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Mungo MacCallum - Quarterly Essay 36 Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country

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Quarterly Essay 36 Australian Story: Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country
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Mungo MacCallum
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2009
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Quarterly Essay

Quarterly Essay is published four times a year by
Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd.
Publisher: Morry Schwartz.

ISBN 978-1-86395-457-0 ISSN 1832-0953

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CONTENTS

AUSTRALIAN STORY
Kevin Rudd and the Lucky Country

Mungo MacCallum

IS NEO-LIBERALISM FINISHED?
2009 Quarterly Essay Lecture

Robert Manne

Christine Nicholls, Chris Sarra, Tony Abbott, Peter Shergold, Peter Sutton,
Fred Chaney, Jane Caro, Andrew Leigh, Noel Pearson

Contributors

AUSTRALIAN
STORY

Kevin Rudd and the
Lucky Country

Mungo MacCallum

This is the nightmare.

You are naked and lost and in desperate need of help. Around you the countryside is familiar, but all the usual landmarks have vanished, along with the roads and tracks. Signposts have been obliterated. You look in vain for a way out, and realise that there is nowhere safe to go. Storms are approaching from all sides, the ground is heaving as if in an earthquake and the horizon rears up as a tsunami gathers.

All seems lost, and then you feel a reassuring tap on the shoulder. You turn to see a funny little man, who says: Hello. My name is Kevin, Im from Queensland and Im here to help. With a scream of despair you wake, and then you go on screaming because it was all true. It is 16 September 2008: Lehman Brothers has collapsed, signalling the end of the world as we knew it. Just as socialism was seen to have failed with the unravelling of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, the basis of the capitalist system must now be called into question. The global financial markets can no longer be trusted, and all ahead is gloom, doom and above all uncertainty.

It is a situation that calls for superlative leadership: the iron resolve of John Curtin, the imperturbable authority of Robert Menzies, the towering intellect of Gough Whitlam, the comforting charisma of Bob Hawke, the flair and daring of Paul Keating, the dogged reliability of John Howard. Instead we are stuck with an untried, God-bothering shiny-bum whose idea of a crisis is a joke that fell flat on commercial television.

But here is the tag line: not only do we accept him, we welcome him with adulation. Suddenly the nerd from Nambour is our trusted saviour. It is, to put it mildly, an unlikely apotheosis, but then Kevin Michael Rudd is in many ways an unlikely politician. While he spent a long time working for a Labor premier, Queenslands Wayne Goss, he was never a Labor apparatchik; he did not fight his way up through the ranks in the manner of a Paul Keating or a Mark Latham. He lacks their visceral hatred for their political opponents, but equally he often appears to lack their unquestioning commitment to the Labor cause. On the surface, at least, Rudd might appear comfortable sitting on the conservative benches in parliament; he has much in common with Liberal moderates, such as Petro Georgiou and Judi Moylan, and of course he had a personal friendship with Joe Hockey, now himself a potential aspirant to the Lodge although that may have lapsed in the recent heat of battle.

Unusually, he is open about his Christian beliefs, which has led Janet Albrechtsen, in an outburst of bile notable even for the Murdoch presss resident dominatrix, to snarl: Our man in the Lodge is so full of hubris that he uses his religious beliefs for some particularly base political purposes. But he is generally less forthcoming about his political convictions, so much so that one critic, Greg Melleuish, has described him as Australias first postmodern prime minister. By this Melleuish did not mean that Rudd was a student of semiotics, but that he lacked any firmly held principles or beliefs.

It is a charge which others on the Right have made before: they concede, reluctantly, that Rudd is a brilliant political operator, but then jump to the conclusion that he is all spin and no substance. This judgment is based almost entirely on a single fact: Rudd, before the 2007 election, declared himself to be an economic conservative. But in dealing with the global financial meltdown he has proved to be a born-again Keynesian, willing to embrace both deficit and debt as the price of economic stimulus.

This is seen as a contradiction, but is it really? Rudd never claimed to be an economic neo-liberal, dedicated to a balanced budget at all times, irrespective of the circumstances. What he did promise was to keep a balance over the course of the economic cycle, surely a conservative approach. This obviously meant delivering surpluses over the boom years, but it did not preclude going into deficit when the busts came. And given that the bust of 2008 was the biggest for at least eighty years, his spending program was hardly an unorthodox response. And he promised to return the budget to surplus as soon as possible after the recovery came. The truly radical approach would have been to cut spending to match the loss of revenue, which is what the more wild-eyed of the neo-liberals in America were demanding. This was the so-called conservative solution, which failed so spectacularly during the Great Depression. Not even the most hide-bound Tory would want to repeat that experience.

Rudd has further confused people by describing himself, admittedly some time ago, as a Christian socialist. Given that in Australia socialist has come to mean left-winger, practically communist, some of the commentariat appear to believe that behind the mild-mannered faade lurks a rabid Trotskyite ready to emerge when the time is right. But if Rudd is to be judged by his actions rather than by the fantasies of the Right, he comes through as a pretty straightforward social democrat, accepting the broad tenets of capitalism provided that it can be regulated in ways necessary to make it a tool of a civilised and compassionate society. Hardly revolutionary, but perhaps not ideological enough to satisfy the pundits who seek to attach precise labels to their politicians.

The confusion over Rudd has a long history among the commentariat, dating back to the time he assumed the Labor leadership, and even before that. When Rudd sought to explain himself in two essays in the Monthly concerning the way his Christian beliefs informed his Labor politics and rejecting the Coalitions attempts to claim a religious monopoly, it was widely seen within the Canberra press gallery as a purely political manoeuvre, an attempt to draw attention to his leadership credentials. And when his approval ratings rose to stratospheric heights and remained there, the assumption was that the general public simply didnt know or understand him; they were dazzled by his novelty, but sooner or later they would wake up to the fact that he was just another clever politician.

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