Prime Ministers with high approval ratings are in a great position when times turn tough. They can afford to risk the loss of a little political skin. The only trouble is that most politicians, not surprisingly, love being popular and want to stay that way. Kevin Rudd is no exception.
Rudd’s riding so high in the opinion polls that he could easily take a few more risks. If he explained the need to do so, there’s a good chance voters would continue to give him a big tick. So far, however, he seems addicted to over-compensating people for any decision that some might find unpopular. If the decision involves financial pain, no matter how small, he throws money at anyone who could be affected. If some other government policy turns electorally tricky, his immediate instinct is to resort to overblown rhetoric to blame anyone who’s easy to hate.
As will be explained below, crunch time is rapidly approaching on the financial front. But even extravagant attacks on evil-doers can lose their lustre. Normally, it’s pretty safe to brand terrorists, drug dealers, arsonists and people smugglers as evil. But Rudd went too far in congratulating the Australian Federal Police for “cracking down hard on terrorists” when it arrested Mohamed Haneef, only to find that an entirely innocent man had been falsely charged.
Rudd seemed on safer ground with his recent denunciation of all people smugglers as “vilest form of human life . . . [who] should rot in hell”. Clearly, he did not want a suspicious fire on an asylum seekers’ boat to undermine the more humane approach to potential refugees that his government has adopted compared to Howard’s.
But his passionate language was much too sweeping. Not everyone who smuggled people across borders in World War 11 was evil. Rudd words also prompted a newspaper to use the headline —Deal with the Devil — to describe an AFP attempt to recruit a people smuggler in Indonesia as an informer. Suddenly, this standard police technique for penetrating criminal organisations was portrayed after Rudd’s outburst as a repugnant transaction with the devil.
Although Rudd is a devout Christian with a high regard for Catholicism, he drew fire from a leading Jesuit theologian, Andrew Hamilton. Writing in the online publication Eureka Street last Thursday, Hamilton said Rudd’s approach contrasts with the Christian view of moral evil. Hamilton said, “Seen in this light, the incident involving people smugglers and asylum seekers requires a more complex view than that taken by the PM . . . all the people involved are human beings like us, and the line of sinfulness runs through them as for us.”
Hamilton said the people smugglers are also caught up in the sin of others — embodied in the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the initial encouragement of the Taliban for geopolitical ends, the current military action, and the ethnic hostility between different tribal groups. He said, “We should also give full weight to the selfishness that has led Australians to evade the claims that asylum seekers make on us by virtue of their shared humanity”.
Politically, however, Rudd has more to lose if keeps chucking money around in an attempt to remain popular. He promised so much compensation for the (often minor) impact of his proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme that he undermined the original purpose of putting a price on emissions. If the badly flawed scheme proceeds, the compensation will chew up $12 billion in 2011-12, leaving nothing over to help fund the deployment of new technology essential to cutting emissions.
Next, Rudd responded to the global recession with $22 billion in cash handouts. Some payments sent exactly the wrong message by being called “bonuses”, long after there was no revenue bonanza to distribute. Trying to stimulate the economy was fine. But it would have been much better to focus most of the $22 billion on the productive side of the economy. Jobs could then have been directly created to achieve something of more lasting benefit than occured when someone spent their $1400 handout on an overseas holiday or an imported trinket for a pet.
Now, the Treasurer Wayne Swan is facing a $50 billon deficit in his May 12 budget. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, subject to two provisos. First, the government must take convincing steps to unwind the deficit over time. This can’t be done simply by hoping revenue will rebound to its pre-recessions level. That relied on a huge commodities boom, which is unlikely to be repeated for decades.
Secondly, Swan must cut profligate spending on middle and upper class welfare — especially for well-off retirees — that proliferated under John Howard and Peter Costello. Already the Labor government is claiming it can't afford to keep its promise to expand the opportunities for young Australians to go to university and contribute to the nation’s future prosperity. It is affordable. All Swan has to do is make room for the necessary spending by cutting the wide array of subsidies given to people who can easily afford to fend for themselves.
Provided Rudd explains why the budget must be recast to promote a sustained economic recovery, he could even maintain his cherished popularity rating.