If this test were to be applied to the leadership of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, both would fall far short of greatness.

At least Rudd started well, identifying climate change as the “great moral challenge of our age” and working tirelessly to introduce an emissions trading scheme to tackle it.

Climate change was a key element of his campaign to defeat the Howard government and his commitment to an emissions trading scheme defined him in the eyes of the public.

Without raking over the still smouldering coals of the politics of the first 18 months of the Rudd government, there is little doubt that his championing of his ETS was popular and put the opposition in a quandary.

The test of his leadership came with two events: the ascension of Tony Abbott to the leadership of the Coalition and the Copenhagen climate change conference.

Abbott won the leadership through a stance of implacable opposition to Rudd’s ETS with the simple but effective mantra of “a great big new tax on everything”.

Rudd went to Copenhagen with high hopes and worked around the clock until he realised belatedly China would not sign up to any binding or substantive agreement.

While Rudd retreated to Kirribilli House for several weeks, in the face of Abbott’s intransigence he appeared to consider a double-dissolution election on the great moral challenge.

Fatally for Rudd, he dithered and ultimately decided to take the issue to a general election later in the year.

It now transpires Gillard lobbied for Rudd to ditch his scheme, obviously spooked by Abbott’s scare campaign that was gathering momentum but was hardly a game changer at that stage.

Gillard clearly was influenced by what she anticipated the scare campaign might achieve rather than what it had achieved to that point.

She jumped at shadows; Rudd accepted her advice and his credibility fell off a cliff.

With no defining policy, Rudd became increasingly desperate to recapture the momentum and grasped at the resource super-profits tax.

However flawed it was, Rudd did have a vision of some form of sovereign wealth fund that would ensure Australians continued to benefit from the resources boom after it had abated.

To his credit, Rudd held his nerve on the tax and was determined not to back down in the face of the mining sector’s advertising campaign and the unrelenting attack of the opposition on “the great big new tax on mining”.

Yet again it was Gillard who was spooked by the campaign and lobbied Rudd to back down.

Courtesy of journalist Laurie Oakes, we also know Gillard was lobbying Rudd about the growing public unease at the number of asylum-seekers heading for Australia. She tried to get him to support the idea of a regional processing centre in East Timor.

This time Rudd did not cave in, telling Gillard it would not work, that East Timor would not accept it and that it was a return to Howard’s Pacific Solution, albeit under another name. His confrontation with Gillard came just hours before she played the final card in his political demise.

While Rudd will be remembered for his chaotic and authoritarian management style, Gillard’s leadership abilities are not readily apparent. Indeed, since assuming the role of Prime Minister, she has demonstrated a craven refusal to confront any difficult issue and a reliance on the political quick fix to feed the daily media cycle.

Gillard took power amid high expectations, claiming a mandate to deal with three issues: climate change, the mining tax and asylum-seekers. Yet her handling of all three has been nothing short of disastrous.

She single-handedly destroyed her credibility on climate change with a decision to refer the issue to a citizens assembly to build consensus. In other words, she was too timid to take on this great national debate, wanting to hide behind a group of unelected volunteers shouldering that burden.

Terrified of another Abbott scare campaign, Gillard repeatedly and unequivocally ruled out a carbon tax before the election, but after the election has been driven by the Greens to commit to introducing such a tax.

As for the mining tax, the three large mining companies outsmarted Gillard in the pre-election negotiations and now she is wriggling her way out of the deal she struck with them.

But it is her idea of a regional processing centre in East Timor that has been her most embarrassing policy position to date. Early criticism of the announcement led her to deny she had suggested East Timor, but confronted with the backflip she then re-embraced it.

It is hard to think of a single issue where Gillard has stood against the tide of criticism or public opinion. The Prime Minister is the first to cut and run at any sign of negativity about a policy.

The charade over the East Timor regional processing centre will continue because Labor has no alternative policy and will have to keep the idea alive long enough to get through the next election.

In parliament, the Prime Minister is increasingly self-righteous, bristling during question time when the opposition exposes

her weaknesses and indecision.

Opposition deputy leader Julie Bishop has asked pertinent questions about how the regional processing centre would operate. The Prime Minister’s apparent lack of understanding of the significance of the issues Bishop has raised, coupled with her attempt to deflect the questions, is laughable.

Gillard knew she was floundering in dangerous waters and flicked the switch to derision.

Successful leaders must champion issues in which they believe even though initially they are often unpopular.

Herein lies Gillard’s problem.

There does not appear to be any conviction that she is not prepared to walk away from, no promise that she is not prepared to break, no commitment that she is not prepared to compromise to cling to power.

It is not evident that there is any issue on which she would be prepared to stake her leadership.

Bob Hawke championed bank deregulation and an accord with the unions to keep wages low.

Paul Keating committed to privatisation and a curbing of excessive union power, issues that were deeply unpopular with his electoral base in particular.

John Howard fought a battle to win reforms on the waterfront, which had been a running sore damaging Australian productivity, and nearly lost an election over his belief that a GST was a necessary economic reform.

In stark contrast, Gillard lacks the political courage to attempt any big reform. Her recent speeches claiming to be a reformer leading a reforming government are the hollow stuff we have come to expect of the school of juvenile spin doctors populating the ranks of Labor advisers.

For Gillard to come anywhere near meeting Galbraith’s test, she must identify anxieties within the Australian community and confront them.

If she fails to step up to that challenge, the opposition will not only define those anxieties for her but underline the weak nature of her leadership.

The Weekend Australian , November 6-7, 2010

AS the dust settles over the prime ministerial demise of Kevin Rudd and the hype surrounding Julia Gillard subsides, the questions remain: who is she and what does she stand for?

The fact that Gillard was parachuted into the job of prime minister by the largely “faceless” union backroom boys has led to the inevitable claim that she is a puppet of the union movement. Gillard recognised she needed to move quickly to counter that impression and declared at her first press conference: “I would defy anyone to analyse my parliamentary career and find that I have done anything but made up my own mind.”

Gillard’s biography would lead one to conclude that she is a committed member of the Labor Left. Her student activities included president of the Adelaide University Union, president of the Australian Union of Students in the early 1980s, and a campus convenor of the Socialist Forum at Melbourne University.

In her first parliamentary speech in 1998 she spoke of her time in the student union: “It inspired me to spend eight years as an industrial lawyer defending trade unions and working people.” And she declared: “I will remain fiercely committed to working with unions.”

Gillard was given her first real opportunity to live up to that commitment when she produced the workplace relations policy for Labor in opposition in May 2007. The original document was widely believed to have been crafted by the unions, as it was much more pro-union than John Howard’s laws were pro-employer.

The alarm bells rang within Labor’s sensible centre, whose leading parliamentarians predicted a battle with employer groups over her hardline provisions, which initially banned all individual agreements, with only collective employment agreements seemingly available.

The lack of detail in Gillard’s policy as to the proportion of employees that could force employers into negotiations with unions led to the conclusion that if only one employee among 200 requested union representation, the union automatically became a party to the workplace agreement with open access to all non-union employees, including their wage and employment records.

Such was the level of concern raised by Gillard’s policy that Rudd drafted a replacement document that significantly watered down the union influence in time for the 2007 election.

Gillard was rumoured to be humiliated at the time. Her message was clear, however, when she suggested that employers could get “injured” if they opposed her workplace reforms. Later dismissed as a joke, it had all the subtlety of Rudd’s joke to the miners that in opposing the mining tax, they should remember Labor has “a long memory”.

As education minister, Gillard initially supported unprecedented union influence, endorsing the right of unions to enter schools and recruit students as young as 14: “I think it is important we are getting information to young workers about what their rights are in the workplace . . . it is important for secondary school students to have information on the rights of workers,” she said.

However, at least since last year Gillard has sought to reposition herself more towards the Labor Right. There was an effort to distance herself from the teachers’ unions with a faux fight about the MySchool website. It was not lost on the unions that the information from the national tests used to establish that website resulted from reforms of Liberal education ministers Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop.

Gillard’s makeover from Left to Right included the embrace of a number of the Coalition’s education and industrial relations policies. Key elements of the Coalition’s education platform for the 2007 election, including a national school curriculum and greater autonomy for school principals, were part of Gillard’s education revolution.

The Coalition’s blueprint for capital funding of government and independent schools has been followed, with the fatally flawed exception that Gillard decided to put the federal funding for government schools in the hands of state governments and not school communities, which led to massive waste and rorting.

In workplace relations, Gillard retained the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, established after a royal commission instigated by Tony Abbott. The unions loathe the ABCC and Gillard trumpets this decision as proof of her independence from union influence.

Her biography on the parliamentary website does not mention the word “union” once, which may itself be a sign that she will try to govern from the centre if not from the Right.

Yet it is hard to imagine that Gillard’s skirmishes with the unions had much substance, given that the unions have now thrown their support so comprehensively behind her.

Lest there be any doubt about who made the decision to dump Rudd and install Gillard, the precocious but talented Paul Howes of the Australian Workers’ Union gave a running commentary on the evening of the coup.

To understate the case, the unions clearly believe Gillard is not hostile to their interests.

The point of all this is that the public should know what values and beliefs will underpin the new Prime Minister’s policy decisions and who or what are her greatest influences.

The still unanswered question is whether Gillard is the left-wing activist who entered parliament to fight for union interests, or has she now changed her focus to that of the broader national interest?

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has said that Gillard was committed to her left-wing values and ideals, but that she changed after the 2007 election and became a pale shadow of Rudd.

Latham has been rightly criticised for his leadership of the Labor Party, but he can and does provide invaluable insights into the inner workings of the Labor machine.

Moreover, before he became leader, when he and Gillard were close, Latham engaged in some inventive policy work, although whether these ideas, especially about the importance of nurturing communities, rub off on the new prime minister is unclear.

Gillard claimed that she needed to replace Rudd because the government had lost its way and therefore it was in the national interest that she did so. When pressed for an area of policy differentiation, she identified population policy as a key difference, insisting that any population growth had to be “sustainable”.

Her case rested on the false premise that Rudd had unquestioningly endorsed a much larger population of at least 36 million people by 2050. While Rudd did give one interview supporting a “big Australia”, the opposition used it to verbal Rudd, claiming he supported an unrestricted population growth.

To counter this claim, Rudd appointed Tony Burke as minister for population.

His role was to develop a comprehensive population strategy that took into account challenges and opportunities, including the social and economic infrastructure and the roads, housing and service delivery network needed, the impact on regional towns and communities and the impact on the environment, water, and urban congestion.

In other words, Rudd’s policy was based on sustainability.

Prime Minister Gillard, in adopting the opposition’s misrepresentation of Rudd, merely changed Burke’s title to Minister for Sustainable Population, clearly already part of his brief. In fact, there was and is no policy schism with Rudd.

It seems likely that Gillard will call an election for sometime in August. The Australian public thus has only a matter of weeks to find out whether she is a true believer from the Labor heartland, a true centrist, or just another politician practised in the art of spin and ultimately beholden to the unions who put her there.

The Weekend Australian, July 03, 2010

It is generally recognised that a key responsibility for any national leader is to safeguard the country’s reputation abroad.

For an Australian prime minister this is not only vital for our trade and export relations, but also for our standing as an attractive destination for international capital markets.

Kevin Rudd seemed to recognise this imperative during a visit to Beijing in April 2008 when he observed: “Australia is an open market when it comes to foreign investment. And if you look at Australia, we have had a history of relying upon internationally sourced capital to fund the country’s long-term development. In the great state of Western Australia, it’s like that.

“I mean, you have a relatively small population, a huge land mass and therefore foreign investment has been necessary.”

This sentiment stands in stark contrast to his recent extraordinary attack on several large mining companies as foreign-owned, which he claimed were sending “massively increased profits” overseas denying the Australian people their “fair share”.

Acting in concert with the Prime Minister’s xenophobic stance against foreign companies, the Australian Workers’ Union has launched a disturbing media campaign in support of the government’s deceptively named resource super-profits tax. A couple of foreign-born executives of big mining companies have been pictured, named, singled out as rich mining executives and accused of not giving anything back to this country.

Exactly what message are Rudd, Labor and the union movement sending to international investors?

Dragging Australia’s international reputation through the mud for domestic political point-scoring cannot be excused. It has serious long-term implications not only for the mining sector but also for the broader Australian economy.

There was no hint of Rudd’s antipathy to foreign investors and the mining sector before the 2007 federal election. Then he was the champion of foreign investment, claiming it had fuelled the mining boom: “We have enjoyed great prosperity and have benefited from a time of unparalleled world economic growth. And to cap this off, we have prospered from the rise of China, the rise of India and the global resources boom. The benefits of this are washing through the economy, creating jobs, generating new businesses and boosting government revenues to an all-time high.”

Little wonder there is deep confusion within the global capital markets over the open hostility now shown by Rudd and Labor to foreign investment.

Australia has been regarded as a low sovereign risk with a stable and predictable regulatory regime, but there is now the very real prospect of a downgrade in Australia’s sovereign risk rating.

The retrospective nature of the new tax means projects developed under the existing royalties and company tax regime now face being hit with an unexpected 40 per cent tax, bringing into question the long-term viability of the cost structures underpinning them.

Any increase in sovereign risk can add significant cost to the high-risk business of resource exploration and extraction.

International ratings agency Moody’s has warned in recent days that the tax could drive mining companies offshore, as it could reduce earnings by nearly one-third.

Moody’s referred to the recent experience in Zambia, where the government removed a similar tax in 2008 due to a large reduction in exploration activity that threatened the nation’s long-term prosperity.

The uncertainty is not confined to the mining sector.

After all, if Rudd is prepared to launch an assault on one set of international investors what is to stop him directing his venom at other sectors?

The mining industry rightly has been alarmed by the unexpected severity of the proposed tax in terms of its retrospective application to existing projects.

In the words of BHP-Billiton chairman Jac Nasser in a letter to its 500,000 shareholders this week, it “fundamentally, abruptly and unfairly changed the rules of the game”.

Another legitimate concern is the government’s failure to engage in any prior consultation with the industry.

Industry elders well remember that the Hawke Labor government undertook two years of consultation before it implemented its petroleum resource rent tax in the 1980s.

That new tax applied only to new developments at a much higher threshold and existing developments were exempt.

The Rudd government’s mining tax will not only apply to existing developments but there is also uncertainty as to whether assets such as in the Northwest Shelf, which were exempt from the Hawke government’s tax, could come within its scope.

Lack of consultation and personal attacks on opponents of its policies has become the hallmark of the Rudd government.

The new tax has disturbing parallels with the government’s drive to introduce an emissions trading scheme, also with the Orwellian title of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Rudd famously declared climate change to be the greatest moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age. Those who dared question any aspect of the CPRS were derided as climate change deniers and were told repeatedly to get out of the way, for the “cost of inaction was greater than the cost of action”.

Rudd savagely suppressed debate or any legitimate scrutiny of the effect and operation of the CPRS in an attempt to bully into submission those who dared to question him.

He used emotional blackmail by claiming opponents of his legislation were putting at risk the Great Barrier Reef, which would be destroyed if immediate action were not taken on climate change.

In November last year he declared that any failure to pass the legislation to enact the CPRS represented “absolute political cowardice” and “absolute failure of leadership”.

It is impossible to reconcile his conduct and statements about climate change with his decision to delay indefinitely the introduction of the CPRS.

Similarly, those opposed to the mining tax are also pilloried as siding with the greedy mining companies, while Saint Kevin stands shoulder to shoulder with the working families whom, in reality, he abandoned on November 25, 2007.

There should be a lengthy and serious debate about the resource super-profits tax.

Questions are being asked about the legality of a brand new tax that is taking the federal government into uncharted waters in relation to the taxation treatment of onshore resources.

Under the Australian Constitution, mineral resources are owned by the Crown and state governments are entitled to charge mining companies a royalty in return for access to those minerals.

Mining companies operate under state agreements ratified by acts of parliament that detail the royalty regime.

The proposed RSPT appears to undermine the security provided by these agreements, cutting directly across these ratified acts of parliament, and High Court challenges appear more likely than not.

The key to understanding Rudd’s behaviour over this mining tax is to consider the bonanza in revenues the CPRS would have delivered to his government. Embittered by his failure to achieve its passage and faced with a resurgent opposition led by Tony Abbott, Rudd has seen his political salvation in the mining tax.

Rudd’s desperation for revenues to plug the holes in his budget is revealed by his willingness to damage international perceptions of sovereign risk associated with investing in this nation.

It is one of the most damaging acts of short-term populism in our nation’s history and not befitting the holder of the office of prime minister.

With no one in Labor’s ranks of the stature of former Hawke ministers Peter Walsh, Paul Keating or John Button, it would appear the only way to restore certainty for our key resource developments is a change of government.

ROSS FITZGERALD, The Weekend Australian, May 22-23, 2010

The PM is keenly aware of how long a memory can last when you’ve been forced to wait for five hours in casualty with a sprained ankle, or how deeply personal the political becomes when you’re forced to endure the grinding pain of a worn-out hip for 12 months before you can get a replacement.

If he hasn’t fiscally hammered the states into an agreement, Rudd may well get his majority of voters in a majority of states, if forced to a referendum. Health issues are deeply personal ones and a lot of people are very upset.

Although it may be hard for Rudd to win a referendum with the opposition advocating a “no” vote, this one could be different. The 1967 referendum, on whether discriminatory references to Aborigines in the Australian Constitution should be removed, was overwhelmingly supported for a number of reasons. One of these was that, at the time, discrimination against Aborigines offended the deeply held views of many Australians. This was unlike, for example, the question of whether we want Australia to be a republic, or whether we have a queen or a president, which for most people is still about politics and is not all that deeply felt.

The states still retain some deeply divisive and outdated attitudes that are at least partly responsible for the present crisis in health care. These attitudes also help form the basis of their enforceable moral codes that differ markedly from state to state.

The fact is that each state still retains a sense of public morality that is different from the other states, and also often different from the commonwealth. How a state-based morality can somehow be different from an Australian morality is beyond most people’s reasoning, especially those who have come to this country in recent years.

To say that people living in the Commonwealth of Australia can embody quite different sets of moral values is, on one level, nonsense. In fact, when migrants come to this country and want to become Australian citizens, they are asked to put away the moral and political values of their home countries and adopt ours.

Yet when they move from state to state, say from Victoria to Queensland or South Australia, they are faced with different moral values enshrined in legislation.

State and commonwealth laws undermine each other on a range of moral and ethical issues.

Laws relating to pornography, prostitution, public nudity, obscenity and abortion, for example, are the canaries in the coalmine when it comes to state v commonwealth legislation and that of other states.

Thus our art galleries are subject to classification and obscenity laws, which are disparate and contradictory from state to state. When well-known Western Australian artist Jeremy Holton entered a clothed portrait of his wife, entitled The Sweetest Smile, in a local art exhibition in Perth a few weeks ago, he was shocked to be told that the piece was “pornographic” and had been removed. The local gallery owner claimed she was upholding moral standards. In a state well known for its tolerance of illegal brothels over the past 100 years, it seems that public art exhibitions are a different matter in the west.

A few years ago internationally recognised photographer Karron Bridges had her depiction of ghostly themes in brothels censored and withdrawn from Kalgoorlie’s Goldfields Art Centre. The work had already been exhibited at the Sydney Opera House without incident but, surrounded by actual brothels in Kalgoorlie, it was suddenly unacceptable to the “reasonable adult” in Western Australia.

In Victoria if you want to run an ad for a legal brothel it has to be a specific size and cannot include an ad for sex workers or even ancillary staff. It can only contain head and shoulders images of people. No problem advertising cars and soft drinks with semi-naked bodies in Victoria, though.

In Victoria and NSW, brothel owners have to inform the authorities if they go overseas and how much money they are taking. Remarkably, in Queensland, brothel owners must report to the authorities if they “alter their appearance”, for example grow a beard or shave one off!

In South Australia, Tasmania and WA, prostitution is banned altogether.

Under commonwealth law it’s legal to bring an X-rated film into Australia and to possess it in any state. They are also legal to sell in the ACT and the Northern Territory, but in most states you can go to jail for selling them.

In Queensland it’s illegal to sell a category-one magazine that is available from a newsagent in all other states and territories. Yet under the commonwealth intervention it is illegal to even possess one of these magazines in parts of the Territory. These magazines were said by John Howard to “fuel sexual assaults”, but this law only seems to apply only if you’re black and living in an Aboriginal community!

In all states it is legal to sell category-two restricted magazines from adult shops, except in WA and Tasmania, where minors can sell them from newsagents, as long as they covered by a curtain. This strange law acts like a metaphor for the “old times” when lace-curtain coverings were used to stop prying eyes. It’s certainly not relevant in this techno age.

R-rated films are legal to sell and display anywhere except in SA, which is more old-fashioned than the other states in this regard and where the frilly curtain rule has to be applied.

State laws on burlesque and tabletop dancing are so different and bizarre it’s as though aliens created them.

In NSW you used to have to order food to watch erotic dancers but now there is “a defined space” rule where there must always be a certain distance between the dancer and the audience. However an audience member may touch a dancers’ thigh, but only to place a tip in her garter. The dancer cannot touch an audience member.

In Queensland a dancer can touch the audience but can only be touched above her waist. Yet in Victoria any non-violent touching is allowed by an audience member or dancer.

In a similar confused way, abortion is illegal in Queensland and NSW without a doctor’s consent, yet is legal and semi-legal in other jurisdictions.

But the real benchmark for state lunacy surely concerns the age of consent. You would think that with so much emphasis in the media these days concerning so-called “pornography” and the “sexualisation” of children, the states would simply create one age of consent that involved all consenting sexual activity. This would make understanding the law easier and to make enforcement more efficient. Not even a recommendation from the state and commonwealth attorneys-general in 1999 that the states all adopt a common age of consent has been implemented.

Just as there was a need to standardise our rail gauges throughout the country, surely the time has well and truly come to standardise our nation’s moral laws and to give co-operative federalism a new and proper meaning.

The biggest influence is in NSW. When Catholic World Youth Day descended on that state in July last year, many taxpayers resented being forced to pay $20 million in security charges for the event and $40m for the use of Randwick racecourse. The reason that atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Anglicans and even a few Catholics were being forced to go along with this was essentially because then premier Morris Iemma and many of his fellow committed Catholics in the NSW ALP Right were born into that religion. They didn’t want a confrontation with Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell over a cheaper location.

The idea that NSW taxpayers could be forced to fund a Scientology convention or a Rastafarian smoke-in would be laughable. But they’re both bona fide religions in their own right and meet roughly the same criteria as Christianity and Islam for all the lurks and perks.

Why was there little organised opposition, then, to this unpopular rort? The main reason was that there was no significant dissent from within the parliament.

On the opposition side, a man who reputedly is influential in the NSW Liberal preselection processes, upper house MP David Clarke, is very strong in some of his Catholic views. Two other devout Christians, Fred Nile and Gordon Moyes, happened to sit on the all-important cross-benches in the upper house, with the result that the propriety of handing $60m in NSW taxpayers’ money to support an already wealthy religion could have been better examined.

More recently, Clarke and Nile were guest speakers at last month’s Australia’s Future and Global Jihad conference in Sydney, alongside Danny Nalliah from the Catch the Fire Ministries. Other attendees were Peter and Jenny Stokes from the fundamentalist Christian morals group Salt Shakers Inc and Emmanuel Michael from the Assyrian Federation of Australia. Why would one of the Liberal Party’s top policy-makers be at such a conference, which was backing the notion that our Christian heritage was under attack from evil forces? And what about Kevin Rudd’s attendance at the Australian Christian Lobby’s annual general meeting last month?

The secular Nathan Rees’s elevation to the premiership in NSW afforded a glimmer of hope that the state’s politics would not be dominated by conservative Christian ethics.

But those hopes were dashed by the recent ascendancy of another devout Catholic to the top job in NSW. Sporting a strange mix of American accent and fashion chic, Kristina Keneally boasts a BA in political science and religion and a masters degree in feminist theology from Ohio. She met her Young Labor husband at Catholic World Youth Day in Poland in 1991, which says much about her leanings.

The election of Christian hard-liners to positions of power and influence in NSW doesn’t stop at Macquarie Street. NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione is a devout Baptist who worships at the influential Hillsong Church. He is responsible for the first official police Bible, bound in police blue with an official NSW Police crest on the cover. On Scipione’s watch, all new NSW police graduates from the Goulburn Academy are routinely offered one of these special Bibles.

While Scipione is doing good work in trying to curtail alcohol-based violence, he has made no secret of the fact he brings his Christian faith into his policing work. Out at Hillsong that means treating homosexuality as a disease to be cured rather than an identity to be lived. But is it a fair whack that taxpayers are funding police Bibles? Will they also produce a Koran with a NSW Police logo for Muslim officers? With 38 per cent of our federal politicians being members of the devout Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, and a half-dozen well-known journalists in the press gallery claiming Jesus as their saviour, the non-believers, infidels, atheists, secularists and our many slightly spiritual but anti-organised religion citizens need to be delivered from this anti-intellectualism.

The final word on the Christianisation of Australian politics surely comes from the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, former SAS officer Jim Wallace. Unlike some stakeholders, Wallace has publicly claimed to have had regular contact with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy – Catholic – as Conroy developed his unpopular model for filtering our internet.

Last month Wallace sent out a media release urging other parties to preference the Australian Sex Party last in the Bradfield and Higgins by-elections, as they had done with One Nation.

The Sex Party came third in Bradfield and a close fourth in Higgins.

Wallace needs to take a cold shower. That there is now an Australian political party prepared to challenge the pious claptrap that dominates most of the other parties is refreshing.

The Newspoll survey published last month showed that 32 per cent of NSW voters thought there was too much religion in politics.

With the orchestrated rise of Keneally and Tony Abbott, that figure may have risen.

Too often much of Australia’s daily media coverage is Canberra-centric and political mood changes in states such as Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania are not likely to be detected in Canberra until a Newspoll or election result has highlighted them.

The reality is the new federal Opposition Leader’s direct, knockabout, open style will be well received in these states.

He will be aided in WA by his deputy Julie Bishop and a popular Liberal Premier, Colin Barnett, and in Queensland by an unpopular Labor Premier, Anna Bligh, who is facing a revolt within her own party.

Abbott clearly understands this, which is why one of his earliest regional visits took him to Queensland.

Queenslanders like their leaders to be strong, open characters who directly engage the electorate. The many electoral successes of strong personalities such as premiers Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Peter Beattie should be a key indicator to the Liberal campaign team of Abbott’s potential vote-winning power.

Beattie and Bjelke-Petersen were the most successful campaigners their parties fielded. Both produced landslide victories never seen before by their parties and unlikely to be seen again for some time.

Both are loved or hated depending on political bent.

This is the Abbott style. He will be at home in Queensland.

The battle on the election hustings in Queensland and WA between Kevin Rudd and Abbott will be the highlight of next year’s campaign. Queensland also offers Abbott an unexpected opportunity in Rudd’s home state on the issue of economic management. Economic credentials are always a key electoral issue.

In Queensland, the economic track record of the Bligh government is in tatters and will worsen as the federal poll approaches and the government’s privatisation plans are rolled out.

This will be used by Abbott to undermine the Labor brand and it will strike a strong chord in Queensland.

Under Bligh, Queensland has lost its AAA credit rating and the state budget will not be in surplus until 2015-16.

Both these things were unheard of in the Bjelke-Petersen or Beattie years.

Queenslanders are used to seeing their state as Australia’s economic leader and, with WA, the engine room of the nation. They don’t like Bligh using asset sales to fix the budget bottom line.

Queenslanders also believe the float of Queensland Railways is bad policy and not in the state’s interests. It will soon become apparent that the sale is being handled poorly. Based on history, the float will attract at least a 20 per cent reduction in value for QR compared with a trade sale.

The key question will be: if the state government is so determined to go through with this unpopular decision to sell the assets, why wouldn’t it seek to get the greatest financial returns?

With the state in financial difficulty for the first time anyone can remember, the float is the wrong option. The Bligh government will win no favours by going ahead with it.

Some shares bought by Queenslanders will soon be sold and Queenslanders believe they are being offered an opportunity to buy shares in an entity they already own anyway.

But that is not the only problem that Abbott will be able to exploit .

Eventually the trade unions opposed to the sale will ask why the government is selling both the coal freight business and the rail track now that the Australian economy is improving.

If only the coal freight business were sold and the track kept in public hands, there would be more competition in rail and hence more economic growth in Queensland.

As the global financial crisis recedes it will become harder for the Bligh government to argue it is selling QR only because of the world’s poor economic conditions.

There is also a big problem in packaging the track and the coal freight business in the one float. In effect, this is selling a monopoly. This must impair Queensland’s long-term regional development and in particular the mining and resources industry.

It is to be hoped the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will intervene and not allow this uncompetitive structure.

The big winners from the assets sales will be the bankers, who will do very well from their fees for the transaction.

The Queensland government is handling the sale ineptly and no one should underestimate Abbott’s willingness to take the gloves off to Bligh and her team and do some long-term damage to the Prime Minister and federal Labor’s economic credentials at the same time.

Rudd strongly supported Bligh to become the ALP national president for the 2010 federal election year, a decision he may live to regret. It will be very difficult to hide the unpopular Queensland Premier in this key battle state.

To make matters worse, the unions are agitating for a special ALP conference early in the new year to overturn the assets sale decision and there is speculation that there may be a leadership challenge to Bligh from parliamentary Speaker John Mickel.

The question for Rudd is whether he abandons his close friend Bligh and her unpopular government or tries to defend her performance and in consequence takes the political hit that will surely come with it.

Rudd saw the Goss government, in which he was a key player, lose office in Queensland so he knows how strongly Queensland can swing.

Bligh’s government is closer in style and decision making to the government of Wayne Goss than to that of Beattie.

So the warning signs are not good for Rudd in Queensland.

This is a fight Abbott will enjoy.

The Weekend Australian December 19-20, 2009

Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported that the day before his retirement announcement, Bligh’s office had denied Kaiser had quit.

Kaiser’s retirement and its timing sent a message that the Queensland Labor government and the Premier are in so much political trouble they have difficulty managing the exit of one of their own trusted people. His exit invites comparison with the departure of John Howard’s chief of staff and close confidant Arthur Sinodinos in 2006. Some observers rightly noted that Howard’s administration never recovered its equilibrium.

If Kaiser’s departure has the same effect on Bligh, it will have national implications. As the ALP federal president for Kevin Rudd’s next election year, Bligh will be nothing but a liability for the election campaign. After her March 21 election victory, she was elected as one of the ALP’s rotational national presidents with strong backing from Rudd.

There is no doubt Kaiser’s exit is a blow to Bligh’s premiership. He was her right-hand man and key strategist. While he had political baggage going back to his involvement in the ALP’s electoral rorting problems and subsequent Criminal Justice Commission inquiry in 2000, he was well respected for his tactical skills, which included masterminding NSW Labor under Morris Iemma and helping win the previous unwinnable election. Kaiser will be paid $450,000 a year in his new job.

There is no one left around the Queensland Premier with the political nous and talent akin to Kaiser’s. Bligh’s inner team of advisers is Deputy Premier Paul Lucas, Treasurer Andrew Fraser and director-general of the Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Ken Smith. None have the tactical skills of Kaiser.

Lucas is struggling to hold together Queensland’s ailing health system as Health Minister, the 33-year-old Fraser is fighting to regain Queensland’s lost AAA credit rating and Smith has his hands full dealing with the mess resulting from the failed downsizing of public

service departments.

There is fury in the Bligh government at Garrett’s decision to scrap the Traveston dam. Media reports in the Smart State last weekend included backgrounding attacks from government officials on Garrett for approving the Gunn’s pulp mill in Tasmania , new uranium mining in South Australia and the Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Western Australia but knocking back a much-needed dam in Queensland .

Garrett was criticised for playing politics and for primarily wanting to re-establish his green credentials. He reportedly gave Bligh only 10 minutes’ warning of his decision before his media announcement. Hardly the basis for a close working relationship.

This anger is not healthy for Labor going into a federal election year and the real loser could be Rudd in his home state.

The other problem for Labor coming into an election is whether Bligh can survive as Premier. The prevailing wisdom among commentators is that while she is in serious trouble there is no alternative leader and hence she is safe.

This view ignores two factors. First, an increasingly desperate caucus will start to weigh up all the alternatives and second, the political skills of Speaker and former Peter Beattie government minister John Mickel.

Most senior ministers in the Beattie government knew that as premier Beattie was determined to have a woman succeed him as part of his obsession of turning Queensland into the Smart State.

He was so determined to have Bligh take over from him as premier that other ministers had to watch as she was openly groomed for succession and given the pick of the best ministries. This meant talented former Beattie ministers such as Mickel (transport and industrial relations), Rod Welford (education and now out of parliament) and Judy Spence (police) had no chance for the top job and were passed over.

Spence’s political skills were obvious in the past couple of weeks when she was interviewed on the ABC’s Four Corners program about pedophile Dennis Ferguson.

As Beattie’s decision to support Bligh is being criticised for the first time in some senior sections of the ALP, an increasingly desperate caucus may turn to one of Beattie’s best performing ministers in Mickel and ask him to give up the lofty heights of the Speaker’s role and return to the political battle to save the party from electoral defeat in Queensland.

A leadership team of Mickel and Spence would have experience and appeal.

There is nothing to stop a speaker from winning a caucus battle for leadership and then resigning from the post to become premier. Beattie wanted to create history by having a woman succeed him. History could be created again in Queensland if a speaker

becomes premier.

Rudd and Mickel worked for former Labor premier Wayne Goss in the 1990s and know and like one another. Rudd has a close working relationship with Bligh but would not be fearful of a move in Queensland Labor to Mickel.

One thing is clear, with a federal election due next year, unless the Premier’s political fortunes improve quickly, the ALP and state caucus will not be able to ignore the political realities much longer.

Bligh and her state Labor colleagues won’t be able to do what Beattie did last week. When asked about the present sorry state of Queensland Labor, the state’s Los Angeles trade representative and self-proclaimed former media tart simply responded with an email that said: ” I have retired from politics and therefore my views are irrelevant to contemporary politics other than on matters of trade. I don’t believe it is in the best interests of Queensland for me to comment on the decision of the Rudd government.”

It was another first for Queensland.

Ross Fitzgerald, Inquirer p7. The Weekend Australian 21-22 November 2009

It seems that the only people who don’t like him are those who actually know him: journalists like Annabel Crabb, for example, who has just called him a ‘faux-moralist fraud’ and colleagues like Mark Latham (no slouch at nastiness himself) who once called him a ‘real piece of work’. For everyone who’s never had to deal with the Prime Minister, though, it seems that he’s the slightly nerdy, deeply Christian magician who’s saved Australia from the global financial crisis by sending large cheques to more than half of the population.

St Kevin’s public persona is not just a function of his regular Sunday press conferences outside church. It’s a credit to his personal discipline while in the public spotlight, the ineptitude of his opponents in holding him to account, and the extraordinary power of the Labor Party’s spin machine in dictating the media agenda. The saintly image is not real, and it can’t last.

But more of the Rudd reality seems to be seeping under the door. Three recent developments have drawn attention to the contradictions in the Prime Ministerial character.

In media circles, it’s well known that Rudd spent years cultivating Chris Mitchell, now editor-in-chief of The Australian, when they were both in Queensland. In fact from 1996 to 1998, when he was not in politics, Rudd attended Tuesday conferences at the Courier- Mail when Mitchell was the editor of the Queensland daily. So close was the relationship that Rudd was later made godfather of one of Mitchell’s sons, Riley, although how much communication there has been between them in recent years is unclear. However, as recently as September last year, Mitchell was still sufficiently in favour to be a prized Rudd invitee at Kirribilli House,

Since then, however, The Australian’s scepticism about the high costs of the stimulus package, hostility to the government’s workplace relations changes, openness to argument against policies to counter climate change and, perhaps most of all, derision towards pseudo-academic Prime Ministerial essays, seem to have brought out the PM’s thin-skin. Two weeks ago, asked at a community cabinet meeting a question he didn’t like based on a report in The Australian, Rudd accused it of being an un-objective ‘right-wing’ newspaper.

Moreover last week in a speech in the Mural Hall at Parliament House in Canberra to launch Professor Ross Garnaut’s book about the global financial crisis, Rudd deliberately took a swipe at Mitchell and The Australian. That this was not just an off-the-cuff remark but a real dig at Mitchell is demonstrated by the fact that it was included in the distributed text of Rudd’s speech.

Recounting the time he and Garnaut spent in the Embassy in Beijing when Garnaut was ambassador to China, and Rudd was first secretary ‘tasked with the critical responsibility of doing the embassy photocopying’, the PM concluded by talking about exhibiting great enthusiasm for the game of cricket in which he rarely troubled the scorers. Rudd’s speech stated, ‘The Peking Cricket Club wasn’t exactly like the Gabba – instead of bowling from the Stanley Street end or the Vulture Street end, we’d be bowling from either the Temple of Heaven end, or the Long Live Marxism Leninism Mao Zedong Thought end.’

Rudd’s distributed speech concluded: “My preference was the latter – but I say that by way of self-disclosure in case a journalist from The Australian happens upon it in a further expose of my Chinese communist connections.”

Even though I cannot remember The Australian actually canvassing Rudd’s ‘Chinese communist connections’, why would the PM engage in such a consistent and petty attack on Chris Mitchell? My guess is that, on one hand, Rudd sees is as some sort of boys’ own battle between himself and his erstwhile friend. But more importantly his attack on Mitchell and The Australian is to send a warning shot to other newspaper editors and media figures who might have the temerity to meaningfully criticise Kevin Rudd and his ultra- controlled and ultra-controlling government.

As the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann has just reminded us, in the 2006 essay crafted to position himself as a ‘better version of John Howard’, Rudd called asylum-seekers one of the great moral challenges of our time. What’s more, according to Rudd last week, by highlighting the resurgence of unauthorised boat arrivals, Malcolm Turnbull was playing to the ‘dark side’ of Australian politics. Yet this is the same person who has recently described people smugglers as ‘vile’, ‘vermin’ and the lowest form of ‘scum’. The sanctimonious critic of John Howard’s ‘Pacific solution’ is now trying to cobble together an  ‘Indonesian solution’ of his own.

In fact, as John Howard found, there is no easy way to stop desperate people risking their lives to get to Australia in leaky boats. The former federal government only stopped them by turning boats around, housing unauthorised arrivals on Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and introducing temporary protection visas that meant even refugees had no guarantee of permanent residency. Above all, there were no mixed messages from the then prime minister and his senior colleagues.

When Rudd’s immigration minister hailed policy changes made last year as heralding a more ‘humane’ approach, many high-minded Australians would have welcomed the end of an ignoble chapter in Australia’s history. Unfortunately, being more humane to boat people means that more of them are tempted to come. Rudd’s problem, as always, is his desire to be all things to everyone: wanting to be ruthless against the people smugglers, whom Australian voters despise, but compassionate towards their customers, whom people tend to pity. Perhaps Rudd has managed to embody the confusion of the Australian public. In just about any other politician, though, this kind of logic, akin to crucifying brothel-keepers but canonising their customers, would be attacked as a form of intellectual dishonesty.

One of the best tests of a politician’s character is the ability to retain staff. Advisers, researchers and, above all, personal assistants and diary secretaries see their bosses at very close quarters and quickly become familiar with how they deal with triumph and disaster. If victories are taken for granted while reverses are always someone else’s fault, if a politician is all smiles while people are watching but quite different without an audience, staff soon conclude that their boss is not the real deal. Good people don’t normally dump on their employer. They just leave.

News Ltd publications have recently reported that in just over 18 months, the Prime Minister has lost 23 of an original 39 staff. This rate of turnover is more typical of demoralised institutions under great pressure like Queensland public hospitals than a senior politician’s office. One former staffer described the prime minister as ‘manic’. Another said that he ‘gives little in the way of constructive feedback and doesn’t listen to anybody’.

The public’s greater interest in whether Rudd is a good Prime Minister than a good bloke explains his ‘better PM’ ratings, but not his personal approval ones. Perhaps voters take for granted a prime minister’s personal vendettas, double standards and self-absorption. It may be only when borrowed money can no longer be handed out to favoured constituencies, when there’s official evidence of waste and mismanagement, when the pace of announcements far outstrips the pace of beneficial change and when the promises to fix problems like public hospitals go unfulfilled, that people start to resent their leaders.

Still, when governments have to ask for understanding and perhaps even forgiveness, voters’ assessment of their leaders’ personal qualities then becomes crucial. The great Australian public may tolerate leaders who are unlikeable, but not those who are incompetent and who cannot listen in order to lead.

Ross Fitzgerald, SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA, October 30, 2009