A policy wish list

Australians want dignified, abstemious statesmen not self indulgent spruikers. John Howard still has a remarkable ability to reassure the nation, even if he does not have Sir Robert Menzies’ golden voice.

Mr Rudd is not Sir Robert, but he may possibly be another John Howard. He certainly shares with the Prime Minster the willingness to engage continuously with the broadcast media. Mr Howard had to do this to override a hostile media but Mr Rudd has had no such need. So far the blow torch has not been applied to him: it is only recently that a fatigued commentariat has turned away - for the time being- their torches from Mr Howard, for the simple reason that they had so lamentably failed to inflame our stoic leader.

So I would make a tentative judgment that Kevin Rudd appears to pass the character test for an Australian prime minister. If he can maintain this, and it appears over time to be more than skin deep, the competition will move to policy differences between the leaders.

To date he has tended to avoid the more difficult issues by having, as they say, a bet each way. He is all things to all men. This has kept his left wing happy, which is important in a faction riven party. Let loose, the left would make the federal ALP unelectable - they need to be disguised as centrists.

Mr Rudd must become an antipodean version of Tony Blair - that is a conservative Prime Minister who lets the left have its head on such matters as  the Australian equivalent of fox-hunting, or whatever it may be. Perhaps this will involve saying "sorry", if that is not now passé. He will also have to ensure that Labor will not be seen as the puppet of the declining union movement and that it will not suffer from the Labor tendency, at least from Whitlam on, to spend far beyond its means.

However, Mr Rudd may find that at some time he will be called on to demonstrate that, as chief-of-staff, he in no way condoned the extraordinary “shreddergate” scandal which still haunts the Goss cabinet, and which raises issues fundamental to the rule of law.

This brings me to the agenda I would prefer to see adopted by the next federal government. This is in the context of an extraordinary development, where the global warming industry has the public now fearful of climate change - as if the climate always stayed the same.

Far from being made wiser by technological advances such as the Internet, the public, especially our youth, seem more susceptible than previous generations to secular predictions of some or other apocalypse. Chesterton predicted this sort of consequence would come with the general decline of religion. He wrote that: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.”

This proposition is demonstrated in the surprising acceptance of the message from the global warming industry. This came principally in a film presented by a failed presidential candidate who flies around the world in an executive jet and more recently in a declaration, urbi et orbi, from an assembly of international bureaucrats and scientists in Paris.

The message is that man is principally responsible for global warming.

While the Parisian assembly desperately wanted to anathematise climate sceptics, they balked at making a declaration of infallibility and claimed instead that the link was 90 per cent proven.

People may be initially alarmed by this onslaught of propaganda with little to challenge it in the mass media. This may be confirmed in their minds as they live through the “worst drought in a thousand years”, or as one Sydney editor declares it, not a drought but structural climatic change. But once the drought actually breaks, as it will, the fear about global warming will begin to dissipate.