I don’t believe KRudd MP is going to make a play for the leadership in the first half of next year, and so convinced am I of my rightness that I’ve bet all my Christmas presents on Twitter.
Think about it. He doesn’t have enough support and never has had even when he was PM, otherwise he wouldn’t have found himself lying in the gutter looking at the stars with his left testicle by his side, cruelly severed without benefit of anaesthetic by several faceless men and a faced woman all wielding long knives.
While it would be sweet revenge for KRudd MP to re-assume party leadership and his abruptly terminated Prime Ministership, consigning his mortal enemies to the dustbin of the vanquished in the process, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen in real life. It’s the stuff of Jacobean revenge plays and Shakespearean drama. Admittedly so was the original coup, but they can’t pull it off twice in four years, especially since it was only ever accidentally in those high cultural realms in the first place.
So I’m calling bollocks on the MSM’s fevered speculation about a Rudd/Gillard rift as the precursor to a leadership challenge in the new year. Of course there’s a bloody rift. They’re never going to be best friends, and they never were in the first place. They don’t have to be. Are we to believe everyone in the government gets along?
But what did interest me on Twitter this morning were the tweets about finishing the job on Kev’s nuts if he so much as causes a destabilising rumour. That I find bizarre. IMO the federal ALP destabilised itself when it threw him out, and they’ve been paying for it ever since. The PM has contributed to the destabilising process with a variety of peculiar, unthought through and ultimately highly mockable “decisions” which I won’t detail here because it’s holiday time and everybody knows anyway.
So it seems a bit rough to turn round and blame the victim, but that is what bullies usually do. No matter what you think of Kevin, he did get rumbled, and it’s pretty normal after being rumbled for a human being to indulge in fantasies of revenge. Of course, thoughts and actions are very different things, but I’m betting that KRudd MP is not daft enough to launch into a leadership tilt that will most likely see him right back in the gutter again, sans both testicles this time, and sans his much-loved job as Foreign Minister. I mean, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
However, sense and politics are not always or even sometimes bedfellows, I grant that.
I don’t want KRudd MP as PM again. That ship has sailed. There may well be a leadership change next year, but it better not be back to Rudd because that will turn the government into a total laughing-stock, and they really cannot afford that.
The MSM is whipping up trouble, as is its wont. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re all rooting for the Noalition. In the media what isn’t said is as influential as what is, and I’m flabbergasted that the MSM has maintained a studied silence on the Coalition costings black hole scandal. Well, it isn’t a scandal, actually, and it should be. These people are attempting to sell themselves as an alternative government and they are to all intents and purposes a bunch of financially incompetent drongos. Yet is the MSM ridiculing them? Is it hell.
Given that the Gillard government has, in spite of everything, achieved a great deal since taking office, why in the name of all that is reasonable would anyone want to replace them with a gang of ageing shrivelled charlatans led by a deeply conflicted homophobic misogynist? Why, I ask you. Why, why, why?
I have never really recovered from the shock of WHAT THEY DID WHEN THEY TOOK OUT MY PM WITHOUT TELLING ME. But it’s time to let old hurts and resentments go. IT WAS SOOOO DASTARDLY. But that was then. This is now. IT WAS SOOOO UNSPEAKABLE. But we have to work together to make the very best of what we’ve got. AND NO MATTER HOW PISSED I AM AT YOU COWARDLY BASTARDS FOR WHAT YOU DID, you are still by far the better option.
So, please, everyone in government, do your very best to stabilise yourselves. Look at the big picture, consider the greater good, and those of you who want revenge, dig deep into your inner stores of goodness and find it in yourselves to forgo that desire in the interests of this nation, and of our future. I’m begging you. On my knees. Please do not make us have this:
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No Place For Sheep 
Largely agree with above, but would “nuance” it a little more.
Kevin Rudd did well, particularly with GFM and the bailout; worlds best practice. But he burnt himself out with his obsessive workaholism and a little understandable vanity..
The reports of his peculiar colleague and staff alienating quirks, along with his own DLP type blind spot as to the likes of people like Chris Mitchell, against the left, flawed his over view of political reality. It wasn’t Gillard who destroyed him, so much those within Labor in league with big mining/finance unwilling to see the 2007 platform that centred on ecological and economic reform implemented.
Kevin’s own inability to read the political landscape correctlyoverthrew him, a more worldly and experienced politician would have spotted the real trouble earlier and perhaps circumvented it with changes of his own before the opening was created, on the blind side. His final error was siding with Mitchell over the ABC and the offshore contract, staggeringly in the wake of Murdoch’s NOW scandal.
Apparently a poll out today contradicts the sense that Gillard may have finally kicked clear of Abbott and Rudd.
if Gillard is no worse than the others (if no better), surely particularly in the case involving Abbott, it baffles me that people will gladly and selectively condemn Gillard outright, yet endorse someone proven as amoral, and likely even more destructive as an Aussie version of Cameronist and US Republican austerity neoliberalism, as Abbott.
They’d prefer austerity, after Cameron and after seing the rest of the world driven to Occupy style resistance, to bailout Keynesianism?
Get me out of this Cuckoo’s Nest!
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Rudd was far better than Dillard. Try and imagine her making a heartfelt apology to the stolen generations when she was not even here while it was happening and still doesn’t seem to get what it was about as she trashes the rights of aborigines by stealing their land instead of their children.
Good that Nicola is AG though, she will not allow evil retrospective laws to pass the smell test let alone parliament one would hope. Of course the architect of such evil laws jailed dozens of innocent kids in adult prisons and has lost the job.
AS for losing his nuts, I think he survives rather nicely.
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Largely agree with Marilyn’s comments, in these globalised times the public in the west are faced with a choice as to “spoils of defeat”, in their politics. We aren’t at the Syria/ Egypt end of things yet, but the future is not inviting, as they continue to tamper with the justice system, the last and strongest default we have, in the name of “whatever it takes”.
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When are parliamentarians going to start doing their job…it’s not ot play mummy or daddy to the nation, its not to push agendas and value systems down our throats (thats what pressure groups, lobby and ginger groups are for), the role of government is and always has been the prudent spending of national taxes on goods and services more correctly pooled at a community level (ie it makes no sense to have each state having its own armed forces so lets fund it at a national level)…anything else is gossip for the media…spare me from issues and agendas…..and please start running the country responsibily again
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Agreed deliberatively divisive drivel is amusement for the inane cheer/jeer squad product members.
‘please start running the country responsibly’
In a nutshell AJ.
Or as history does show when ‘the engines they can take no more captain’ applies the citizenship will become restless. We abandon the systems which abandon us be the obvious beginnings already taking place about the globe.
“When Injustice Becomes Law, Resistance Becomes Duty” – Thomas Jefferson
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I’m fascinated by the Occupy Movement, I think it’s one of the most exciting things to happen in the world for a long time. I don ‘t understand those detractors who claim they movement has no clear political goals. Hell, the fact that it exists is a political statement and a warning to the complacent.
I love that Jefferson quote.
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The occupy movement has given back to the English language the almost defunct term “Tuberculosis” and also “rape camp”.
If one chooses to see things of that ilk as postives, well that is one’s own choice.
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That’s right, and thank god we live in a country where we can make such choices.
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Ive long since held the view that real power doesnt lie with our Politicians or Parliament anyway. Sure they make decisions that affect our lives, but individuals largely have control over how there life goes if they choose it. To some extent too, politics is only a media distraction, like football is to some, which just diverts the national eyeballs away from things like undiscussed elephants no one seems to have an answer for or is unwilling to act on – eg Australian homelessness, the real rate of inflation and more niche issues like the common problem of general dental care that a lot havent been able to afford for years. Insufficent superannuation is another especially among the soon to retire boomers, I could probably list 50 that are never discussed. Did we really need all that heated debate and almost a whole ALP conference dedicated to gay marriage? Very important to some but hardly the stuff of national governance
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No, the gay debate was played up to distract us from the things that government can’t/won’t attend to such as those you mention. It’s another version of bread and circuses. I’m glad the platform has been changed but honestly, as you say it shouldn’t have taken almost a whole bloody conference to do that, it isn’t rocket science. Sometimes I hate politics. It’s like really bad theatre or the Bold and the Beautiful. Or I mean I hate how absolutely everything is politicized and drained of all humanity in the interests of political parties.
I have to go clean up these bloody eggs – just blew up a saucepan of boiled eggs and they’re all over the kitchen ceiling and I am in trouble. Been sent to the naughty step because I was on twitter when they blew and I was supposed to be in charge of them. Hoo haa!
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If we take the Jefferson quote into action, where do we start? I’m not about to become a minuteman lining up to shoot Bill Shorten, or Tanya Plibersek, or Greg Combet, or even more deserving cases such a Joe Ludwig or Julia Gillard.
Things will have to get a whole lot worse, as the Americans would say.
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It’s too soon for Rudd to return…maybe in five or ten years…when he has matured in looks and outlook…and there’s been at least one PM between him and Gillard…but not sooner. Gillard might get re-elected but it’s a bit 50/50…half the time she does what people like and half the time what she does & says makes the same people hate her.
In the shops, pubs, factories, dole queues, knitting circles, lawn bowls clubs & craft groups the general consensus seems to be the country is being run by intellectuals who have never held down a real job. And it shows through the policies and rules/guidelines/laws they come up with. On both sides of the Chamber.
So, to win the election, it may (or should) come down to whoever has work experience in the real world. Simon Crean would probably be a great leader but unfortunately isn’t trusted in the eyes of many older voters, and not inspiring to the younger. Greg Combet is a sell-out (ask any blue-collar unionists) & regarded with suspicion by the rest. Bill Shorten probably could bring it off. It’ll have to be soon for him as his boyish good looks are beginning to wear a bit thin, but he has quite a rank & file following, plus he’s charmed much of the disability sector. How he does in his new job will probably decide his chances as PM. Who else is there?
It has to be someone who can stop the disaffected vote going to Abbot…though if the Coalition had any sense they’d oust him just before the election…and as the latest still fledgling move from gay rights campaign grows legs even his red-neck xenophobe/homophobe/everything else phobe following will waver.
(Have you seen or heard this yet? “Come out of the closet Tony” Everywhere he turns, there the six words will be.) This just might work in upsetting his unshakeable he-man persona. (Gee, I laughed when I first heard of this). Deny it all he likes but then, of course he’d say that even if he is gay.
Hockey is probably the Libs best option. Of them all he has the best “trust me” charisma. Even when he’s spouting crap he still come across as credible. Turnbull might make leader but not necessarily a vote winner outside Sydney. And Bishop’d burn the whole Party into charcoal with her outraged glare if she isn’t the next leader; and God help us all if she gets the job of PM.
Gosh, not much choice at all really…
But then…
why should the next election be any different to all that have gone before?
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I think Turnbull is the libs only electable option, he captures the middle ground, Hockey isnt taken seriously and no-one else has any real leadership persona about them including Abbott
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But they don’t support Turnbull, do they? Not since he took a stand on climate change. I thin he was a good leader – at least he’s had experiences outside of politics
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Your last sentence says it all, Julia. Reading your summary I felt quite exhausted! It’s like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel – not one outstanding figure among that rabble,just a bunch of careerist, talentless pollies. I haven’t heard the “Come out of the closet” line but I think it’s great – I never bought the he-man act, I think he’s trying too hard, which goes to the closet gay thing. He’s protesting too much! I have heard rumours about his young years.
Oh well, a much earned break from them all over Christmas I hope, though they’re gearing up for a screaming match about the drowned asylum seekers. How low can you go – people drown and it gets turned into a fight about political decisions. Disgusting.
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