What the fuck just happened? I spent years hating Howard, disgusted by our country being a lapdog to the worst US President in history, appalled by the treatment of refugees, and genuinely afraid of incursions into civil rights via so-called “anti-terrorism” laws. Then Dear Kevin came along, with promises and promise; he would sign Kyoto, he would say Sorry to the Aborigines, he would bring us a government that looked past the next election and acknowledged that there was a world out there beyond our backyards.

I should’ve known it would all go wrong when Rudd delivered the most mind-bendingly awful and boring victory speech since that US President who declaimed in the snow for four hours and died of pneumonia a few days later. He was all just words. So many fucking words, all of them designed to grab that day’s news cycle, ensure he got the airplay, and stay the fuck away from actually doing anything.

The CPRS, like most Rudd government policies, ended up being so watered-down and so craven in its desire not to offend anyone or cost anyone (except the taxpayer) any money at all, that the Greens, who wanted Carbon Trading, couldn’t support it, and the Coalition, containing a healthy proportion of Climate Change deniers and were never going to go for it anyway, bounced it in the Senate. So it was dropped, sorry, “postponed”.

The good things he did were handled with breathtaking naivety and cowardice – too afraid of standing up to the “Debt is BAAAAD” disease that’s overtaken the country in the past decades, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, point out that the small amount of debt we’d taken on to avoid going into recession was less, by orders of magnitude, than anywhere else in the developed world, and by the way, it KEPT US OUT OF RECESSION. He let Garrett be crucified for the insulation scheme rather than point out that dodgy contractors were a consequence of lax state regulators and there were fewer, yes fewer, fires per capita than before the scheme came in. The school buildings program was allowed to be pilloried (rightly) for mandating big Julia Gillard plaques on every building, and (wrongly) for its supposed rorts and waste.

Then the Henry Tax Review came out, and the only part of it they tried to implement was the stupidly-named Resources Super Profits Tax, which scared the horses, and allowed the Stupid to think it was a tax on Superannuation (yes, true – that’s why it was renamed). Rather than take the fight up to a concerted advertising campaign by some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the country, ably assisted, naturally, by News Ltd, the ALP let the RSPT be the last straw, allowing people to realise they were almost as sick of Rudd after three years as they had been of Howard after more than a decade.

They could’ve done it better, couldn’t they? Yes, he had to go, but the way he was dispatched meant there was massive sympathy for him as the victim of the dreaded Faceless Men. All they had to do was what all good operatives do: leak. Enough would have been picked up and salivated over by the press after a couple of weeks for Rudd’s rolling to be seen as The Only Right Thing To Do, and a blessed relief from all the speculation. Instead, this annoying, wordy, arrogant, egomaniacal, compulsive leaker and destabiliser became not just an issue in his own right when he should’ve been nothing more than a mild distraction, but a massive negative for Gillard.

Ah yes, Gillard. Where do I start? Forget all the “fiery redhead” shit, this woman is tough, and one of the ALP’s best parliamentary performers. When she became PM and the first idiot question she got was from one of the Opposition’s prize idiots, serial Deputy Julie Bishop, about trust and stealing the leadership, she responded with “…I wish her well as Deputy to her third leader.” Zing! There was a chance that the campaign would be fought on the front foot, and we’d get to see some real debate about real issues, and a bit of actual fight, rather than the brainless point-scoring that political debate has become in the past decade.

But no, some hack in the organisation decided that the natural successor to “small target” campaigning, so effectively used to self-destruction by Beazley some years ago, was the “say nothing” campaign. Except, of course, when it came to pandering to the perceived prejudices of Westies. So, from Labor’s side, we got a campaign based entirely on the seat of Lindsay; when JG went out on Border Patrol to show she was tough on boaties, who did she take? David Bradbury, the member for Lindsay, just to show his constituents that he’d protect their McMansions and their KFCs from the evil scary Boat People. The only people convinced of anything by this bullshit were those of us who realised that we were irrelevant, and the ALP thought we were fucking morons. I’ve never fucked a moron in my life, so I was rather offended.

Abbott played the campaign the way St Kilda have played for much of this season: ugly, but effective. It’s easy with hindsight to tell him where he went wrong, and where those game-changing one-percenters were, but this entire piece is hindsight, right? The Liberal organisation really fucked up with preselections, particularly in NSW and Victoria, where many candidates in winnable seats were picked at the last moment and given nowhere near enough support, or, worse, fucked their chances completely, like that morbidly obese Muslim-hating “christian” in NSW; the fact that they couldn’t take the seat formerly held by Belinda Neal tells you that the NSW Liberal machine may not be as evil as the NSW ALP, but they’re well up there when it comes to stupidity.

So the parliament was hung, seats went down to preferences and postals, and we ended up having to wait for three rural Independents, all disaffected Nationals, to announce their decision. Adam Bandt was always going to align with the ALP, as was Andrew Wilkie, the former Green (don’t mention he was a member of the Liberal Party before that), who had little option either, given that the Howard government had tried to, you know, put him in jail and did a character assassination on him that must’ve just been practice for what they did to Dr Haneef a couple of years later.

Abbott’s relentlessly negative campaign style leached through to the post-election negotiation period, to his detriment. Barnaby Joyce screaming at Tony Windsor on national TV on election night was a nice start, and Bill Heffernan, a back-bencher, pranking Oakeshotte’s kids made it clear that the coalition were damned if they were going to cop a result that didn’t suit them.

The election night speeches from Gillard and Abbott were as expected. Gillard admitted they’d fucked up, started sucking up to the independents immediately, and said “good game buddy” to her opponent, whereas Abbott couldn’t resist the opportunity to ride the wave of hooting from his supporters and say “Yah, fuck you, bitch”.

And that sense of entitlement, of disgust at a decision that didn’t go their way, is going to continue for the foreseeable future. The internet is not a reliable way to take the nation’s temperature, but check out some of the so-called “conservative” tweeters and bloggers and count the number of times Gillard’s been called a lying slut, or the abuse and threats hurled at Windsor and Oakey for accepting the wrong bribes. Or just look at the front page and the opinion pieces in any News Ltd paper. Get used to it, because the Born To Rules, and the media giant that loves them so much, are not taking this lying down.

I’d like to think this government can go the full term, not because I particularly like the ALP, or think that Gillard will be that much better than Abbott, but because the country needs and deserves a stable government. There is a slim chance that consensus and compromise and more open government could result from all this, but more likely the Opposition and News Ltd will do everything in their power to destabilise and block by any means fair or foul, and we’ll be back to the polls inside twelve months.

+ 1

+ 1