Parliament has resumed for 2012 and the political temperature has not cooled since we left last year. The pressure is already starting to show within the Labor/Greens alliance as Labor leadership tensions take hold.
That Kevin Rudd still covets the job of Prime Minister is no surprise to political observers. He has not cauterised the deep wounds left from his brutal political butchering at the hands of Julia Gillard and the faceless men of the Labor Party. The fact that many of those faceless men are prepared to even consider reinstalling Rudd as leader says a great deal about the parlous state of our federal government.
Notwithstanding the perverse pleasure in observing the leadership woes of the Labor Party, it is morbidly fascinating to see the desperate scramble by Greens leader Bob Brown to vigorously defend the power that was handed to him by Julia Gillard.
Only weeks ago, Brown was attacking Gillard for being duplicitous and breaking her word in respect to logging. Now that she is under fire from within, in a transparent bid to keep her in power (so he can remain in charge) he has now denied any broken agreement.
In fact, Brown has actually condemned any criticism of Prime Minister Gillard as ‘sexist’; further evidence that those devoid of any coherent or logically persuasive argument resort to name calling with the preferred tags being ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’. In the PC world, these are almost guaranteed to silence any dissent from those that fear the associated character assassination.
That such slurs are most often levelled by the Australian Greens should come as no surprise. They loathe freedom of speech and freedom of thought – except when it applies to their own world view. Any questioning of their counter culture agenda is deemed ‘hate speech’ and holding them to account for their policy failures is being ‘extreme’.
But the Australian people are waking up to the dangerous agenda put forward by the Labor Party and the Greens. Whatever their rhetoric, the end game is bigger government, higher taxes and a growing public debt. Ultimately the result is a dysfunctional, inefficient and stifling government which creates a less prosperous society.
The evidence of this end game is overwhelming. We had zero jobs growth nationally in the last year, our national debt has grown to over $160 billion, cost of living increases are crippling household budgets and business investment is gradually drying up. These are all a direct result of the policies of the past four years.
That the Labor/Greens alliance will not take responsibility for these massive failures is a sad indictment on the character of the players involved.
The rarest words in politics are those uttered accepting responsibility and yet they are the words the public are craving most to hear.
Although perhaps not as much as hearing the Prime Minister call an immediate election!
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
