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November 7th, 2011 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda 7 November 2011
Menacing media talks up another Labor coup
First, a declaration: my book on Australia’s 27 prime ministers, The Good, The Bad And The Unlikely, is on its way to the printers for release on Australia Day next year.
I therefore have a vested interest in Julia Gillard staying in the job until then. If there is to be a change, please delay it until it is time for a second edition.
But having said that, I don’t believe a change is coming any time soon. Last week’s media reports about the progress of plots and the imminence of coups had an air of desperation about them – the desperation emanating not from Gillard and Kevin Rudd, both of whom are behaving with commendable equanimity, but from the journalists. Particularly within News Ltd, they seem incapable of writing about anything else. If we actually entered a period of stability within the Labor Party (admittedly not likely in the immediate future) we would have to buy the Murdoch hacks a set of alphabet blocks to keep them occupied.
There is no doubt at all that Kevin Rudd would like his old job back, but there is also no reason to think that he is actively pursuing it, at least at present. He is quite smart enough to realise that to do so would be suicidal; at the first whiff of insurrection from Rudd or his backers the ranks would close tightly behind Gillard. His strategy is rather to make the party come to him; to wait until sufficient backbenchers despair of their chances of re-election to break with what is left of factional solidarity within the Caucus and recall him to the leadership as their only hope.
An article over the weekend suggests that Rudd thinks that this process is already well underway; he is reported to believe that the serious right-wing factional bosses – Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten and David Feeney in Victoria, Mark Arbib in New South Wales, Don Farrell in South Australia and Wayne Swan (who?) in Queensland – now control a mere 15 Caucus votes between them. If this is so, after taking the six men’s own votes out, they must have an average of just one and a half followers each, and might as well give the warlord game away and take up knitting.
But even if Rudd’s assessment is a touch optimistic, the hard fact is that the faction leaders’ powers consist of the ability to deliver two things: promotion within the Caucus, and numbers for preselection. In the current circumstances the former is hardly worth considering and as for the latter – well, there’s not much point in tying up the preselection if there’s no prospect of holding the seat anyway. In a doomed party, the warlords become paper tigers.
As far as anyone knows, Rudd has made no direct overtures to any of them, although his supporters (and yes, he has a few) are letting it be known that, if reincarnated, he would be more accommodating the second time round. And of course, if the faction leaders fall out among themselves, and there are some signs of rifts developing, it can only help Rudd’s cause. But essentially he is relying on people power; that Gillard will self destruct in the same way as Alexander Downer did in 1995 and that the party will return to him as its only hope, in the same way the Liberals returned to the previously rejected John Howard.
There are just two things wrong with this strategy: Gillard is not Downer and Rudd is not Howard. For starters Downer was only the leader of the opposition. Gillard is Prime Minister, and as such is a lot harder to shift. And it hardly needs to be said that she is also a lot smarter and tougher than the preposterous pretender replaced by Howard. And Howard was the last man standing; the Liberals had already tried and discarded every other possible contender for the job with the exception of Peter Costello, who then, as ever afterwards, didn’t really want it anyway.
Rudd might not have quite such an easy run. If the right is to give Gillard the tap on the shoulder, there has been talk of an ABR (Anyone But Rudd) candidate, possibly the seldom seen Defence Minister Stephen Smith. It is only a vague and ultimately self-defeating possibility; any such contender would be seen as another creature of the same faceless men who gave you Gillard in the first place, and would be even more unelectable. If there is to be a change, Rudd is Labor’s only hope.
But such is the visceral dislike of him among a hard core within the Caucus that it would not, could not, be an easy transition. Gillard would be unlikely to go quietly, and her own rusted on clique would not wait long before it began to white-ant Rudd all over again. He would almost certainly have to chance his arm with an early election before the process got too far advanced and while whatever honeymoon the voters were prepared to offer him lasted. And early elections are a risky business at the best of times, which this most emphatically isn’t.
All in all it is not a tempting scenario; the current program of muddling along and hoping that something will turn up seems likely to continue for a while yet. And of course most of the media will continue to ignore the real issues of government while slavering obsessively over the opinion polls:
“If an election was to be held next weekend which party would receive your first preference?”
“But hang on, an election won’t be held next weekend …”
“Shut up and answer my stupid, meaningless hypothetical question.”
Such is the breadth and depth of current Australian politics.
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator.
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