Spin Dentist - Flossing the plaque out of Aussie Politics

Let the Character Assassinations Begin

Bring out your dead, or how Teflon John got it wrong.
The main problem with the moral high ground, is that if you choose to occupy it, you must be high on morals.
At the start of the year Labor brought out a couple of pre-campaign policy samplers. Nothing too meaty, and more to do with intent than anything else. As was to be expected, they were Pooh-Poohed by the government and all was well with the universe. But after another poll came out in February, this turned personal.
For once the tired old "Labor can't be trusted with your money" rhetoric clearly wasn't making inroads into the electorate. Why not this time? For one, it's a hard position to defend when interest rates are rising. Saying they'd rise even more if your opponent was in charge doesn't really hold a lot of water either. The mortgage belt tend to respond to the evidence before them, reactive animals that they are. And Rudd just looks like a banker... Labor = economic ruin, is a hard policy to promote when the supposed rabid unionist in charge could be your financial planner, or accountant, or bank manager.
So if you can't deride their character on policy, undermine their moral character was the call. Some liberal strategist who is probably down the centrelink by now, dug up a supposedly scandalous, but in reality quite harmless bit of info on lunches Rudd had held with Brian Burke, the corrupt ex-premier of WA. An outcry into the moral character of Rudd would follow surely..."Saint Kevin the fallen" would be the cat calls from the baying mob. He attended lunchs with this judas? Noooo... The reverberations throughout the electorate were... missing.
Merely a day or so later it came out that Liberal minister for the environment Ian Campbell had had a meeting with the very same ebola virus-like Brian Burke. He promptly resigned his post, in order not to taint the morally irridescent Holy Trinity of Costello, Abbott and Howard.

Body Count after the smoke had cleared? ALP = 0 Libs = 1

Why didn't the Electorate jump up and down and burn effigies of Rudd after this attack? I'd like to think that the Australian electorate are savvy enough to realise Politicians encounter many people in the business they are in, and the fact you cannot account for the high moral standing of all you encounter is not a fault of yourself. The fact that Ian Campbell had to be sacrificed in order for the Government's mud to stick, highlights the absurdity of the attack. Is Ian Campbell in some way morally compromised because of meeting with a lobbyist now proved to be corrupt? No. Unless he was of very little moral fibre prior to this (I won't be tempted to comment on that).
The upshot? People in White houses shouldn't fling mud. And yet the McCarthy like witchhunt continued into all MP's wheelings and dealings.... next up and probably with some legitimacy, Shadow Attorney-General Kelvin Thomson resigned after it was revealed he provided a character reference to one Tony Mokbel for a liquor licence in 2001... ill advised at the very least, considering Mokbel has been charged in absentia with importing cocaine and implicated in the murders of other Melbourne underworld figures. His poor old interns will probably be wondering if the character references he gives them will be worth the paper they are written on now. The actual nature of Thomson's relationship with Mokbel never really did come out, but was met with muted vigour by the Government. Once bitten twice shy, perhaps, or perhaps it sent a Government scurrying to their own records to weed out any possible impropriety anybody they had ever dealt with had committed since their dealings...
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 1
The ALP hit back barely a week later, with news that Minister for Ageing (but not an Ageing Minister, like some in the Holy Trinity), held shares in a bio-technology company , thus arising a conflict of interest, as said company related to his portfolio. While it initially appeared as an innocent mistake, it later emerged that as an act of contrition, he sold the shares and donated the proceeds to a "charity". Unfortunately the supposed "Charity" wasn't a charity at all, but the conservative values group Family Council Of Queensland...Looks like Santo forgot to read the Clause about "conflicts of interest".
Body count: ALP 1 Libs 2
Has it ended? Maybe... for what started as a desperate character assassination of Saint Kev, in order to peg a few points back in the polls, would appear to have backfired, and the Government's own moral credibility is the one on the line.... careful what you wish for eh John?

Labels: Australian Politics, Ian Campbell, John Howard, Kelvin Thomson, Kevin Rudd, Santo Santoro

posted by The Dentist @ 4:15 pm