OF BLOOMS AND GINGERBREAD

A friend used to have a quaint, but mangled, expression for when things started to go bad. She wouldn’t say ‘the honeymoon is over’. She’d say ‘the bloom’s gone off the gingerbread’. I’m sure Kevin Rudd has never heard that expression but it seems to hit home today with the latest opinion poll showing a huge drop in his Government’s support and in his personal rating.

It’s simplistic to blame the Budget because the same poll shows many people think it was a pretty fair one considering the current Global Financial Crisis.

But two issues have upset people and they both involve the number 67. The lifting of the retirement age to 67 before you can qualify for a pension and the consideration of a plan to boost to 67 the age before you can access your own superannuation. To get your hands on your own money, Ralph.

They are going to decide on that in December and you know which way the wind is blowing. Already, they are squeezing you on how much you can transfer into your super fund to try to rebuild a dwindling nest egg.

But, I believe, for Kevin Rudd it is more than that. In recent weeks cracks have started to appear in a carefully crafted image. If he tried his old, and at the time refreshing, line:  ‘Hi. I’m Kevin. I’m from Queensland. I’m here to help you’, he’d be greeted with cries of derision.

His ‘don’t you know who I am’ temper tantrum which reduced a flight attendant to tears on a VIP flight. The spoilt brat hair dryer incident in Afghanistan. Whether that was true or not is almost immaterial.

People were instantly prepared to believe it. And as the hapless Billy McMahon discovered: when people start to laugh at you in pubs rather than with you, then you are in trouble.

And nobody was fooled by their shabby attempt to slip huge overseas travel expenses under the Budget news radar.

One thing that has stained this government in its first 18 months is the chronic refusal to admit to a broken promise even when elected in a wave of commitments to be open and transparent.

Sure, Howard was just as guilty with his ‘core and non-core’ promises. But post-Budget, Rudd and Swan couldn’t say it. You’ve heard of Polly waffles. This is ‘policy waffles’.  Neither man could say: Yes, we broke election promises because we had to. Because of the recession. We had no choice.

I said last week, when the Prime Minister floated a furphy, he won’t go to an early election with a double dissolution. The voters are too restless. Too capricious.

Kev from Queensland would hate to go into the history books as a One Term Wonder.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009