Paul Keating famously commented that 'when you change the prime minister, you change the country'. How much has Australia changed in the transition from John Howard to Kevin Rudd? I was recently invited to address this question in a panel with Paul Kelly and Clive Hamilton at the Sydney Writers Festival 2010.
Earlier this month, a major newspaper's regular monthly list of Australia's ten bestselling non-fiction books included one war history, one crime history, two memoirs, and six cookery books. There were no books on current affairs, politics, economics or climate change. Quite a change from the Howard years, when public interest in serious political or social themes regularly produced bestsellers like Dark Victory or The Weather Makers.
It isn't that such books aren't being written today. The difference is that they are not being read in anything like the numbers they were under Howard. We have turned off the heavy stuff: the irony is that Rudd has achieved the relaxed, politically inattentive public that Howard sought.
I believe a key difference between these two prime ministers is in the area of public decency, as measured in terms of how governments treat individual human beings.
Rudd may be an artful spinner of verbal structures and a man whose main interest is to retain power, but he does not arouse the politics of moral outrage which for many Australians defined the Howard years. Political professionals dismiss the moral outrage factor, or disparage it as not very important statistically. It is mocked by phrases like 'bleeding hearts' or 'luvvies'.
Yet the perception that the Howard government enjoyed going after vulnerable groups of people mattered in unseating him. I am sure Howard lost power in 2007 because significant numbers of Australians had reached a tipping point. It wasn't that we had become bored by him: it was rather that we had become disgusted by him. Perhaps the harsh military takeover of Aboriginal welfare and the mishandled Haneef case tipped the balance.
So I am unable to think of Howard as a 'patriot', in the sense that I think of most Labor and Liberal prime ministers before him as patriots. I remember how the Howard years made me feel ashamed to be Australian, and how I felt about his electoral defeat the way East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall coming down: as a kind of cleansing. Maxine McKew's victory in Bennelong was the sweetest victory of all.
Mainstream Australian political scientists don't frame the Howard years in this way. They have a professional investment in the idea of the essential normality of Howard's time in power. They like to think that he generally observed Australia's unwritten rules of political fair play.
But for me, these were shaming years, defined by memories like these: attack dogs lunging at workers on the Melbourne docks; sick refugees sitting in regimented rows for days on the hot steel decks of the Tampa, guarded by Australian SAS troops toting machineguns; scared kids forced to jump overboard in lifejackets from the sinking vessel SIEV 4; the 353 unexplained deaths when SIEV X sank in international waters patrolled by Australian aircraft and monitored by Australian long-distance radar, and the subsequent efforts to dissemble and hide those facts; the cruelty of Temporary Protection Visas and the Nauru solution; children born and growing up mad in desert detention camps; undeclared attacks on Iraqi troops by invading Australian SAS forces, early in the allies' 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to cede power; the encouragement of anti-Muslim prejudice in Australia, culminating in the Cronulla riots.
The style of the Howard years was little by little brutalising Australia, destroying our multicultural decency.
These are some of the names that I remember — Lance Collins, Andrew Wilkie, Merv Jenkins, the Bakhtiari family, Shayyan Badraie, Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau, David Hicks, Mamdouh Habib, Mohammed Haneef. There were too many victims of corrupted or vindictive government practice in the Howard years. Many of us are glad that those times are gone.
So it is a real compliment to Kevin Rudd to say that he is not John Howard! The Rudd Government respects Australia's multicultural society, and takes care not to fan the flames of bigotry in public debate on sensitive matters like boat people and domestic terrorist crime. These are important gains, and I give the Rudd Government due credit here.
Rudd disappoints for a different reason: that he is failing to meet what is truly the greatest moral, economic and security challenge of our time — the climate change crisis.
I see this as a strange lack of imagination, rather than malevolence. Rudd for all his intelligence and political skills has just not been able to join the mental dots on climate change. As he showed on the now famous ABC 7.30 Report interview with Kerry O'Brien, he really believes he has been working hard on the problem, and that it is other people's fault that he has not yet succeeded.
Labor's climate change policy has simply been a train-wreck. On our nation's clear and present danger from climate change, Rudd is Howard revisited: from his backing-away from the 2008 Garnaut Review, to his divisive political handling of emissions trading legislation during 2009, to his recent abandonment of the emissions trading bills, and now his unconvincing attempts to convince Australians that he has in place serious renewable energy and energy efficiency policies, in place of no progress on carbon emissions trading or taxing. It is still mostly spin, and people have started to see through it.
These are complex policy issues, which people have to trust governments to get right. But Rudd's policies on climate change are marked by irresolution and political opportunism. He has muddied these waters in important ways, making future reform harder to achieve by discrediting good policy ideas and instruments. His disastrous combination of overblown rhetoric and inadequate actions has tarnished the brand, inadvertently encouraging climate change denialism.
The precious first six years of Labor government — assuming Labor is re-elected — have been wasted. It was open to Rudd in 2007, advised by Ross Garnaut, to inspire and lead real national decarbonisation policies to sharply reduce Australia's carbon dioxide emissions: to move the nation quickly towards electric cars and a renewable energy — based electricity supply industry. Instead, he opted for hollow, feel-good gesture policies which were about appeasing strategic constituencies, not about the urgent arithmetic of real carbon emissions reduction.
Rudd hoped that by his decision to shelve the CPRS bills, Labor could see off the climate crisis as an election issue for 2010. With Tony Abbott as Coalition leader — the man who said climate science is all crap — Rudd is probably secure, in the short term. But the climate crisis will continue to haunt him, unless he moves to real policy leadership on the issue.
More and more voters who care about the climate crisis have formed a view of Rudd as lacking policy vision and integrity on this key issue. Indeed, if Malcolm Turnbull were still Opposition Leader, he could be a real threat to Rudd in the coming election.
Just as British voters turned away from Tony Blair over his habitual dishonesty on Iraq — and Gordon Brown's Labour Party later paid the delayed price — Australian voters could do the same to Rudd Labor. I think Labor will pay a electoral price for Rudd caving in to the coal lobby and deferring any possible real climate action until 2013. I suspect that we may well see new party leaders, on both sides of politics, in a couple of years' time. Perhaps then Australia can begin to make up for these six wasted years.
Public understanding of the reality of the oncoming climate crisis, and readiness to support radical policies, is increasing, spurred by events like the Caribbean oil disaster and the Iceland volcano, which remind us of the growing fragility of our global life support systems.
Yet over the last three years, Australian climate change policy has stalled. Australia now is a society hamstrung by different kinds of climate crisis denialism. It is easy to laugh at people who clog up public discussion sites and newspaper letters pages with their resentful pseudo-scientific pontifications. But I am angered when intelligent people, leaders of opinion in society, on all sides of politics, persistently put short-term 'realism' and respect for powerful vested interests ahead of the science that they know in their hearts to be true.
These are the people who encouraged Rudd in his present weak policies. They share responsibility with him for Australia's climate change policy stagnation.
WIN: Post your comments about this article below to win one of three copies of Tony Kevin's climate action manifesto Crunch
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Tony Kevin is author of the climate change book Crunch
Time. This essay is adapted from his presentation at the Sydney Writers Festival.