Anyone who doubts the absolute neccessity of compulsory superannuation will only have to wait a few years to see the enormous financial difficulties & social distress the European countries without it will endure.
Where do you think Singapore gained the capital to fuel its rapid & successful growth ?

The wound that Howard inflicted on him in 1996 have not healed yet.

True. Paul Keating says:

[Howard] did no thinking.

Also true. So you’re both right.

Oh, and BTW the proposed increase in complulsory super that Keating keeps pushing is really, really crap policy.

dd, I too would really appreciate a few words of explanation.

For the life of me I can’t imagine why you would think that.

I mean John Howard turned the prime ministership into something like a state police minister. He was at the scene of every crime, twice a day on radio. The guy did no thinking. When a country has a lead they’re does not think, think then that country starts to move back.

The wound that Howard inflicted on him in 1996 have not healed yet. You get the feeling that they never will.

Part of Rudd’s entry to PM’ship included that he be very different from the codger, whose ten years of stranglehold on national narrative wore thin.

Rudd is failing, along historical lines, to establish that national narrative we’ve come to expect one way or another from PMs, but only if seen in that light. Again, I think Rudd has thrown open those sorts of historical constraints, thru the Aussie Summit etc, is gathering information, to present more cohesively later. I could be wrong, but I don’t think punters are ready for the narrative thing just yet; I think they’d become sick of that style of politics being rammed down their throats and at a guess Rudd is still letting in that fresh air into the system.

Punching out a narrative as Keating seems to want can certainly be the rope which ties political sails for forward thrust, but it can also be the rope by which a PM eventually gets tied to and run up the mast.

Also, I think it’s too early to really tell what such a narrative should be, with so much looming over the horizon, eighteen months or so away – CC and economic instability questions for starters, huge in themselves, let alone the daily stuff which hasn’t yet concretised in the public political mind, but will. I think then we’ll know if Rudd has played his early year well, or not.

Not knowing him is frustrating, and we want to draw a rule from him to measure against past knowns, but he’s clearly doing it his way, and while he might be a flop I don’t think he can be at all underestimated, especially in terms of playing the politics.

Now Rudd is a boring, prudish, small-c-conservative micromanaging workaholic who, unlike Keating, is hard to warm to personally. I know who I’d rather share a drink with. But he’s likely to last a lot longer than Keating as PM and Keating is in no position to give him advice.

Oh, and BTW the proposed increase in complulsory super that Keating keeps pushing is really, really crap policy.

If Rudd is micro-managing, then by definition he will not grasp the mettle on the really big topics such as water, climate change and constitutional reform (such as getting state government to do sensible non-parochial things.

It seems to me, as Julian Morrow observed on Q&A, that Rudd’s government is really not providing the leadership people want on defining issues of our time such as water, climate change, renewable energy and sustainable living.

Keating still makes me chuckle, most recently for his accurate description of Costello as a nong, and in the past for cracks such as “the Souflée only rising once” (Peacock). But I won’t forgive him for the RFAs and sanctioning ongoing destruction of Australia’s unique and irreplaceable native forests, which of course still continues unabated, so he was not wholly responsible for this.