ECONOMIST John Kenneth Galbraith once said: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
If this test were to be applied to the leadership of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, both would fall far short of greatness.
At least Rudd started well, identifying climate change as the “great moral challenge of our age” and working tirelessly to introduce an emissions trading scheme to …

Julia Gillard once pledged herself to the unions, but today her allegiances are unclear.
AS the dust settles over the prime ministerial demise of Kevin Rudd and the hype surrounding Julia Gillard subsides, the questions remain: who is she and what does she stand for?
The fact that Gillard was parachuted into the job of prime minister by the largely “faceless” union backroom boys has led to the inevitable claim that she is a puppet of the union movement. Gillard recognised she needed to move quickly to counter that impression and declared …

THE Rudd government’s resource super-profits tax is causing considerable consternation across the world, with global capital markets in utter disbelief.
It is generally recognised that a key responsibility for any national leader is to safeguard the country’s reputation abroad.
For an Australian prime minister this is not only vital for our trade and export relations, but also for our standing as an attractive destination for international capital markets.
Kevin Rudd seemed to recognise this imperative during a visit to Beijing in April 2008 when he observed: “Australia is an open market when it …

KEVIN Rudd’s threat to force “co-operative federalism” on to the states on the issue of health sees him reading the electorate very well.
The PM is keenly aware of how long a memory can last when you’ve been forced to wait for five hours in casualty with a sprained ankle, or how deeply personal the political becomes when you’re forced to endure the grinding pain of a worn-out hip for 12 months before you can get a replacement.
If he hasn’t fiscally hammered the states into an agreement, Rudd may well get …

WITH the rise of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott federally and Kristina Keneally in NSW, religion is re-encroaching on politics.
The biggest influence is in NSW. When Catholic World Youth Day descended on that state in July last year, many taxpayers resented being forced to pay $20 million in security charges for the event and $40m for the use of Randwick racecourse. The reason that atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Anglicans and even a few Catholics were being forced to go along with this was essentially because then premier Morris …

TONY Abbott should not be underestimated. His direct approach to politics will have a powerful appeal to regional Australia. Abbott may have a Sydney seat in federal parliament but his greatest appeal may be outside NSW.
Too often much of Australia’s daily media coverage is Canberra-centric and political mood changes in states such as Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania are not likely to be detected in Canberra until a Newspoll or election result has highlighted them.
The reality is the new federal Opposition Leader’s direct, knockabout, open style will be …

THE timing of the departure of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s highly talented chief of staff Mike Kaiser last Friday could not have been worse. Kaiser’s announcement that he will join the federal government’s national broadband network from December 1, as head of government relations, came only a day after the scrapping of the controversial Traveston dam by federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett.
Brisbane’s Courier-Mail reported that the day before his retirement announcement, Bligh’s office had denied Kaiser had quit.
Kaiser’s retirement and its timing sent a message that the Queensland Labor government …

THE great mystery of Australian politics is why Kevin Rudd’s approval rating remains so high.
It seems that the only people who don’t like him are those who actually know him: journalists like Annabel Crabb, for example, who has just called him a ‘faux-moralist fraud’ and colleagues like Mark Latham (no slouch at nastiness himself) who once called him a ‘real piece of work’. For everyone who’s never had to deal with the Prime Minister, though, it seems that he’s the slightly nerdy, deeply Christian magician who’s saved Australia from the …