Australians go to the polls tomorrow. All the tea leaves indicate that Labour risks being consigned to the badlands for a generation. Why? As always there are multiple causes. But one stands out.
Just when you thought that politicians could not get any worse, along comes a doozie who raises the bar for every following aspirant. Kevin Rudd, reinstated Australian Prime Minister, is that toxic dish of acute incompetence used with a gargantuan ego condemned to relentless self-belief, spiced with a snobbish disdain of lesser mortals. Paul Sheehan, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, delivers the following indictment of a politician from way, way beyond the Looking Glass.
Never in the previous 113 years of Australian federation has a Prime Minister created such a gap between soaring rhetoric, sweeping promises and national interventions and meagre or failed results of so many grandiose plans.
Rudd inherited a $90 billion financial firewall when he came to office, via a federal budget surplus, the Future Fund and two infrastructure funds. It took the previous Coalition government 10 years to dismantle the $96 billion debt it inherited. It took Rudd little more than one year to build it up again.
When Rudd first came to power, he spoke of the ''greatest moral challenge of our time'' - global warming. He said it needed to be attacked via an emissions trading scheme. He then backtracked spectacularly when the electorate did not endorse his enthusiasm for higher energy prices.
He said Australia needed to remove the ''stain'' of processing asylum seekers in offshore centres. After he duly dismantled offshore processing, 50,000 people have arrived on smugglers' boats, more than 1000 have drowned when other boats sank and the cost of it all has blown out to $10 billion, thus far. Rudd has never accepted responsibility for this debacle and the mass detentions involved.
Instead, in an act of breathtaking hypocrisy, he has promised to send asylum seekers to a malaria-ridden island off the coast of a failed state, to a gulag in Papua New Guinea that does not even exist beyond a row of tents, and spent $30 million of government funds making false claims and election promises in breach of the spirit of the electoral laws. . . .
Then there is Rudd's penchant for micromanaging the economy via public announcements that the federal bureaucracy then could not deliver. The list of debacles is long.
FuelWatch - dribbled away. Grocery Watch - dribbled away. Citizens' assembly on climate change - never happened. Cash for clunkers - abandoned. Computers in schools - poor outcome, cost overruns. Green car environment fund - scrapped. National network of childcare centres - paltry outcome. National Solar Schools Program - shutting down. Network of GP superclinics - paltry outcome. Family healthcare clinics - dribbled away. Poker machine reform - largely abandoned. GreenPower scheme - ineffective.
At least none of these failures involved significant financial loss but there have been mass-scale cost blowouts. The national broadband network has turned into a money sink, over budget and behind schedule. The Building the Education Revolution program was an exercise in spending $16 billion to get about $8 billion worth of building done. The roof insulation scheme become infamous, a byword for a billion-dollar cash splash that produced false billing, over-charging, unsafe houses and four dead installers.
The recycled 2013 edition of Rudd is more of the same, a font of uncosted policies that sound suspiciously as if they were created on the plane. The Manus Island detention centre that doesn't exist. The Brisbane deep water naval base that can't exist. The Northern Territory economic zone written on the back of an envelope. The high-speed rail system no one can afford. Rudd is not running on his record because he can't.
Rudd's great advantage is that the public has never warmed to the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott. But the public has also now seen Rudd's hot air balloon.
He has also crossed the line between exaggeration to deceit. Two of Canberra's most senior bureaucrats, the head of the Treasury and the head of the Finance Department, had to distance themselves from Rudd's claims that he had departmental briefings that debunked the opposition's policy costings. In the most polite way, the two heads of department said the Prime Minister had been reckless with the truth.
The pattern of dysfunction is unmistakable. It's why his party sacked Rudd in the first place. His ''new way'' is his old way.
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