In the dying days of the1996 election campaign Paul Keating famously said “when you change the government, you change the country” in an attempt to scare people away from taking the baseball bat to his Prime Ministership. He did it on the basis that the Australian people recognised John Howard and what he had stood for over the years. The line didn’t work, the government changed and so to did the country.
In 2007 when the doom of the campaign set in, John Howard used the same line to try and get people to focus on what Kevin Rudd really stood for. This was ultimately a difficult task because at that time what Rudd offered the public was one great contradiction.
For instance he had described the day of the introduction of the GST as “fundamental injustice day” but campaigned as an “economic conservative”.
Following a visit to Iraq in late 2002 he had said: “Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. That is a matter of empirical fact,” but proceeded to question the motive for military action in Iraq.
Even today he defies logic by arguing that his approach to asylum seekers arriving by boat in northern Australia is “humane but tough”. It’s like being drunk and sober at the same time.
Rudd could do this before the election because he had very little public history to haunt him; he had not been a minister as had most previous Prime Ministers nor had he been a larger than life public figure. His most famous achievement prior to entering Parliament was being the chief bureaucrat of the Queensland public service. It is fair to say that going into the Prime Ministership Kevin Rudd was the blankest canvas ever to take the reins of our country.
Two years later we are starting to see Kevin Rudd’s true colours emerge.
Kevin Rudd is unlike any former Prime Minister of the modern age. He is a bureaucrat looking to ‘run’ Australia. He wants to be the ultimate controller of power, people and information.
Dennis Shanahan recounted a story in The Australian recently explaining how Kevin Rudd in a meeting with the Premier of South Australia on rail funding demanded a map of Adelaide to plot where the additional rail route would be situated.
Don’t we have experts to plan rail lines? Is that what we want our Prime Minister to be spending his time on?
Equally, last week the Prime Minister delivered a speech to the Business Council about planning control in our major capital cities. We already have buildings full of town planners, landscape designers and urban developers – but Kevin Rudd thinks they could use his help.
In the area of health we are seeing a new proposal every week to intrude on Australians lives under the guise of “preventative health”. According to the Health Minister, Australians eat, drink and (some) smoke far too much costing our health budget gazillions more than need be.
So Kevin Rudd and Nicola Roxon have a plan. They will ban or restrict or worse still tax what they don’t like into submission.
Rather than spending the money educating Australians about health choices the Rudd approach is to socially engineer through legislation.
They will ban junk food advertising, restrict tobacco companies from labelling products and hit alcohol with new taxes all under the guise of ‘preventative health’.
Do we really need the Government engineering what we eat and drink? What’s next a minimum sleep requirement?
Kevin doesn’t like kids watching too much TV, so he has plans to restrict that as well. Don’t worry about taking too much responsibility for your own family, Kevin’s guide to parenting will be law soon enough.
Even the internet faces the looming threat of Rudd’s social engineering. He’s introducing a new censorship system designed to prevent you from viewing what he considers to be “inappropriate” content.
Don’t worry about yourself; Kevin is here to micromanage what you see online. And don’t just take my word for it: the system is so bad that his unofficial marketing division GetUp have advertised against it.
Kevin Rudd’s also worried about what you might read in the post. The Prime Minister has changed the rules for Parliament forcing MPs to clear everything they send by mail to their constituents to ensure it does not criticise the government.
If I tried to send this column to my constituents in the mail, the Government would black out anything that attacked Kevin Rudd or the Government in general. Thank God for the (pre-Rudd censored) Internet.
So far words like “mismanage” and “debacle” have been removed by the government censors from opposition letters. This is an unprecedented level of micromanagement meets censorship.
This is who Kevin Rudd is and this is what he believes in. He said it all in the opening line of his maiden speech in Parliament – “politics is about power”.
Kevin Rudd, bureaucrat-in-chief of Ruddstralia.
Hope you enjoy your stay.