All noise, little action

TELSTRA boss Sol Trujillo has picked it. The Rudd revolution is nothing but a kumbaya-crowd hand-holding exercise designed to distract but deliver little.

In his first week in office, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has backed away from his headline-grabbing stand on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, warning public servants at the Bali beach bonanza to err on the side of caution, his planned broadband partnership has lost its partner, and the grand slam on hospitals has been reduced to an old-fashioned consultation with the states, as has the future of education. Grocery prices haven't dropped, petrol prices were higher than they have been for months, housing is just as inaccessible or unaffordable as it has always been and there as many Aussie troops in Iraq as there were three weeks ago. Way to go, Kevin. While a lot of Labor's policies were clearly (and successfully) aimed at garnering the idiot vote, there is a faint pattern emerging from the Rudd-Labor Government's earliest moves. Fortunately, it has not been seized by the grand mal which struck the Whitlam government in its nascent days. There have been no moments of extreme lunacy. As expected of a Howard-lite administration, the main message has been one of reassurance, though there are considerable concerns about this approach, particularly in NSW, where the beleaguered government of Labor hack Morris Iemma has been bogged down in reassurance mode for the past two years and is steadily going backwards. Rudd has made lots of leadership noises but has so far failed to exhibit any real leadership traits beyond those of a middle-level public servant anxious to cling to power with calls for consultations, commissions and enquiries. Voters are entitled to ask if this is all they can expect over the next three years. Cuddling calves is all very well but cute only goes so far and voters are entitled to expect more from a party that has had almost 12 years in Opposition to construct ready-to-go policies, only to come into office promising endless years of sham consultations with special interest groups. If the Labor party didn't have the answers when it ran for office, it was elected on a false premise, and that's what it is beginning to look like. Domestic policy is in the process of being shuffled into a bureaucratic never-never land, just as it has been under Iemma's hopeless administration. The pledge by the new Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, to ask the states how they would end hospital waiting lists and at what cost is an absolute farce. The very people she is consulting have been responsible for failing the public. Their broken-down hospitals are vivid evidence of their inability to manage public health. The same goes for education. The Labor states have buckled time and again before the teachers' unions, which have defied the simplest of requests for clear and intelligible student reports and clear records that would enable parents to make comparisons between schools. Why does the Rudd Labor team now believe these roadblocks in the path of progress will suddenly be cleared? Meanwhile, the new Opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, moved rapidly to clear one impediment to his leadership, admitting that he was not telling the truth when he made his 1993 claim never to have voted Liberal. It was, he told the Australian newspaper, a heat of the moment remark made when he was surrounded by burly trade union leaders at a heated rally. Not a major mea culpa, but similar to the excuse he offered during his 1995 Liberal Party preselection interview, and the party officials went along with it on that occasion. The other rumbling that will have to be cleared up is the question of the eligibility of those who voted in the Liberal Party's leadership ballot. It was always obvious that inviting those whose seats had not been officially declared to participate in the vote was going to create lingering problems. The former treasurer and the interim party leader, Peter Costello, could have demanded a more stringent voting qualification but he did not. Shadow treasurer Malcolm Turnbull lost to Nelson by three votes. The closeness of the outcome made the eligibility an issue but it should not now be permitted to remain a sore point. Turnbull could have challenged the vote at the time but he did not. It is now too late for him to raise it against Nelson's leadership. As the last votes are counted over the next week, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Rudd Labor Government does not present an insurmountable challenge to the new Opposition. Although one-term governments are rare, a careful Opposition armed with the right strategies could take the fight to Labor and win back the government benches. To do so, however, would require Nelson to win the co-operation of everyone in his party, and harness the experiences of those with proven talents. But to maintain his hold on office, Rudd will have to do exactly the same with his already fractious members.