a book declaring the trouble all started when he, Faulkner, with his crucial casting vote put in Latham not Beazley; Beazley who would have won comfortably 2004 and yielded up the Prime Ministership to Shorten or Wedderburn in 2015; and then, at the book launch, have his first alcoholic drink at age 77 and quite like it.
It was a pretty depressing talk after a while, and the Labor backroomer, after many Carlton Draughts, allowed it might be a good idea not to bring back Rudd after all and another candidate, or even Gillard, was a better look.
While we were talking it became known that Brough had set up Ashby to gull, shame and scupper Slipper, and Labour won all over England, and the politics of everything altered, the way it does, into ever more different, more opalescent scenarios.
And so it went.
And the Rudd Redux Option began to slip away.
Name:
This is a good reply and I will leave it up for twenty-four hours and then erase it since you have offended me sorely and stupidly and are banned therefore until May 25.
Rudd will be popular until a day after his reinstallation and then will progressively lose credibility. Murdoch will be in gaol by September and his media support of Rudd useless.
It is too much to ask that Swan, Shorten, Crean, Carr, Clare, Roxon, Macklin, Brandt, Wilkie, Oakeshott, Windsor, Slipper, Gillard and Thomson all wear him. If just one of them slips the leash the experiment is over.
Almost anyone else would be less dangerous. Not on day one, but on day one hundred.
‘Don’t frighten the horses’ is good advice.
Stamp on intelligent idiots like the backroomer, and you did an excellent job, but bringing this stuff out in the open is not really beneficial.
Rudd redux would split the Party, immediately and beyond repair; and isn’t that Murdoch’s agenda and the fond hope of our reactionary billionaires, and their glove puppets of “The Opposition”?
Screw the lot of them: hold the line. Solidarity, comrade.
A ‘man not fit to run an international organisation’ is promoting a man who made Australian governance a vengeful dithering chaos as the answer to some polls — commissioned by himself and meant to harm Labor — to show sexual corruption and electoral mistrust where there is none (where is the cry for Bishop not Carr as Foreign Minister, Hockey not Swan as Treasurer?), and we are supposed to believe him while Jay Rockefeller is calling for his arrest and back his candidate Rudd.
Some, with their eyes in the headlights, are inclined to do so.
If Gillard is the problem, there are eight better answers than Rudd.
They begin with R, C, C, C, A, P, S, and J. Or, after a byelection, B, B, R, G,and M.
Gillard is fine by me.
Whoa Bob. It’s all roses for the ALP. You said so or do you just talk shit? You and dickhead Don.
It is all roses for the ALP, but not under Rudd.
I will bet you a thousand dollars against an Abbott Prime Ministership.
Are you on? Give me your details.
Including who you work for.
I don’t take fools money. You know who I work for. Stop pretending.
I have no idea who you are.
Please tell me.
Have I banned you for three years?
Tell me, and regain eighteen months.
No?
You are banned, then, alas, for three years.
It is very hard for me to see how Gillard can survive. Rudd remains the Party’s best chance simply because some of the damage done by his removal can be corrected by his return.
Strategically, the decision to publicly excoriate him was a huge mistake. It is clear that those saying caucus were more prepared to drive off the cliff rather than have him return as leader were indulging in a little hubirs.
I have always found more sympathy with the political positions of the current Rudd backers (Albo, Ferguson, Bowen, Carr, Faulkner) than some of the odd missteps to the Right that we have seen the Party take recently.
That these chaps raised the flag for Rudd in the obviously suicidal February should give some solace to those thinking Rudd a psychopath.
If he were brought back the Abbott campaign would simply be to run what was said of Rudd by his own party members.
And this would GAIN Labor votes and seats would it?
How?
And therein lies the scope of the calamity.
The Crean defence, deployed when first praising Rudd in 2010 for being a … “great chair of cabinet” and someone who “listened to people and … took their positions into account and then summed up and made decisions”, is to say he was just being loyal.
That may be about as plausible as its going to get. Of course we always have a strong chorus of Kevin is back and he’s learnt a lot.
Win seats they must, on tonight’s results only the LNP ( or maybe Greens) can win Denison (Wilkies seat) as ALP will likely finish in third in this seat.
Lyne (Oakeshott) and New England (Windsor) are now safe LNP seats.
That’s three seats to LNP before the election starts.
Glad to see you watch The Bolt Report, Bob.
“In the arms of the ocean,
So sweet and so cold,
And all this devotion;
I never knew it all.
And the crashes are heaven,
For a sinner – released,
And the arms of the ocean…
Delivered me.”
The verses from the song above – supposed to be about a woman drowning to death and embracing every moment of it, seem to surmise the melancholy ordeal of Labor right now, and the thinking of the power-brokers who wish to fell Gillard and resurrect Rudd. Little do they realize that the ship is sinking anyway, and fatally wounding Gillard may only worsen their condition.
Two years ago Murdoch’s candidate Cameron edged into power. Today he would lose by a hundred seats. Six months ago he would have lost by fifty seats.
Gillard, and Labor, have seventeen months of good policy to defend and win seats with.
That is four months more than Julius Caesar’s entire administration.
There is time.
Only Rudd will take it from us.
In a moment of whimsy, I imagined Bob in his garret engaged in silent communion with the raven perched on the ledge, dealing with the misty elements of events as yet unfolded in our time, the Nostradamus of Australian politics.
Rudd will be the next PM, it’s safer for the ALP and him to go to an election quickly. Why, the carbon tax. He cannot alter it, delay it or reduce it, he would need Abbott’s support, which he will only get if he eliminates it. If the cabinet is considering eliminating it, they might as well go to an election on this platform than giving Abbott a free kick (They will immediately lose Bandts vote if ALP and LNP voted to kill CO2 tax and this is likely to have the same end result). Rudd goes to election with plan to kill carbon tax, instead puts in place an ETS with no floor price purely market based. Accompanying him as treasurer would be Shorten, likely to be the most convincing treasurer since Keating. Likely still to lose but this eliminates Rudd as a future issue as his retirement would then be assured (a condition of his acension) it also means having to put up with Rudd for as short as time as possible. Egos or the ALP is all in the ministers hands, Hawke/Keating were successful despite how they felt about each other, why not Shorten and Rudd?
PS Carr’s kabuki comment may cost him his job if either of the cabcharges or sexual harassment cases are proved. Shame as he appeared above this sort of politics, this mud, and now he has jumped into the slime pit bringing himself down to the level of Abbott.
I know Shorten and I know Rudd and I know Keating and I know Hawke and believe me, it is different. Shorten and Rudd were never friends, as Hawke and Keating were, and when Shorten was offered the leadership at the time of Beaconsfield instead of Beazley — or sounded out about the leadership instead of Beazley — he stuck with Kim.
It is old, it is visceral, they do not trust each other, not for a minute. And it cannot happen.
If Murdoch wants it, and he does, it is bad for Labor.
He is an unfit person, and Rudd is his candidate.
PM Beazley would probably be handing the reins over to Shorten around now, if only. Who supported Rudd, the political genius herself, sigh.
Is there no hope?
Perhaps some elder statesman to bash their heads together and act as go-between? Someone they both trust?
I like Shorten, he seems earnest, sincere and capable. He just doesn’t seem ready.
My political barometer suggests, in the unlikely event that he were to replace Gillard, the Party would remain becalmed.
Ready compared with whom? Campbell Newman? Julie Bishop? Tony Abbott? Barnaby Joyce?
I was not making a point of comparison, simply an intuitive response as to how he may be perceived upon assuming the leadership.
There appears an insecurity, an odd lack of confidence. It’s slight, but present.
Given the imperative to make that first month a winner it may prove fatal.
He will have good advice, from Carr, Bracks, Rann, Howes, Beattie, and the undersigned.
Shorten is ready, but associated in the publics mind with Rudds demise in 2010 and hence with Gillard. His political antennae seems astute, does he have little influence with Gillard? Its a gamble that could taint him for the future if there is an ALP shellacking. That being said the risk is without change there is little hope for at least 2-3 terms.
He is also associated with the Disabled and the Beaconsfield rescue. As PM he would gain other associations.Rudd was associated with Scores for a while. This passed.
I find it passing strange that you ban anyone who attacks the ALP, yet you say you can’t become a member because then you can’t attack them.
I think Richo is a member. So too Troy Branston.
No, I ban people who tell persistent lies about anything, including the non-Labor voter and Jewish benefactor Mel Gibson. All attacks on the Labor Party which go to policy or factual behaviour I print.
This lie of yours puts you in danger.
Do not repeat it.
How would Garrett survive this meltdown? He is sitting on 5.2% and heading for defeat right now.
He could swap with Carr.
Before the election, then?
Of course.
A resignation, and a byelection seven weeks later.
Which Carr, a local boy, would win.
I would have thought KKK had her eyes on that seat, but perhaps not until 2015/2016.
Not sure she’s acting with those interests in mind at the moment, Doug.
Would she defeat Carr for the preselection?
Come on.
She is a very intelligent person, and she has time on her side. As an aside, if she could lose her American accent it would be advantageous.
But I think, and as Obama proved, people will vote for the best man, or perhaps even the best person for the job, in spite of any perceived disabilities, in the widest sense of that word.
Much more reasonable, because in the article it appears Garrett looks easy to win the seat. Which is clearly on the numbers, including the great Antony Green, not quite easy.
It all changed today, Sunday, with the dental package in the Budget.
Labor will be on 49 by Friday week.
Just a quick question before I am banished by Bob. Someone here may know the answer…
Who on Labor’s front bench has ever run a small business?
Apart from Peter Garrett?
Who else?
Carr was a freelance journalist and involved himself in his wife Helena’s printing business, which was worth millions when sold. Gillard was a freelance lawyer for a time. Tony Burke was/is a small publisher. Jason Clare was an executive of a big company …
Your point being? That a haberdasher knows more of life than a union representative of injured coal miners like Shorten? Or an emergency doctor like Bob Brown? Or a teacher of profoundly disabled children, like John Faulkner? Or a career soldier who had to dispose of Uday and Qusay’s bodies and counsel Saddam like Mike Kelly?
What are you talking about?
Your reply will be erased at 2 pm tomorrow.
Make it a memorable one.
WTF does it matter?
What about the Brough-Slipper connection?
Well, that’s the meltdown, isn’t it. It’s a meltdown suddenly, tardily, scarily, in Abbott’s credibility not Gillard’s.
He’s involved, or he might be seen to be involved, in blackmail, or a cover-up of blackmail.Of the third highest official in the land.
A crime, I think.
The only melt down is happening on the left. Where are all those Emily Lister D graders supporting the victim of sexual harassment? Hypocrites, the lot of them.
Sexual harassment of a thirty-four year old male, you mean.
Not a lot of that about.
Name another example.
In world history.
Prince Charles at Thirty-Two forced by the “Firm” to marry the woman not of his dreams.
I said thirty-four not thirty-two.
Let’s do lunch.
My treat the wine of your choice.