There is one final striking thing about the Rudd media tour, he is the only one doing it because at the end of the day, he is the only in the government who knows how it is done.

Another Howard bubble finally bursts

Monday, 26 October 2009   Tactics   5 comments 

Rudd was calling the bluff that Turnbull and the Liberals had been playing, namely that Howard had a real policy that they could return to rather than a political game whose time had passed.

A losing game for Labor

Tuesday, 20 October 2009   Tactics   5 comments 

What’s worse, earning a trade out of human misery or making politics out of it?

A pathetic attempt to look in control

Thursday, 15 October 2009   Tactics   3 comments 

Chris Uhlmann castigated Rudd for not using his political capital to take a less populist line on asylum seekers, but in reality there is no political capital.

At no time has the party ever had its leadership calculations so openly determined by their complete loss of confidence in their ability to recover government in the foreseeable future.

The irony is that Abbott is doing what Turnbull did in reverse, but with the same negative consequences.

Now when Turnbull, the only one in the Liberal Party who seems to have actually wanted to lead it over the last few years, is gone, the vacuum is likely to come back with a vengeance.

Climate change has become the issue that is carrying the Coalition parties downstream not just away from the electorate, but even from their own base.

Rights and wrongs

Tuesday, 1 September 2009   The Australian state   10 comments 

While the right and left have argued over the nature of the punishment, what we have seen with the intervention is a denial of a basic right in front of the law to be judged whether to receive the punishment in the first place.

Nelson’s lesson for Turnbull

Thursday, 27 August 2009   Political figures   7 comments 

Nelson’s problem was not so much Rudd, but that his party would not let him follow the route Rudd has taken to adapt to current conditions.

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