Samizdata

If it is true that venom has medicinal uses, the leading figures of the Australian Labor Party must be the healthiest people on Earth.

Entertaining stuff, but one thing keeps bugging me. In about half the articles giving background information on Kevin Rudd I read, I see something like this:

When Gillard, then deputy prime minister, moved against him in 2010, she did so against a backdrop of internal disquiet and profound electoral disappointment.

Rudd had back-flipped spectacularly on an important pre-election pledge to introduce a carbon tax and his sky-high popularity with voters had slumped. (One of the major figures who urged him to listen to the mining and business lobby and jettison that promise was the deputy who would later depose him.)

You would think from that that the righteous planet-protective wrath of the Australian people was directed at Rudd for his failure to fulfil his pledge to introduce a tax (actually an emissions trading regime) intended to retard global warming. Cobblers. He had backed out of laying the tax because the voters loathed the idea. In fact so unpopular was the proposed carbon tax that it also resulted in the ousting of the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, from leadership of the Liberal party, he having offered bipartisan support for the scheme. While it is true that voters do despise retreat and will punish a politician who backs down even when they howled for him to do so, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was only politically attractive in the sense that the song of the siren was attractive to Odysseus. Any Australian political leader who began to find that tune catchy had better hope that his Parliamentary colleagues had tied his bindings firmly and plugged well their own ears.

(Ears. Plugged. Rudd. Don’t think that thought – too late.)

Nor has the curse abated since then. One big reason for Julia Gillard’s unpopularity is that she in turn “back-flipped spectacularly on an important pre-election pledge” not to introduce a carbon tax. I studied Australian politics at the University of Tim Blair’s Blog and I know that much. Why doesn’t the Guardian?

Robin Horbury at Biased BBC made a similar observation about a BBC story in July 2010. The link to the BBC story is dead, but, trust me, it was one of many.

Added later: another story from the Guardian exhibiting the same symptoms:

Ms Gillard’s once famously popular predecessor as Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, lost first that popularity and then his leadership partly because he failed to steer through the legislation he had promised to deal with what had earlier been called “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.

My native land of Australia is having a federal election on August 21, in which Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott will challenge Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who came to office in a party coup a mere five weeks ago. For those who are interested, I recently recorded a conversation with Patrick Crozier, in which he attempted to interview me about the issues at hand.

In this conversation, we cover issues such as how the Australian political system differs from the British system (and perhaps more crucially, how Australian political parties differ from British parties), just how and why Kevin Rudd managed to go from having some of the highest opinion poll ratings of any Australian Prime Minister to being tossed by his party in approximately nine months, the issues at hand in the electioin, and The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin.

Overhanging all this, though, is the recent party coup against Kevin Rudd. We spend quite a bit of time attempting to figure out the man’s downfall, and trying to figure out exactly how such a man became PM in the first place.

On the other hand, there are times when a music video is worth a thousand words. People without the time to listen to our conversation might instead consider simply watching this, which I think gets to the bottom of Kevin Rudd fairly quickly.

Unfortunately, although the conversation is timely and should be posted quickly, I have not had the opportunity to give it a great deal of editing. (I am presently in Romania, as part of having a life, and a touch short of editing facilities). As a consequence, the conversation still contains a few ums and ahs and pauses, and I think it is a little slow in starting. However, for those who want to give us a fair shake of the sauce bottle, I think it is pretty coherent once we get going. Enjoy.

The Australian state of Western Australia has a population of 2.2 million people, and occupies an area of just over 2.6 million square kilometres. Just for reference, that is seven and a half times the size of Germany or alternatively ten times the size of Texas.

However, average house prices are amongst the highest in the world, as there is a shortage of land.

It rather boggles the mind.

Correction: Texas is actually slightly more than a quarter of the size of Western Australia. My apologies to Texans.