Prime Minister Kevin Rudd November 25, 2007
Posted by Kirk Fletcher in Election.Tags: Kevin Rudd, Kevin07, Politics
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Well, the election is over and as expected, the LDP got no seats – but we made a pretty good show of it for a first election. One bit of good news is that Greens senator Kerry Nettle was not re-elected.
It seems that with all the hype in what became a very presidential-style campaign between Howard and Rudd, that votes were more “polarised” than usual – meaning that minor parties/independents attracted an even lower percentage of the votes than usual. The result was, of course, a landslide win for Labor and Kevin Rudd, who will become our new prime minister. Outgoing PM, John Howard was gracious in defeat. Is it just me, or are politician’s best speeches always when they’re conceding?
What sort of PM might Rudd be? Helen (aka skepticlawyer) has an excellent (but long) post over at catallaxy suggesting he’d be a Blair-like ‘trendy vicar’. I hope she’s wrong. Here’s an excerpt:
He reminds me – with his relentless ‘on-message’ rhetoric and carefully scripted ‘socially conscious’ Christian conservatism – of Tony Blair in his prime, a type that some of my Oxford friends deride as a ‘trendy vicar’.
One of Blair’s enduring political legacies was his nanny-statist determination to ‘make people behave’. This found expression in the creation of some 3000 new offences since New Labour took office in 1997 – more than the sum total of offences in UK law until that point. However, more than simply rushing to lock more people up for more stuff, Blair began to intervene in his citizens’ lives in ways that are spookily Orwellian. The most meretricious of these interventions is undoubtedly the ‘anti-social behaviour order’, or ASBO for short – although talking CCTV runs a close second.
ASBOs are civil orders, not a criminal penalty. This means they don’t appear on an individual’s criminal record – at least initially. However, breach of an ASBO is a criminal offence punishable by a fine or up to five years in prison. Crucially, their civil status means there is no objection to the use of hearsay (the UK abolished the rule against hearsay in civil proceedings in 1995). Oh, and then there’s the definition, under section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Anti-social behaviour is ‘behaviour which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more people who are not in the same household as the perpetrator’. As you’ll appreciate, it’s entirely subjective.
I wish to congratulate you and the people of your land. I strongly believe that even though Labour only seems to be slightly different on the issues than the so-called ‘Liberal’ Party, I think that you are slightly better off. I think I saw somewhere that Labour would pull out of Iraq. Do you guys have soldiers in Iraq?
I certainly hope that the Labour Party of Australia is at least a LITTLE better than the one from England.
I hope you’re right. Personally, I think it’s a disaster – and that Labor will be a lot worse – but I’m holding out hope.
We have had troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since the beginning… Labor supports troops in Afghanistan, but says they want a staged withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. The “combat troops” was an important qualification – Rudd is basically saying he’ll keep the trainers, etc there (which is what most of them in Iraq are doing – training the locals). Funnily enough, it’s Afghanistan that we’re seeing fatalities, not Iraq.
One good thing is that ALP have pledged to abanadon plans for an identity card… hopefully they don’t just rename it as something else.