Desperate times
Illustration: Spooner
October 13, 2007/the AGE
Reconciliation and the death penalty. These issues drove John Howard and Kevin Rudd to frantic manoeuvres, writes Shaun Carney.
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Kevin Rudd in a sheer fit of panic at the prospect of losing the so-called battler vote that WorkChoices has returned to Labor and John Howard as part of a slowly unfolding paroxysm of existential horror brought on by consistently bad opinion polls.
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Let's face it: Howard's conversion is hard to believe. That's not to suggest that it's all bull. It might be sincere and deeply felt. But everything we've seen and heard of the Prime Minister, from his first act as the nation's leader back in 1996, which was to hack into ATSIC, to his out-of-nowhere pledge on reconciliation in his victory speech in 1998, which went nowhere, to his always enthusiastic and heartfelt repudiation of the "black armband" view of Australian history, encourages scepticism.
It is not being unfair to the Prime Minister to be so sceptical; it is a tribute. He was the one who campaigned against symbols and in favour of practical reconciliation. He led the argument. Most Australians, I suspect, were either convinced or were never interested. The rest, who wanted something else when it came to indigenous affairs, had given up on this Government on the issue. Now, the Prime Minister says it's time to get interested in it again.
And yet, when he was interviewed at length by Neil Mitchell on 3AW yesterday morning, he settled pretty quickly back into the old culture wars tropes: an apology would be a terrible thing ("I have always supported reconciliation, but not of the apologetic, shame-laden, guilt-ridden type," he said); the best way to help indigenous people was to incorporate them into "the mainstream of the community".
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Changing your ways and shifting your opinions isn't always a positive, as we saw with Kevin Rudd. Clearly, the long waiting period for the campaign playbooks, which both major parties finalised some time ago, to go into action, have made Rudd edgy. He overreacted to Monday night's speech on Labor's capital punishment policy stance by foreign affairs shadow minister Robert McClelland.......
Faced with a rabid tabloid media, still-grieving relatives and a Government that has no compunction in portraying Labor as a friend to the Bali bombers, Rudd chose not to stare them all down. Instead, he publicly upbraided McClelland, McClelland's staff and his own staff, and said he hated terrorists. He seemed to suggest that Labor would not make great efforts to argue against the death penalty for terrorists. Make no mistake, he was saying this because he was terrified of losing the blue-collar voters who've voted for Howard at the past two elections but who have been prised free because of WorkChoices. There's a lot of research to show that these voters favour capital punishment for terrorists.
But on the death penalty, there can be no halfway houses; you're either for it or you're not.Rudd's response raised legitimate questions about how pragmatic, and not in a good way, he would be if he becomes prime minister
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