Fairfax commentator Mark Davis ruminates over the fall of Rudd the Lonesome Dud:>/strong>
Rudd’s one-man band plays its last tune, HERE
Among the many pertinent matters covered by Davis in this article, its most important sentence might be: “But [Rudd] did not rise through the ranks of the union movement and the state-branch-based machines and tribes – he did not traverse the road Gillard has travelled all her political life”, and it says a lot about who get to become Labor MPs, and how that affects our country.
Considering “the road Gillard has travelled all her political life”, her elevation may not make much difference to the quality of ALP administration.
The question is whether all Gillard’s life is synonymous with what Davis calls “all her political life”?
Current Labor MPs seem to have had political lives which run like this:
~ school, curiously, often ‘wealthy’ private ones;
~ dodgy university course, rarely any hard subjects like physical sciences and foreign languages [Rudd the exception proving the rule], and focusing on soft-option pseudo-subjects titled ‘Studies’;
~ position as electoral assistant, media adviser (trainee spinmeister, really), Party organiser, factional heavy, etc;
~ get pre-selected, get elected, off to Parliament, and Bob’s your uncle or Bab’s your auntie; later, a visit to the props manager for hard-hat, fluoro-vest and updated PC phrase lists.
Western democracies have moved in the last two centuries from parliaments s/elected from a narrow base of gentlemen from landed gentry to broad-based representation, one feature of this being MPs being paid, which enabled people ‘without private means’ to temporarily leave their work-a-day lives to serve as members.
However, it has had a perverse unintended consequence of turning representing the people into a life-long political career, which seriously changes the dynamic – we are now being exploited by a new political class for whom politics is their whole life, leading lives quite unconnected with those lived by We the People.
BTW, in the other major party, there is an equally harmful but distinctly different disconnect.
Their influence-peddlers and decision-makers don’t ride train, trams & buses, don’t send their children to state schools, don’t use public hospitals, don’t live in risky, non-leafy suburbs – they have almost no life experience of these situations, giving them no empathy with the daily lives of up to two-thirds of the voters.
