Indulge me

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is going to a spill in caucus today.  Good.  If he wins, there can be no more speculation about his stability as leader of the Labor Party until after the election (whenever it is).  If he loses, I'm not even going to open a newspaper for the next fortnight.  As it is, I'm not really paying close attention to anything before the international news coverage.

Indulge me for a moment.  In Australia it is compulsory to be on the electoral role once you reach the age of 18, and thus enrolled, to attend a polling place on election day.  What happens in the privacy of the booth is between you, the table, your pencil and the ballot slip.  I started my voting life as an instinctive Labor voter (there were some Liberal-supporting crazies in my family), but my sense of priorities have shifted in time.  That's natural, but the political convergence of the ALPs is what finally cured me of voting for either of them.  Such is my abhorrence of the easy bigotry, intellectual laziness, wanton class and generational warfare and sheer bloody-minded, persistent moral turpitude of both parties that I make sure my preferences travel a very long way indeed before my vote ends up with either of them.  I even vote below the line for the Senate.  O that more people would take advantage of the rigour of the Australian ballot system and do likewise.

There's plenty of journalism about the fortunes of the Rudd leadership, but that won't deal with the biggest problem I have with Rudd Labor.

None of those supposedly educated people can string a simple, grammatically straightforward, sentence together.  Not without lapsing into acronyms, doublespeak, changing the topic or any of an infinite number of "go directly to jail..." types of verbal duck-shoving.  Mr Rudd himself has never appeared before the public with fewer than 1,000 words (including unpacked acronyms) at any time.  OK, it's nice that he's trying to avoid being sound-bitten, but in all that wall of verbiage he never really says anything at all.  For someone apparently so preoccupied with decency (pace David Marr), it strikes me as terribly indecent.

I have never seen Mr Rudd in the absence of television cameras or microphones of various sorts.  He may well be an articulate and witty conversationalist in Mandarin or English.  If that is so, then it's a pity he lapses into being such a noxious bore in public.  It's clearly contagious, as it has affected his challenger, Julia Gillard.

Just a quick example will suffice, because it is past my bedtime.  Julia Gillard was interviewed on the 7.30 Report a couple of weeks ago about the problems in rolling out the Building the Education Revolution policy.  The problem is summed up by observing that Catholic and independent schools have been able to put up buildings that meet their needs, on schedule and at a cheaper rate than comparable public schools.  Now, the policy is about building facilities for schools.  Fix this in your mind.  Go and browse the transcript of the story I'm talking about here.  Within seconds of the opening of the interview between Kerry O'Brien and Julia Gillard that followed the story, this dropped out:

Kerry, what I would say is this, building the Education Revolution is a huge economic stimulus project and today's national accounts prove that it is supporting jobs.

Why is everything in Australian politics about jobs, even when it's meant to be about improving facilities in public schools?  Jobs equals the here-and-now, schools represent future prosperity.  Let's leave the senseless waste of public money on independent schools aside for a moment; public schools must accept any student within their catchment area.  They should be the powerhouses of the nation.  In the perpetual present of the political echo chamber, it's jobs that matter because there's statistics to parse and votes to extrapolate, so we end up talking about jobs when we should be talking about schools.  Go and read the rest of that exasperating interview here.

All manner of iniquity begins with language.  In many ways the present government have never really grown away from the contest with Mr Wiggly himself.  So much of their rhetoric could be played next to that of certain ministers in the former Howard government, and you'd be stuck for weeks trying to tell the difference.  I could go for the Orwell gun, but that's hackneyed, and in any event, G.K. Chesterton put it better:

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

(Find the rest of it here.)