Sermons on De’Mountables

“The Kevin Rudd era has begun. It is expected to last a long time. Rudd offers a new brand of leadership for Australia that breaks not just from John Howard but from Labor’s past.
Rudd enjoys a big majority, an unqualified mandate, a growth economy, a Labor Party invigorated by a surge of fresh talent and a demoralised Liberal Party that will take many years to recover.”

— Paul Kelly, The Australian, Nov 26, 2007

“Federal Labor appears weak, unconvincing and hostage to many dilemmas. The Gillard government, deft at tactics, is losing its policy authority in the nation and facing a relentless hemorrhage in political support with repeated exposures of its inability to shape events or outcomes. Labor is in serious difficulty, a fact more apparent the greater the distance from Canberra. The government looks out of its depth, weak and devoid of strategic purpose. So overwhelming are these early signs they demand an urgent rethink of Labor’s policy and messages.

— Paul Kelly, The Australian, Nov 6, 2010

 There is never any room for doubt when Rupert Murdoch’s in-house Australian Polonious opines on the state of politics. Imperious, self-important and grandiloquent, Paul Kelly has made a long journalistic career out of appearing to be plugged into the Zeitgeist and sounding very sure about it. And no doubt he did at one stage in the mid-to-late-1980s, but not much since.

Kelly’s latest theory is that the Rudd/Gillard governments have failed to live up to their rhetoric by being demonstrably unable to formulate effective policy – either in foreign affairs, climate change or dealing with the terms of trade shock resulting from the mining boom.

“These are now on full display: an epoch-defining resources boom that imposes serious capacity constraints, interest rate pressures and new infrastructure needs,” Kelly says.
“Labor’s policy response is weak, from its misconceived super resources tax to its hostility towards supply side reforms.” 

All of which one could share some sympathy with, but for the fact that Kelly’s newspaper, owned by the world’s most interventionist media proprietor, has effectively white-anted every attempted reform of the Rudd/Gillard era through an orchestrated blitzkrieg of misinformation, slurs and outright lies.

Kelly would have us believe there is some great unrealised supply-side economic “reform” that Labor is too timid to pursue, despite the fact the electorate itself appears to have no stomach for it and that his publisher’s favoured Liberal-National coalition is now pursuing populist, nativist solutions that make Labor look positively libertarian. And Kelly never seems able to say exactly what this “reform” is. (It’s very similar to the way Murdoch’s Fox in the US persuades the lower-to-middle-class to vote against its own interests by appealing to nationalism, xenophobia and ignorance).

It would be easier to take the pontificating of Murdoch’s outlets had they not spent the Howard years making allowances for that government’s spending of billions on middle-class welfare and making catastrophic foreign policy errors by cosying up to the Bush administration’s neo-cons.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s another more personal agenda here. It’s the boss’ agenda, of course. It has nothing to do with Australia’s interests and everything to do with making this country the 51st state of the USA. Quite simply, Rupert wants another Delaware in the South Pacific, a place where he can make loads of money and pay hardly any tax at all.

The job of the News Ltd minions is to dress up their boss’ tawdry, ideological and commercial ambitions in an unspecified “reform” agenda that no Labor government, however diligent, could ever live up to. In the meantime, our own democracy is laid to waste by a man who controls 65 percent of our print media and who lives somewhere else. One wonders when people will wake up to this ruse.