Kevin Rudd's political cowardice
**Rowland Croucher**
18-Oct-2007
By Scott Stephens
Kevin 07On Sunday afternoon, Kevin Rudd confirmed that his official
election campaign will be the vanity exercise, the gutless appeal to a
shallow and disaffected electorate, that most of us suspected it would be.
Positioned against the ubiquitous sky-blue billboard — which now bears
the rather pretentious slogan 'New Leadership' — Rudd could have cashed
in a little of his electoral capital and kicked off the campaign with a
'vision for Australia' that is so generous, so expansive and morally
engaging that any residual concern over his federal inexperience would
have evaporated amid the heat of his fidelity to such an ideal. He could
have lifted his listeners out of their prosperity-induced lethargy and
directed them, much like Paul Keating did in his 1993 campaign launch,
toward 'a great Australian social democracy, a proud and independent
country, united and cohesive — and able to deliver to all our people
living standards and a way of life unequalled in the world'.
Instead, the launch was everything we’ve come to associate with the
'Kevin Rudd Show' to date. He presented as relaxed, vaguely affable, and
completely sterile. The actual content of his speech was
inconsequential, because its overall intention was to give the public
nothing to object to, and John Howard no ammunition to fire back at him.
Rudd is clearly convinced that this election is the Coalition’s to lose,
and that popular discontent with the government has finally reached
critical mass — as it had in 1996, the election that saw Howard defeat
Keating. The political pendulum is swinging. The time for change is
nigh. All Rudd has to do to win is play it safe, avoid any issue or
matter of principle that Howard could use to drive a wedge between
voters, and, above all, keep playing the media dandy.
There’s no doubt that this has been a remarkably successful strategy,
one that will more than likely carry Rudd through to victory on 24
November. If it does, the media will have played a crucial role in
determining a candidate’s fate: it would seem that years of whoring
himself to journalists (Latham once described him as 'a fanatical media
networker … he is addicted to it, worse than heroin') has finally paid
off. And yet one cannot shake the feeling that Rudd has sold his soul in
the process — presuming, of course, that bureaucrats have souls in the
first place. Rudd’s new slogan is thus only half true. For while he has
embraced the aura of glitzy political novelty, one looks in vain to find
anything resembling the virtues that define genuine leadership.
Rudd’s diminished political capacity is thrown into sharp relief in an
unexpected juxtaposition in Don Watson’s outstanding memoire,
Recollections of a Bleeding Heart. In the first vignette, Watson
describes how it was reported by the ABC’s Jim Middleton that, 'on the
flight from Pusan to Beijing, in a conversation about Mabo and the
premiers, [Keating] made unflattering remarks about Wayne Goss and
called his adviser, Kevin Rudd, a "menace".'
On the same page, as if providing the ultimate foil to Rudd’s soulless
brand of politics, Watson describes a moment during the 1994 H. V. Evatt
lecture, in which Keating spoke of the chief among the political
virtues: 'Between the conception and the execution there is faith, hope
— and courage.' Keating went on to say that 'it is never the people who
let their countries down, but governments that 'lack heart', politicians
who 'imagine things but don’t do them', bureaucrats who 'thwart
initiative'.'
Such courage — which Watson later describes as 'Keating’s hallmark and
his stock in trade … the prime element in the Keating mythos' — is
defined by a leader’s willingness to wage war against the people’s baser
instincts, to expand the public’s moral imagination rather than simply
pander to avarice, to stare electoral oblivion in the face by defying
popular opinion, to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of a
larger cause. In his justly famous address to the National Press Club on
7 December 1990, Keating lamented the absence of this kind of courageous
leadership from Australian politics.
'We’ve got to be led, and politics is about leading people … The United
States had three great leaders, Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and
at times in their history that leadership pushed them on to become the
great country that they are. We’ve never had one such person, not one.'
It was his commitment to this political virtue (which is the subject of
Michael Beschloss’ stunning new book, Presidential Courage) that
motivated Keating’s blistering attack on Kevin Rudd in June this year.
Keating complained that Rudd had surrounded himself with 'conservative
tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types' who lack 'the
creativity or the passion or the belief to go and grab the prize'. Rudd
was thus adopting a craven, unprincipled brand of politics that had lost
sight of what political leadership was all about. As if this diagnosis
of Rudd’s cowardice needed any further proof, one cannot help but be
sickened by his recent rebuke of Robert McClelland — the only shadow
minister to demonstrate any moral insight or political courage all year
— over his opposition to the practice of capital punishment in Indonesia.
The great hypocrisy of Rudd’s style of politics is that he launched his
challenge for the Labor leadership 12 months ago with an appeal to
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s courageous opposition to National Socialism in the
name of robust Christian commitment. But it was this same Bonhoeffer who
urged Christians not to fear 'being publicly disgraced, having to suffer
and being put to death for the sake of Christ', for it is by such
courageous discipleship 'that Christ himself attains visible form within
his community'.
Perhaps it is time for Rudd to consider Christ’s warning, which had
seared itself into Bonhoeffer’s conscience: 'What does it profit a man
to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?'
Scott Stephens is an author and theologian who lives in Brisbane,
Queensland. He is the co-editor (with Rex Butler) and translator of two
volumes of the selected writings of Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real
and The Universal Exception.
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=3605 - and see this
page for comments...
--
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/ (20,000 articles 4000 humor)
Blogs - http://rowlandsblogs.blogspot.com/
Justice for Dawn Rowan - http://dawnrowansaga.blogspot.com/
Funny Jokes and Pics - http://funnyjokesnpics.blogspot.com/
lynx
Interesting.
--
rgds,
Pete
=====
http://pw352.blogspot.com/
'My wife ran away with my best friend.. I sure miss him!'
Sean McHugh
**Rowland Croucher** wrote:
>
> Kevin Rudd's political cowardice
>
> 18-Oct-2007
>
> By Scott Stephens
<snip>
> Rudd’s new slogan is thus only half true. For while he has
> embraced the aura of glitzy political novelty, one looks in vain to find
> anything resembling the virtues that define genuine leadership.
Yep. Perhaps this will be remembered as the Rudd session we had to
have.
<snip>
Best Regards,
Sean McHugh