Y’know I hafta agree with Jack somewhat above. Kev’s done what every Aus PM does,regardless of party affiliation or personal ideology, when faced with a economic crisis. Throw money at everyone, suck up to big business and ask every lobby group how they can help and vice versa.

Thats more or less right, “events dear boy, events” as Macmillan once remarked about what was driving policy.

But the phase of the business cycle positively correlates to the ideological valency of policy.

Thus when times are tough governments tend to lurch Right, pampering special interests and cracking down on the powerless. eg early Fraser, early Hawke.

When times are good governments tend to sprawl to the Left, throwing money around members of the general public like a drunken sailor on shore leave. eg early Whitlam, late Howard

Nabakov says:

And this approach seems to have worked pretty well over the last hundred years. We’re still here and looking pretty damn svelte by comparison with most of our G20 peers.

Things work well for us because we washed up on a bountiful island and we were made of the Right Stuff in what passed for the good old days: Caucasian race, Christian religion and Constitutional regent. The people and their leaders have also had the good sense to stay loyal to powerful imperial allies (UK/US) and cultivate booming trading partners (JAP/PRC).

Things may still go well enough for us if we ditch those key aspects of our traditional identity.

But it just wont be the same.

And this approach seems to have worked pretty well over the last hundred years. We’re still here and looking pretty damn svelte by comparison with most of our G20 peers.

Kevin is my local member and he was *absolutely brilliant* at it. Still is, in some ways. True story: I have a mate who was out shopping in Morningside with his infant daughter earlier this year. He walked past Kevin’s office and saw the C*1 comcar out the front and thought ‘hey! I should go visit my local member!’ So he wanders in past security, unchallenged. “The Prime Minister’s a busy man” he’s told, but maybe he can get a photo is he can wait a few minutes. “I was hoping for a proper chat.” Can’t be done, he’s told, so he leaves and crosses the road, heading back to the shops.

A couple of minutes later, the security guard comes running over and tells him Kevin’s got a few minutes free if he’s still interested. So my mate ends up, to his utter disbelief, spending a bit over five minutes chewing the fat with Kevin about local issues (and comforting his daughter, who didn’t like the look of Big Kev at all).

d

Carney himself refers to skepticism that Rudd is “a right wing free trader leading a left wing party”. I think that’s wrong. I’m increasingly convinced that Kevin Rudd should be taken at his word on his perspective on economics.

Kevin’s “word on his perspective on economics” should be taken with a grain of salt because it changes depending on time and audience. As Costello put it before the 2007 election:

Kevin Rudd is being managed and packaged by PR consultants and pollsters. He says what the pollsters tell him. They tell him to say what the electorate wants to hear – not what he actually believes.

Lets look at his slippery forms of self-definition.

When he first came to prominence he declared “I am an old-fashioned Christian socialist”.

After he won the ALP leadership, speaking to Left-liberals in the Monthly, he castigated Howard’s free-market Brutopia which had so impoverished average people during the late nineties and early noughties.

Before the election, speaking to the mainstream in broadcast land he characterised himself an “economic conservative”.

After the GFC, again sermonising to his pet Left-liberals at the Monthly, he went beyond denouncing greed and latched onto financial marketeers.

Moving away from rhetoric to the facts on the economic ground, Rudd has bent over backwards to please and appease the owning and ruling class. He has

– cut income taxes on high earners

– done virtually nothing to hobble the grip of financiers on the real economy (apart from guaranteeing them against bank runs),

– thrown every kind of subsidy and tax-break at property owners and developers in order to drive up house prices and rents,

– larded the car industry with subsidies,

– ramped up the immigration market to drive down wages,

– riddled CPRS with loopholes for Big Coal and

generally acted like Santa Claus to everyone in a suit.

This is “Right-wing”" alright although it does not have a very great deal to do with Hayekian economic liberalism or free trade (except in commodified labor).

* Right-wing = establishing the high-status
Left-wing = empowering the low-status (the FHO scheme is probably Left-wing on that definition, but it has mainly acted to enrich vendors rather than empower emptors)

There were two Qld-born Prime Ministers betwixt Fisher and Rudd: Arthur Fadden (1940) and Frank Forde (1945).

Of course, such inconvenient facts have no place in commentariat bluster…

Anyway, Shaun Carney was a bit of a Costello booster, so I can believe he’s dead wrong in his assesment of Rudd.

Maybe Rudd fancies himself as an EG Theodore style big picture man, though in reality I see him as being closer to a successful version of Bill Hayden (and the original Bill Hayden, not the strawman that some Leftwingers have created over recent years. There’s a fantastic profile by Bob Ellis circa 1976 that is reprinted in one of Ellis’ anthologies that explains what that Queenslander was trying to do in going against the ultraconservative regional politics of the era.)

Keating, who could be read through his history at Jack Lang’s knee

I was discussing this figure with Paul Burns on another thread a couple of days ago, and I came to the conclusion that although I dislike Lang PB is basically right that the big fella was fundamentally a 19th century radical liberal.

Too much is read into the Lang-Keating connection. For instance, it was a young Bob Carr who introduced the motion at that early seventies NSW Labor conference readmitting the BF to the ALP—funny how we never hear much about Carro being a Lang man.

I think the most interesting influence I’ve ever heard Keating admit to having was when he told Phillip Adams in an interview that he’d read all of Churchill’s writings as a teenager. Now that’s a lot of self-aggrandisement for a youngster to be exposed to.

Iam not professing to be learned on this topic- far from it. I am suggesting I would much rather read an article outlining the way in which these factors have shaped our leader historically, and the way they impact on the practice of his leadership today.

I believe that we have seen eras of politicians affected by global shifts in ideology- just look at Keating’s monetarism- hardly Thatcher or Regan, but influenced by the same neo-liberal ideas. I want to see analysis of what the new “big global ideas” are that are playing themselves out through our leader.

Of course, we are also living in a time of unprecedented risk from the back-lash of nature to our unsustainable practicec in the form of water shortage and climate change. These interesting times deserve deeper analysis, leaving no room for superficial analysis. I crave the attention of the deep thinkers to this.