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October 17, 2008
Dennis Shanahan in The Australian makes a good point about the political rhetoric of the Rudd Government.Shanahan says:
Rudd faces the difficult problem of selling diametrically opposed messages: Australia is better off than the rest of the world and our banks are the safest in the world, but we are in dire need of guaranteeing those banks and blowing the budget surplus.Health Minister Nicola Roxon was caught in this contradiction by suggesting - only a couple of hours after Rudd and Swan had blown $10 billion - that the Coalition's opposition to the Medicare levy in the Senate was endangering the surplus.
The Ministers work in terms of set lines or talking points, always repeating the same message over and over again until the new lines or talking points are devised. The media usually goes along without paying much critical attention to political rhetoric and the way that it is out of kilter with reality.
What we are presented with by the media professionals is an emphasis on particular words, such as "working families"; or an insider's reconstruction by a senior columnist of what happened inside government circles by a senior columnist in response to particular in events.
The gasp between reality and rhetoric has been marked with the global financial crisis. The Rudd Government knew its significance as a global crisis around March 2008 and its the effects on the world economy. Rudd decided to prepare an economic stimulus package for Australia and commissioned a series of papers.
Not a hint in the political rhetoric. Ministers were still rabbiting on about protecting the surplus, fighting inflation and China providing Australia's insurance policy to sustain its economic growth. As Stuart Middleton, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Business at the University of Queensland, said in Crikey::
The Rudd Government was slow to acknowledge a financial crisis...At this stage [10 October] Rudd Government rhetoric shows no indication of a financial crisis. Emphasis is on world, global, and Australian financial markets, but there is no negative connotation with these, such as "turmoil". A good example is Rudd’s summary of the problems on 10 October in an interview with ABC Radio: "I think, overall, what we face is a broader problem of a lack of a demonstration of global and coordinated political will to deal with some of the deeper regulatory challenges that we now face, and that, I believe is a key part of the confidence equation and that must be addressed as the Finance Ministers meet in Washington this weekend."
Rudd is careful to talk of administrative solutions to what he perceives as a confidence issue. The Government’s talk at this time is therefore of a strong economy. It only definitively and unreservedly discussed a global financial crisis on 14 October, after the notion had appeared in the media over a period of several days. Yet they knew in March.
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Rudd faces a dilemma. He craves to be seen well on the
world stage. He craves to be written into history. He needs to be seen as a good prime minister of Australia.
Its a hard one...for him.