From :
Piers Ackerman
IN the past six years, Labor has not only trashed its own brand but it has wrought incalculable damage to the Australian political fabric.
Assisted to an enormous degree by the propagandising power of the monolithic state broadcaster, the ABC, Labor, under Kevin Rudd, then Julia Gillard, then Rudd again, has crossed so many lines that it once claimed to respect that it may take decades to re-establish any sense of public trust.
The grotesque claims made by Rudd, flanked by Treasurer Chris Bowen and Finance Minister Penny Wong, about the cost of the Coalition's policies on Thursday were so staggeringly outrageous that three federal economic agencies - the Departments of Treasury and Finance and the Parliamentary Budget office - took the unprecedented step of publicly rejecting Labor's falsehoods.
Rudd accused the Coalition of a "$10 billion" fraud but it rapidly became apparent that the real frauds were Rudd, Bowen and Wong.
On cue, the trained sheep at the ABC started bleating a call for the Coalition to release its own costings while, true to form, overlooking the fact that the Coalition has said it will release its costings this week and not at 5pm next Friday as Labor has done to avoid scrutiny before the last two elections.
But while this stupendous lie put out by the increasingly desperate Labor camp is noteworthy because of its sheer brazenness, it is not that singular.
It is part of the pattern of deceit that Labor has engaged in since coming to office in 2007 in an attempt to camouflage its lack of principle and the mediocrity of its leadership.
There are the massive serial lies about the non-existent Budget surpluses and there are the standouts like "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead" but the constant barrage of deception has stripped Australian political life of the essential trust and transparency necessary for democracy to function smoothly.
Ironically, the trend was set in NSW, the State which Rudd effectively told to drop dead during this campaign with his ignorant remarks about Sydney's need for a second airport and his harebrained scheme to move the naval presence from Sydney Harbour at a cost of upward of 4000 jobs.
Bob Carr, a failed former premier and a lacklustre Foreign Minister, but nevertheless a literary bloke, would well appreciate the Machiavellian crew that he recruited and trained in Macquarie Street and set loose on the federal ALP.
Former Opposition leader Kim Beazley was felled and replaced by Rudd by the NSW thugs who were later called upon to tilt the numbers for Gillard to knife Rudd. She, in turn, was betrayed by the Victorian Bill Shorten.
That Rudd received a momentary rise in popularity when he regained the Lodge was unsurprising - Gillard's problems with the AWU investigation, her screeching tirade against Opposition leader Tony Abbott, her fostering of the handbag hit squad (whose proclaimed feminist members not only ignored former Speaker Peter Slipper's disgusting observations on female genitalia but also quickly deserted the nation's first female PM) - had made herself deeply unpopular.
Rudd's also received a tick for his backflip on illegal boat arrivals, though that didn't last either as the PNG Solution proved as phony as the East Timor Solution, and even more importantly, as the public recognised that the "new" Rudd was basically the same monomaniacal psychopath his colleagues had rebelled against three years ago.
The naked lust for power has effectively killed the ambitions of most of the current generation of Labor MPs.
Rudd is certainly finished, no matter whether he holds his seat or not, and he doesn't deserve to.
The ticket being talked up to take over after the election, assuming that Abbott remains the likely winner is Bowen and Butler, as in Mark Butler, the current Climate Change Minister.
The best argument mounted for this ticket is that they are both grey men, or as one senior Labor figure told me: "They wouldn't stand out on a Sydney bus."
The high-flyers who were once touted as future Labor Prime Ministers are either going (like Craig Emerson) or too tarnished by their disloyalty (Shorten) or association with the current or former leadership to be salvageable.
Bowen, who may struggle to hold his seat, despite the ugly smear campaign he has been running against his opponent in McMahon, the respected former police officer Ray King, would still be lumbered with considerable baggage having spent his adult like working within Labor and the union movement.
Labor knows it has lost this one, it doesn't yet know to build for the future
