Yep it's an amazing fall especially in Australia politics. Political suicide for mine whoever wins the leadership tomorrow. As you say Jake I think the public won't like backstabbing although it's the norm in politics and both sides do it.
Only in opposition MT. Why do we now start ditching PMs based on opinion polls.
Rudd made the mistake of fighting too many battles at once and making too many enemies. Mind you if he spoke like he did tonight for most of the past year he wouldn't be in trouble in the first place. Incredible that the ETS has killed off leaders of both parties. The Liberal one for supporting it and the Labor one for putting it on the backburner.
Agreed it was a good speech.
The ETS was an issue of almost unprecedented complexity in Australian politics. This all started rolling with the Libs knifing Turnbull. That meant any coalition support for the ETS went out the window. In the meantime, the Greens played the role of environmental terrorist with a 'tax or nothing' stance when if they fell in behind Labor they might have got Turnbull and MacFarlane on board. So the Greens are quite unreasonable and should never be treated as a serious political party with Brown as leader. Then you have all the international politics and Australia just doesn't hold any sway.
Still I don't think ETS is a big issue because 95% of Greens votes would eventually come back to Labor.
It is really the mining tax. The problem from a PR point of view is that from the outside it just looks like big government. And as a frontier country, we have a natural disposition to the sort or conservative, 'private enterprise' mindset that opposes this. On top of this, our capitalist egalitarianism, for all its virtues, helps breed a society where everything comes second to personal wealth. That is to say we have few institutional means of defining what a good, well-lived life really is other than to be wealthy. We don't have the great scientific institutions to harness the best minds, we don't have the great literary, journalistic or artistic traditions of other nations, nor do we have a great reputation for philanthropy. All we are left with is that very middle class desire to accumulate more wealth than the next (or to retire before your mates - see WAT). We are just fortunate that we are sitting on a bunch of resources.
So Rudd could have given the mining tax a real purpose by saying that it was going to real targets. To raise the numeracy and literacy standards to top of class, to fund research into renewable energies, to solve the homeless problem etc etc
Nonetheless, the mining tax would have funded the social infrastructure and in my travels I have to say the places that are most welcoming and where people are most happy (and this is backed by research) are those with a strong social democracy (Denmark, Sweden, Finland etc). So the real question re. the mining tax and other forms of taxation is what is more important? Personal wealth or personal happiness?
Anyway I hope Rudd hangs on because it isn't right that a serious democracy ditches its PM halfway through his first term.
