The rotten core poisoning Labor

SIX weeks ago Kevin Rudd was a Labor rat who had to be publicly exterminated and Julia Gillard was the party's saviour, a saint in the making.

Today, the former prime minister is the hope of the ALP and Gillard is an embarrassment looking for a hole to hide in. If you're confused by Labor's campaign strategy, you're in good company. The ALP's election campaign is being run by a "detested caste of ruthless, robotic machine men". Don't take my word for it. That sentiment was expressed by John Della Bosca, a former secretary of the NSW Labor Party, former MLC and former minister for health, education, finance and industrial relations, writing in The Daily Telegraph yesterday. "Della" is telling it like it is because he has walked away from the shameful disgrace that now calls itself Labor. Some other veterans have not been so lucky. "Just four days ago, the current federal Education Minister Simon Crean was heroically mouthing the Labor Party line and mocking journalists for their preoccupation with the former prime minister. Continued questioning about the former prime minister during the election campaign was a "trivial pursuit", Crean told them at a Melbourne briefing last Wednesday. "Are we seriously still on this subject?" he asked. "Can't you let go what happened some five weeks ago?" To answer his question: No. Why should the media "let go" when the Labor Party not only cannot let Rudd disappear as it once hoped, but has been forced to resurrect him in a bid to shore-up its flagging election prospects? Operating outside the party structure, away from the "detested caste of ruthless robotic machine men" who first brought him to power and then assassinated him during his first term as prime minister, Rudd managed to fight a damaging rear guard action which saw Gillard forced into humiliating capitulation. Though neither she nor Crean or any other senior members of her new team admitted speaking to Rudd, the same ruthless machine men have now found they desperately need to embrace the former prime minister. These are the people who just a few weeks ago were busily leaking against Rudd in what was undoubtedly the most vicious character assassination ever launched against a recent party leader. In a total repudiation of the plot and the plotters, Rudd - who was so easily toppled because of his lack of friends within the parliamentary Labor Party and among the union bosses pulling the factional strings - is now dictating terms to Gillard because he is popularly perceived to be a more authoritative figure than the woman who deposed him. The bad news for Gillard and Crean is that the public still has not been told where Rudd stands on all of the policies Gillard rushed to deny, the big new super tax on mining, climate change "the greatest moral challenge", border protection and boat people. Labor's faceless men decided Rudd had to go or it faced defeat. He has found sympathy but no one is standing up for his leadership. Having handed him a red card and told the public that the Rudd Labor government had lost its way, Gillard has to tell us why she recalled him to the field and is now asking him for directions. Those robotic machine men need to conduct more focus groups to determine who should be given the better position at Labor's campaign launch, Rudd or the woman who hustled him out of the Lodge. In the real world beyond Labor politics, Gillard has been caught out over her wasteful BER program. The interim report offered up by her hand-picked adviser Brad Orgill is a transparent joke. As Orgill has admitted: "I say there was no waste. As an economist there was no waste because the cost of not doing this would have been much higher unemployment." Orgill may be an economist but he has been used as a political apologist, just as Gillard has used business leaders Rod Eddington and Don Argus to provide cover for her damaging forays into the economy. A brief examination of the BER fiasco shows that the union movement has claimed the wasteful spending spree saved or created 200,000 jobs. Gillard has put the figure at 350,000 and Crean at 450,000. The Bureau of Statistics figures for August, 2008, show 989,500 people were employed in construction. In May, 2010, that figure was 1,006,700 - an increase of 17,000. According to figures revealed during Senate estimates on June 3, the BER had swallowed $7.8 billion as at May 7, 2010, which would cost each new job at $453,488.37. That is a conservative estimate based on the assumption that every new job in the construction industry, including those in the mining sector, were created by the BER spending. As the Orgill report makes clear, hundreds of millions have been wasted through inflated charges, mismanagement and a lack of value for money but Gillard says she would throw the same amount of money away if the same situation arose again. Not a single lesson has been learnt from the BER experience. Opposition leader Tony Abbott will today outline the Liberal Party's election platform and draw attention to the marked differences between the Coalition and Labor on the ballooning national debt, ending waste, raising taxes and stopping illegal boat arrivals. There will be no big new promises beyond a return to the security and certainty that led to the prosperity of the Howard-Costello years. He will discuss his priorities should the Coalition persuade voters to give it their trust in a fortnight. While the polls give the Coalition a slender margin for a second week, the voters still believe Labor will be returned on August 21 and, most worrying of all, the polls show the Greens would hold the balance of power in the Senate. It seems unlikely Labor will be able to resolve its farcical leadership issues before the end of the current election campaign. That "trivial" matter will still influence voters, as it should, when they go to vote. The perceived wisdom has been turned on its head. The preconception that Labor had the best campaign management and leadership while the Coalition was handicapped in both areas has been shown to be false. Della Bosca should be thanked for exposing Labor's rotten core.