politicalowl

Kim Beazley has had the easy win he needed. Notwithstanding the two poseurs who pretended they were after Labor’s top job, this was no contest. The survival instinct saw to that. The overwhelming majority of Caucus members realised that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are not yet the kind of people that the voters they need to attract are attracted to. Kevin Rudd smugly gets his face on television and speaks in contrived 15 second grabs that television journalists like because they need so little editing. Yet the subject matter of his comments is irrelevant to winning elections. Foreign policy is not what Labor needs to be worrying about. It is a hindrance rather than a help to have Kevin Rudd available at the flash of a microphone. It creates the impression that the Labor Party is more interested in the dilemmas of Iraq than the housing prices at Blacktown. Over the next year or so Mr Rudd will best serve his Party by virtually disappearing until he gains a new shadow Cabinet position...

There are nine governments in Australia – those of six states, two territories and the federal one. In Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, Labor rules. For a political brand, eight ninths of the market can’t be bad. Yet since losing the ninth election to John Howard’s Liberal-National coalition, the newspapers and the airwaves have been full of discussions about the need for Labor to undergo radical change. It is like the thinking of that head of Coca Cola who decided that the formula of the most successful soft drink in the world needed to be changed because it had lost a few percentage points of market share. Utter nonsense. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the Labor Party brand. In so far as there is a problem federally it is because the federal party leaders, unlike their state counterparts, have forgotten who they should be trying to sell their product to. In...