Anne Barrowclough, Sydney
Win a trip to football heaven
If, as expected, President Obama cancels his planned trip to Australia later this month, Australians will have their explanation ready.
And no, it’s not the oil spill. At least one newspaper is already preparing to blame the cancellation directly on Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister.
Why, will go an argument that would have been unthinkable just six months ago, should a winning president bother to take time out to visit a political loser?
Only recently lauded as the most popular prime minister in Australia’s history, Mr Rudd is now watching his support base collapse with all the drama and speed of a Guatamala sink hole.
The leader who could do no wrong can now do nothing right. The most enduringly popular politician in 40 years is becoming terminally unpopular, with a personal standing rating of just 36 per cent — a record low, down from a record high of 67 per cent last September.
Only a few months ago commentators were pondering Mr Rudd’s undentable popularity. Now they are wondering if he will ever be able to regain the confidence of the electorate.
Things are so bad that if an election were held tomorrow, just two and a half years after they stormed to victory in November 2007, the Australian Labor Party would lose.
His fall from grace began with his decision in February to shelve until 2013 the emissions trading scheme (ETS), a Rudd trademark for which he had fought passionately in the run-up to the Copenhagen conference on climate change.
Successive failures to get the ETS through a reluctant Australian Parliament, and the declared intention of Tony Abbott, the climate change sceptic who leads the opposition Liberal coalition, to characterise the scheme as a “great big new tax” had demonstrated just how difficult it was going to be to fight an election on the issue.
But Mr Rudd abandoned his scheme so quickly that Australians were left aghast. How could a man who had described climate change as the “greatest moral challenge of our time” and who had said it would be “cowardly”, and a “failure of leadership”, not to enact the ETS by 2011 so blithely spring back from his commitment to it, they asked.
Suddenly the superhero of the 2007 election had shown himself to be a political coward who put pragmatism and the polls before his own principles.
But even as the electorate reeled over such a betrayal, Mr Rudd continued on a suicidal course of broken promises and U-turns, including the scrapping of both a controversial home insulation scheme, and an election promise to build 260 childcare centres.
The latest, and hugely controversial plan, to impose a super tax of 40 per cent on mining profits, is obviously loathed by the mining companies. But ordinary Australians are more incensed at the Labor Party’s decision to spend A$38 million (£22 million) of taxpayers’ money on an advertising campaign to explain the tax.
In a recent newspaper opinion poll, one former supporter wrote: “I wouldn’t put Rudd in charge of my kid’s school tuckshop, let alone a prosperous country such as Australia.”
Why is such an apparently brilliant politician now floundering so badly? Part of the answer lies in the rise of Tony Abbott, Mr Rudd’s nemesis. Mr Abbott, an avowed climate change sceptic, took over the Liberal leadership in November when Malcolm Turnbull, who had been its leader, was ousted over his support for the ETS.
‘Mad Monk’ Abbott, whose strongly conservative views divide both his own party and the electorate, has nonetheless proven to be a formidable opponent. It was his carpet-bombing assault on the ETS that ultimately forced Mr Rudd to abandon the scheme and in other areas, too, Mr Rudd has chosen to ditch his own policies rather than fight his opponent head on.
But his fall hasn’t resulted in the rise and rise of Mr Abbott. If Mr Rudd’s popularity is in freefall, the opposition leader’s own ratings have also stalled, currently standing at 37 per cent, just 1 per cent above Mr Rudd. He may be good at attacking the government’s policies, but he’s not so good at getting the public behind his own — mainly because he won’t explain them to the voters. With only a few months to go before an election, he has failed to present his party as a government-in-waiting rather than just a strong opposition.
Mr Rudd probably has more to fear from his own deputy, the unflappable and increasingly popular Julia Gillard. A politician once best known for her amazing ability to turn every vowel into five different sounds is now so politically articulate that she is being openly spoken of as Mr Rudd’s replacement if Labor loses the election — or wins it by such a low margin as to make Mr Rudd a lame duck leader.
There would be no shortage of Labor MPs who would happily ditch Mr Rudd for Ms Gillard if they got the chance. If he has only recently lost the love of the Australian electorate, he never really had the sympathy of the Labor caucus, who know him as a cold, controlling bully.
They were willing to support him when he was the only person who could keep the Labor Party together enough to take it to victory after 11 years in the political wilderness. But now he is no longer its messiah, it is more a matter of when, not if, the party turns its back on him.
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