ALP Hanging Itself Out To Dry

A Turd By Any Other Name Is...

This isn't meant to be a blog about politics. It just goes that way because it's stuff from which I can't run away in the news cycle. believe me it's more fun watching movies and listening to rock albums. Still, the recent debacle is the gift that keeps giving.

I'm trying to keep a straight face as I try and decipher what allegedly happened last week coming into this week, including this odd business of Bob Carr. What we've gleaned so far is that Bob Carr got tapped to fill in for Mark Arbib's Senate seat at about the same time Simon Crean started mouthing off about Kevin Rudd not being a team player (while Kevin Rudd was in Washington DC). Bob Carr's condition for going to Canberra was that he would get the Foreign Ministry portfolio.

Of course, Kevin Rudd resigned the Foreign Minister role on Thursday going on to Friday in Australia time, so this means Julia Gillard tapped Bob Carr for the job before they'd ousted Kevin Rudd. So whatever was going on in caucus, it was decided early last week that Kevin had to go back to the backbench, Mark Arbib had to go, and Bob Carr would parachute himself into Kevin Rudd's job AND Mark Arbib's job in one fell swoop - but somehow this wouldn't look like typical ALP machinations where something inherently undemocratic was going on.

What a facepalm moment.

Didn't Paul Keating call the Senate 'unrepresentative swill'? I think such a move would have reinforced that notion. Come on peeps, get your act together...

But it gets worse than that. It turns out Stephen Smith wanted the Foreign Minister job he vacated for Kevin Rudd back and put the Kaibosh on the Bob Carr move. Bob Carr was already at the airport waiting for a plane when told there were objections and he wouldn't get what he wanted - so he went home. It turns out, everyone wants something more for their loyalty for Julia Gillard when in fact it's a zero sum game because it's not like she's going to create more ministries in order to have more ministers to please her backers.

Anyway...

I got some sound rebuking by some ALP friends about the way I was stumping for Kevin Rudd (with the humiliating reminder "that this is Australia where we are still under the Westminster system and we don't elect Presidents" - as if I don't know...) who told me that Julia Gillard was the superior politician, and therefore the superior prospect "going forward". The ins and out of it were how hard the ALP works and secures the future of workers and how all these ructions are not playthings for the commentariat - "and fucking bloggers at that!" - but momentous decisions undertaken by the party - and that Kevin Rudd really wasn't a good Labor man at all. In short, if I truly were a progressive, then I was way out of line for writing the things I'd written here and worse, the outbursts I'd written over on Facebook. No matter how sharp my criticisms were, I wasn't actually in the party having to do the things the party does to make things right for the working families of Australia. Yikes.

And it's true, I've been rather flippantly cruel and most unkind about the members of caucus who would not and did not vote for Kevin Rudd. And it's true I won't go join a party to hand out leaflets at polling booths, just so I can be closer to the faceless men in the vain hopes of influencing them. Who am I really to critique the mighty ALP? "Pull your fucking head in" they said (most undemocratically, I might add).

Nonetheless the fact remains, only 24hours after the triumphant moment where Julia Gillard's told us she's going to do a better job, here we are with this fiasco. As one Rudd supporter quipped, "you can't blame this on Kevin too."

Ain't that the truth?