Dr Nelson has challenged Mr Rudd to take firm action on climate change at the G8 meeting.
“Now he’s actually going to be able to eyeball these people,” he told reporters. “And he ought to be a human blowtorch and put direct pressure on them to actually commit to a global response to climate change.”
Sustaining a credible policy position is one thing — one that is proving difficult for Nelson on climate; a descent into utter irrelevance beckons –but it seems the leader of the opposition is also incapable of sustaining a metaphor to the end of a sentence. A blowtorch, Dr, does not apply pressure. That said, there is a challenge for the Prime Minister in the opposition’s resort to hip-pocket populism in the face of encroaching climatic calamity. (Unless of course the rubberised Mr Fantastic and friends can save us, in which case Ross Garnaut can halt his town hall tour right now.)
The risk for Rudd is that once again he will be rope-a-doped into following Nelson into a micro tit-for-tat discussion of fuel prices, pensions and the like. It’s happened before in the forgettable aftermath of this year’s Federal Budget, when Liberal and Labor traded fuel discounts in a ludicrous display that hogged several 24-hour news cycles, but did nothing to illuminate the bigger picture. And it’s that picture that Kevin Rudd was elected to address. That’s his strength, and like a bucket of water to the Human Torch, he loses his political presence and appeal when he sinks to the sort of crass pettiness that seems to be Nelson’s forte.
Now be fair to Rudd over the dopey debate on petrol prices. That was not led by him, nor fostered by him beyond one mild remark by Bowen that the tax review might look at the interplay between the excise and the GST, made a few hours before Nelson’s dopey 5cents.
The media initially picked it up with stupid stories of people struggling to fill the tractor to take the kiddies to schools around the corner and trotted out people all over the land “just making ends meet” on $3,000 per week to help tell the tale. It took the media over a week to figure out that Brenda Brenda was talking about $1.20 or so a week. Meanwhile the punters tuned out, took the trains, took the buses, took up the role of “FuelWatch” by bleating day and night about record prices (which haven’t been mentioned for some time now) and tried to pretend that Fuel Watch was some big brother scam.
In reality it is nothing more than a data base, like this one, that will provide information and stop the practice of fuel being more expensive from one minute to the next as the dealers follow the stock market instead of what they actually paid for the fuel.
Kevin Rudd gave Nelson not one thing. Nothing, nada and zip. It is just that the media were deprived of oxygen and didn’t much like it.