If you’re sick of reading about Utegate – and a poll currently running on SkyNews suggests 45 per cent of you are – I’d suggest you skip this and go straight to the article below about orgasms.
Our health columnist Roy Eccleston reveals that far from sending you blind, frequent and enthusiastic self-abuse may be the key to longer life, which makes you wonder why David Carradine and Michael Hutchence aren’t still with us today.
Anyway, I digress. This column isn’t about sex, but it is about somebody who looks totally shagged - Malcolm Turnbull, who, currently, is the Leader of the Opposition.
The past 24 hours in Australian politics have shed stark new light on the character and style of the nation’s two political leaders.
And it’s Kevin Rudd who has emerged as the best practitioner of politics, while Turnbull’s vacillating, scatter-gun efforts have only fuelled the perception that he may not be mentally and tactically equipped for the job.
Going into what for Turnbull will be a hugely important and massively taxing second sitting day of Parliament, Kevin Rudd looks like a very effective politician, and Malcolm Turnbull looks like a lawyer.
Turnbull looks mentally exhausted. Rudd is full of beans.
Rudd was a picture of focus and discipline yesterday.
With his tedious monotone, he stuck to his mantra that the email which treasury official (and police suspect) Godwin Grech referred to in estimates on Friday was “a fake, a forgery, a fabrication” and that Mr Turnbull had no choice but to “walk into Parliament, apologise, and resign.”
It was staccato and methodical and toxically boring, and it did not waver from his first morning radio interview to his unusual 6.30pm stand-up outside Parliament’s great verandah with A Current Affair’s Peter Overton, who is currently being treated for hypothermia.
What it confirmed is that Rudd, who apart from a brief stint living in a Datsun 180B, has led a consistently uninteresting life as a diplomat, advisor and politician, and has the skill and temperament to craft a simple message and stick to it.
This isn’t a vindication of what he said. Rudd very deliberately has spent most of the past 24 hours talking almost exclusively about the fake email which purported to implicate him in the Utegate affair, rather than the series of genuine emails which suggested (and still suggest) that Treasurer Wayne Swan had gone the extra yard for their friend, Ipswich car dealer John Grant.
But Rudd wrung every drip of political life out of the hoax email which, even though it never formed the basis of Turnbull’s entire attack on the government, was nevertheless used by Turnbull to call for the PM’s dismissal. It’s here where Turnbull has been accused of “over-reaching”, the new favourite term of the nation’s political pundits.
I’m not sure if he over-reached. But he certainly flailed about like a ratbag.
After starting the morning strongly, Turnbull hit the wall around lunchtime yesterday as it was revealed that the AFP had raided Grech’s house and established the email was a fake. The emergence that the AFP also want to talk to one of his former staff completely rattled the Libs, who left the chamber in the middle of the Utegate debate.
Rather than acknowledging the Grech email was a fake – as Tony Abbott did last night on Lateline - Turnbull tried to pretend he hadn’t been gravely embarrassed when his body language suggested he wanted to hide under the dispatch box.
Worse, he acted like a lawyer, in that upon realising his arguments against Rudd had a gaping hole in them, he quickly hunted around for a new one and tried to make Swan the sole focus of his attack.
His performance goes to the sense that Turnbull is not so much a conviction politician but a sophist and a dilettante for whom politics is merely the latest string to his bow in a life which has ranged from merchant banking and journalism to republican campaigner to arts enthusiast.
Being a renaissance man might make you an interesting dinner party guest but it probably won’t make you prime minister; as things stand Rudd’s grip has tightened on that prize.
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