You know things are going seriously awry when the party of the workers starts blaming the workers.
But that’s exactly what’s happening within the ALP over the insulation rollout debacle.
Ignoring proceedings in the Labor State of NSW where bosses can be tried for industrial manslaughter, federal Labor is saying that the minister responsible for the rollout should be exonerated from blame in the deaths of four insulation installers.
Peter Garrett wasn’t in the roof cavity, so he can’t be held responsible, so he can’t be held responsible, they say. The Environment Minister says the installers are at fault
Tell that to John Howard who was held by the ALP for being responsible for everything from throwing babies overboard to handing over cash in a brown paper bag to Saddam Hussain.
This massive mixed message from Labor underscores a number of schizophrenic problems with the Rudd government’s narrative, which as they become more apparent are starting to bite Labor in the polls.
Kevin Rudd promised to cut the cost of household goods when he was campaigning for government.
But his Fuelwatch and Grocerywatch efforts quickly collapsed and, instead of attempting to keep faith, he’s ended up arguing for a new tax which would drive up the cost of just about all the things he promised would be cheaper.
He promised to fix the country’s hospitals, but has wimped his own deadline for the fix. Instead, people are finding out that he intends to make their private health insurance more expensive.
It’s nothing new for Rudd.
Rudd entered the parliament claming that all ALP policy should be bound together by a “red thread”. Those were the days when he claimed he was a Christian Socialist.
In the lead-up to the 2007 campaign, he morphed into an economic conservative, but regressed after the global financial crisis, preferring to claim neo-liberalism had brought the world to the brink. We needed more regulation to counter the markets which had gone mad, he wrote.
But by January, he had slid back into his rationalist suit, recasting himself as a conservative. A year after urging a higher regulatory burden, he announced plans to cut regulation to help create Australia as a global financial centre, a hub for the markets in our time zone.
In his first major speech of the year, he decried widening budget deficits and told people they would have to work harder so the country could avoid a looming demographic catastrophe. He’d previously attacked the former government’s efforts in this area.
But no sooner had he uttered these words when Senator Conroy was sent out to announce a quarter of a billion dollar tax cut for commercial TV networks.
Widening deficit? Demographic crisis? Rudd has seemingly jettisoned the efforts around these legitimate policy objectives in a bid to stitch up media support.
Who cares if the punter has to pay more later if you can “help” the networks in an election year.
He’s sat idly by while his deputy attacked Coalition leader Tony Abbott for having the temerity to advise his daughters not to sleep around.
He said he didn’t want to give moral advice on virginity to anyone, just a few weeks after urging everyone to stick with him while he fixed the greatest moral issue of our time.
These flip-flops and backflips are emblematic of a Government which has no policy coherence and no clear agenda. The gains it made on its fiscal response were reactionary and are now proving to be grossly miscalculated.
Its efforts on climate change have been mishandled and premature, exposing Australia to a tax which is out of step with anything else in the world.
These responses have flowed from the Prime Minister, who appears lately to be unable to manage his own agenda and is struggling to clearly articulate a vision beyond the daily media cycle.
It’s easy, within this context, to see how the so-called “Party of the workers” has been able to walk away from the workers and their families with such ease.
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