a good man is hard to find

Just when Mr Rudd looked to have Labor in the perfect position for the Federal election later this year, a report in the Australian today contains ominous signs that, far from being the long awaited anti-Howard many people imagine, Rudd’s vision for Australia might in fact be a hideous centre-right Blairite “new” Labor state (the Australian’s cheersquad are practising their new routines supporting this outcome here).

A selection of the general policy positions KR will apparently be pushing for at the upcoming national ALP conference:

- supporting logging, including a guarantee of no job losses in forestry (what other industry gets such assurances?), and abandoning the policy of protecting old-growth Tasmanian forests

- retaining all free trade agreements entered into by the current government

- supporting the ‘casualisation’ of the workforce, despite all the ALP’s bluster about the evils of WorkChoices

- keeping taxes “as low as possible”

- embracing the full sale of Telstra

- embracing public funding of private schools

- embracing “public private partnerships” in funding infrastructure projects (i.e., spend public money to build things and then let some private company charge the public for the right to use those things)

We’re also vaguely told that Rudd plans to dump current policies regarding welfare and aboriginal affairs. All of this sounds a lot like… well, the current government. Brilliant. Rudd is apparently set for a ‘showdown’ with the left of the ALP at the conference.

Of course, Rudd doesn’t seem to be stupid so far, and he will certainly be acutely aware of the importance of having the right wing of the media (i.e. everything except the ABC and the Fairfax papers) on side, or at least not describing him as some kind of psychotic, dangerous Communist. So a “showdown” with “the left” could easily be a PR ploy to show moderate Rudd reigning in the loonies and thereby reassuring those easily startled, mortgaged-to-the-hilt little bunny rabbits out there in the electorate (and the equally flighty business world) that he’s a good, safe leader who won’t go all Whitlam on them.

On the other hand, he could genuinely be trying to move to “the centre” (which when you start from “the left” means “to the right”, and when you start from “social-democratic party” mean, “interfering in peoples lives a great deal in order to pursue cynically populist policies whilst secretly sucking up to big business, media interests and corrupt unions on the side”). It’s certainly worked well for state Labor governments across Australia.

If it’s the latter case, and the current momentum carries through to election day, we can look forward to the joys of the modern British Labour Party – free market capitalism combined with ridiculously intrusive laws supposedly designed to fix every social ill under the sun, and of course more spin than the London Eye. Tony Blair has given Britain the thrill of compulsory ID cards, ‘ASBO‘s, and even a frightening attempt to allow Ministers to make laws by decree rather than going through all that voting in Parliament nonsense (which has passed the UK parliament is heavily modified form). If this move to ‘the centre’ is genuine then Australians will soon have the choice of which party they would like to take care of doing the same here.