RUDD’S MEA CULPA
 
Five words on a placard held up outside Norwood Town Hall in Adelaide yesterday sum up the plight of not only South Australian Premier Mike Rann but Victoria’s John Brumby, other Labor Premiers around the country, and the new ‘Mr. Mea Culpa’ Kevin Rudd.

The protester at the official launch of Rann’s state election campaign, in which the polls show his support plunging ten per cent, held a placard which read:
 
‘Real doctors, not Spin doctors’. And boy was that on the money. It sums up in those five words why our political leaders are on the nose.
 
All over the country the punters are angry. To be blunt, they are sick of the bullshit. They are sick of the slickness and the gloss and the spin doctoring that is epidemic in our leaders’ offices. Sick of the self-serving, truth-twisting, expensive TV propaganda campaigns. Sick of the ducking, weaving, sometimes lying, press releases that come out of the over-staffed and over-paid propaganda offices known as the Media Department.
 
Maybe the scales are falling from voters’ eyes. Maybe the edict that ‘bullshit baffles brains’ no longer applies.  Even though both sides will be shovelling it in this an election years for many states and the Federal Government.
 
As George Megalogenis observes in today’s Australian: ‘The terminal decline of Labor’s state-governing brand has officially reached the level of satire.
 
On the federal scene Prime Minister Rudd has garnered headlines today after yesterday’s deliberate unveiling of his hair shirt in his first appearance as Prime Minister on the ABC’s The Insider program.
 
He says his government deserves a ‘whacking’.  Has deservedly been ‘taking a pounding’
 
His confession: ‘ …, where we have to improve our game – where I need to lift my game – is in delivering in the key outstanding areas of reform, in health and hospitals, in education, and getting on with the  business of action  on climate change’.
 
Well, that just about covers the waterfront. What the hell have you been doing for two and a half years?
 
It is refreshing for a politician, any politician, to say ‘I was wrong’.  But the electorate doesn’t seem to be buying the mea culpa.
 
The Internet is flooding with comments like:
 
So what Kev is effectively saying is that it's harder being in government than he thought.
 
So what were the first 2 and a half years, Kev, a practice?
 
‘Lift my game’? Mr. Rudd, I don't think you've been ‘in the game’ since Day One.
 
Kev, I suggest you go back to the job you were very good at - opposition!
 
The spin master has switched to another cycle as easily as my reverse cycle air conditioner.
 
It’s pretty obvious, the natives are restless.
 
Monday, March 1, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2010