'I'm sorry about this,' Pontius Pilate tells Jesus in a Leunig cartoon, 'but all the polls and the talkback are saying I've got to crucify you.'
A friend who drew my attention to the image saw it as a comment on the behaviour of the media in Australia's undeclared election campaign. Maybe, though I suspect Leunig was directing our attention to the fate of media hate objects in general.
Whatever one's political sympathies may be, Julia Gillard and the federal ALP make unlikely substitutes for the suffering Jesus, and there aren't any obvious contenders for that role on the other side, either. Clean hands are rare in politics, and innocent persons condemned to death 'for the sake of the people' — literally or metaphorically — are almost never found outside totalitarian regimes.
Democracies do, however, have hate figures aplenty. And one of the strangest aspects of this oh-so-strange moment in Australian politics has been the emergence of a pre-eminent hate figure.
Kevin Rudd may have declared that he accepts he will never be prime minister again, and it can be assumed that he won't be invited back to the front bench in what time remains to the Gillard Government. But he continues to have a function, at least for those ALP members and supporters who are resolved that he must never be more than the member for Griffith.
His role is to be hated, to wear the blame for what has gone wrong.
This is not to say that Rudd is one of the rare possessors of clean hands. His plight doesn't readily summon up Jesus before Pilate, either.
But the extent to which he is reviled does evoke another vivid image of baying crowds: the 'two-minutes hate' in Orwell's 1984, a daily ritual in which the citizens of Oceania assemble before screens bearing the image of Big Brother's arch-enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, and scream out their loathing of him.
In the novel, the ritual has become so entrenched that what Goldstein said or done that was so wicked has become mostly forgotten and largely irrelevant. What matters is simply that Goldstein is hated, and so now it is with Rudd.
He has been cast in this role for some time. In February last year, when Rudd challenged Gillard for the Labor leadership, party elder Barry Jones lamented that 'Kevin Rudd has not yet been blamed for the bombing of Darwin, but that will come'.
This was only barely hyperbole: Labor