Guy Beres

As readers may be aware, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been in London over the last couple of days and just yesterday evening gave a talk at the London School of Economics (podcast download available here). I would have liked to have gone along to see the Prime Minister speak in the flesh, but alas work commitments and a quite difficult 5PM starting time put paid to that idea. As it turns out, rock star-like (and, one adds, in a similar vein to all decent gigs in London), tickets for the “performance” were exhausted in fifteen minutes flat, with queues for the event running out the door. Given that there are roughly as many Australians living in London as there are living in Hobart, this is probably not all that surprising, but Rudd is certainly riding a wave of goodwill in the electorate at the moment.

It is on this note that Simon Tisdall had quite an effusive piece in The Guardian today, complimenting the Prime Minister on the way he is handling things and taking a rare potshot at the Australian media from one of the most criticised media environments in the Western world:

Policy wonk, nerdy control freak, bureaucrat-in-chief, charisma-free bore and junketeer are some of the kinder epithets the whingeing Aussies have applied to the man who ousted the long-serving conservative John Howard.

Rudd has been forced to deny he is a robot, defend his “quirky” sense of humour, and rebut claims he is a US lackey after he jokingly saluted George Bush.

Tisdall goes on to conclude that Rudd is “too brainy” for the Australian right, which I am sure conservatives in Australia will scoff at, perhaps with a touch of self-doubt.. Nevertheless, it goes without saying that while the most substantive criticisms of Rudd’s performance doing the rounds in the media are ad hominem caricatures such as these, the government knows it must be doing fairly damned alright. Of late, even folks such as conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen seem pleasantly surprised by Labor’s performance so far, summarising it as “so far, so good”.

Apart from his ongoing wretched poll figures, Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson must also be a bit concerned that even his party’s staple supporters in the media are abandoning him, or in the very least, not panning the new government consistently. Indeed, with the Opposition in the state it is in, the door is open for Federal Labor to forge a new, powerful coalition of the centre-right and centre-left. Such a coalition, should it prove binding, would spell utter disaster for the conservative parties in Australia.

Tags: Janet Albrechtsen, Kevin Rudd, London School of Economics, LSE

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:56 pm and is filed under Rudd Labor Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.