The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Of course, that’s the famous quatrain from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Kim has written with penetrating insight about Kevin Rudd. Before the waters of history close over this period in our national life and we are totally distracted by the colour and movement of an election campaign I thought we should pause to consider the achievements of the Rudd government.

Where better to start than the list he told us he was proud of in his last press conference as PM?

For your convenience I’ve listed them below.

He introduced the list this way:

I was elected by the Australian people as prime minister of this country to bring back a fair go for all Australians and I have given my absolute best to do that, I’ve given it my absolute all.

In that spirit I am proud of the achievements that we have delivered to make this country fairer.

Here, paraphrased a little, is the list:

1. We kept Australia out of recession. Had we not, half a million people would have been out of work.

2 We got rid of WorkChoices and restored decency to the work place.

3. We stared to build the nation’s infrastructure including the National Broadband Network, which will transform the economy in ways we have yet to conceive.

4. We began the education revolution – 300,000 extra computers in classrooms.

5. We now have trade centres built to service every one of the nation’s secondary schools.

6. New school libraries are springing up across the country, often in schools that have never had one.

7. We now have nationwide early childhood education.

8. We now have a national curriculum.

9. We now have 50,000 more university places and have invested so much more in our universities, in our research.

10. We have reformed the health system; a national health and hospitals network. He said that the new funding arrangements will be seen as a “very, very deep reform.”

11. We are building 20 regional cancer centres right across our country.

12. We now have a National Organ Transplant Authority.

13. We have restored decency to the aged pension. The $100 extra is the biggest increase ever.

14. We now have paid parental leave.

15. We are on track to halve homelessness in the country.

16. We are adding 20,000 additional units of social housing.

17. We signed the Kyoto Protocol.

18. We boosted the renewable energy target to 20%.

19. We tried three times to get an emissions trading system through parliament.

20. We now have a Murray Basin Authority and for the first time in our history have a basin-wide plan and a basin-wide cap on water.

21. On the global stage Australia is now at the table of the G20. We lobbied hard and long for that. It is a good achievement for Australia for the future.

22. We are closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

23. We greeted the Stolen Generations.

He was “most proud” of that last one one, saying:

The apology was unfinished business for our nation. It is the beginning of new business for our nation.

That was the list of achievements Rudd identified, with a little more elaboration, in his press conference. He said it had been a very busy two and a half years.

We have thrown our absolute all at this and I believe when we look back at this, these reforms will endure into the future and make Australia, I believe, a fairer and better place than it would otherwise have been.

Were you aware of all the items on the list? I hadn’t heard of the regional cancer centres or the National Organ Transplant Authority. It’s noteworthy, I think, that his composure first faltered when he reached these two health initiatives. He pointed out that out in regional areas people are three times more likely to die of cancer in their first year of diagnosis. On transplants Rudd himself has someone else’s aortic valve inside his heart. “We chose to make a difference,” he said.

The other points of high emotion were when he spoke of homelessness, of the Stolen Generations representatives being frightened as they came in “over there” and of his family.

This was the first time I played the vision. I heard his speech on my pocket radio, plugged in walking down Queen Street. The speech was indeed very moving, as others have mentioned. Rudd came across as a man of very deep compassion, aware of the fragility of life and concerned about people on the margins.

But I digress. In this post I’m concerned about the achievements of the Rudd government.

He missed a few significant ones. He could have mentioned matching Howard’s tax cuts. He could have mentioned building a string of superclinics to deliver medical services, which I think is quite important. Then there was getting our troops out of Iraq. He could have mentioned getting rid of Howard’s Pacific Solution and replacing it with a more humane approach to asylum seekers, though he was almost certainly not proud of the recent alterations to the policy. Finally, he commissioned the Henry review of taxation, which could spawn more than the RSPT if we so choose.

Any others?

Each one of the above is worth a separate post or three and we might not all agree on their individual worth. Nevertheless, I think the Rudd government’s achievements will be considerably more than a footnote in history.

That assumption seemed to be shared by the panel. It surprised me, because Christopher Pearson reproduced a transcript of Abbott’s remarks in his column in The Australian on Sunday.

The part about “the poor will always be with us” is indicated, rather than quoted, perhaps because (as often occurs) it was a question from the floor and the recording wasn’t clear. Sometimes when a session is transcribed, the speaker’s comments are also omitted if a question can’t be accurately redacted. But the substance of Abbott’s remarks, mostly verbatim, is in fact on the public record.

I was in Canberra last week and had the opportunity to ask Opposition Leader Tony Abbott whether a government under his direction would continue with the Rudd government’s goal of halving homelessness by 2020. His answer was no.

In justifying his stance, Abbott quoted from the Gospel of Matthew: ”The poor will always be with us,” he said, and referred to the fact there is little a government can do for people who choose to be homeless.

Perusco, the Chief Executive of Melbourne’s Sacred Heart Mission, goes on to refute Abbott’s claim that homelessness is a choice, and to underline how vital action in this area is.

It’s instructive to compare Abbott’s remarks, which he presumably didn’t think would end up in The Age, with this piece of puffery from Senator George Brandis in The Australian:

To a greater extent than most Liberal leaders have been, Abbott is a communitarian. He does not believe in an atomistic society of isolated individuals in incessant, ruthless competition. The remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher — “There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals” — would be utterly alien to him. He believes in a settled, rooted society of families and citizens living in stable communities bound together by the gossamer threads of voluntary association.

Presumably there are limits to who constitutes Abbott’s imagined communities.

Indeed, though it’s unclear how much Brandis knows about the history and political philosophy of communitarianism, one point of criticism has always been that there’s a heavy dose of authoritarianism and conformism inherent in its construction of community – it’s premised as much on social exclusion as on inclusion. That’s very apparent in many aspects of Third Way politics – from Blair’s Britain to Latham’s vision for Australia. So, too, many of the debates in Anglophone political theory in the 1990s revolved around perceived frictions between its premise of consensual values and norms on one hand and both individual liberty and multiculturalism on the other hand.

Brandis, who celebrates Rhodes Scholar Abbott as both “intensely intellectual” and “the antithesis of the cloistered academic” may, of course, have a different meaning of ‘communitarian’ in mind when thinking of his leader. But as an erstwhile apostle of Malcolm Turnbull as a moderniser, and of the value of the liberal tradition in Liberal-ism, he might also care to consider that there might be as Brutopian a streak in communitarian conservatism as anything to be found in Kevin Rudd’s portrait of neo-liberalism.

A few days before Christmas, Kevin Rudd launched a white paper on homelessness The Road Home with far less fan fare than the climate change white paper a few weeks earlier.

The white paper was, on the whole, well received by the homelessness policy community [disclaimer – I was close to the action on this one]. It sets out a strategy and identifies targets like “halve overall homelessness by 2020” and “offer accommodation to all rough sleepers who need it.” It’s been signed off by COAG and has a substantial increase in funds. So far, so good and it has as a better chance of succeeding than anything currently in place.

But the Australian Medical Association is not happy and says it won’t work. In particular, they don’t like this commitment in Chapter 3:

Under the National Partnership on Homelessness, state and territory governments will implement a policy of ‘no exits into homelessness’ from statutory, custodial care and hospital, mental health and drug and alcohol services for those at risk of homelessness.

The AMA says this can’t work and the President is reported to have said “doctors would discharge patients even if they had no place to go or risk banking up an already stretched system.” No matter that the impact of homelessness on an already ill person’s health is to be more severe than other! What the AMA has failed to do is to think through the problem and in the process has bizarrely argued that the hospital system should only be for people with acute needs. (Tell that to the cosmetic surgeons!) Now, discharge someone into homelessness and there’s a fair chance they will be a repeat customer in the not to distant future.

In fact, the AMA should have welcomed the White Paper with its focus on prevention of homelessness in the first place. It’s well known that street homeless people “overuse” casualty departments because that’s all many of them can access in the way of health care. And well known that the ill-health of homeless people is exacerbated by the homelessness, whether it be respiratory ailments or mental health or like one guy I met recently on the Town Hall steps who had chronic leg ulcers that required him to elevate his legs for lengthy periods – difficult to achieve when you are sleeping rough. If we can prevent someone ever getting into that situation in the first place, the health system will be a whole lot better off.

Instead we got a knee jerk reaction and the only public bagging of a significant advance in homelessness policy by an organisation that should care about homelessness but had nothing positive themselves to offer. What they are implying is that there is nothing you can do about homelessness so just ignore it. Disappointing.