Australian politics: Rudd renewal

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

FRESHLY restored as Australia’s Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd insists that the cabinet he appointed on July 1st contains the “best players on the field”. Tony Abbott, meanwhile, the leader of the conservative coalition opposition, dismisses it as the “C-team”.

Certainly, Mr Rudd drew on depleted ranks for his ministers. Since his overthrow of Julia Gillard as Labor leader and prime minister on June 26th, some of the party’s leading lights have rushed for the exit. Seven ministers quit rather than serve under Mr Rudd. Labor’s most traumatic division in years will test Mr Rudd’s pledge to unite the party “with every effort I have in my being”.

He has precious little time. Ms Gillard had called a federal election for September 14th. Since he toppled her, Mr Rudd has hinted it could be a bit later. He is keen to attend the G20 leaders’ summit in Russia a week earlier. He started the first weekend of his second prime ministership barnstorming. Mr Rudd’s first stop was an opposition constituency in western Sydney. Friendly locals crowded him in a shopping centre. Then he flew almost 3,000km (1,800 miles) to the Northern Territory for the state funeral of an aboriginal man, a notable singer known as Mr Yunupingu.

In restoring Mr Rudd and defenestrating Ms Gillard, Labor parliamentarians hoped to cut the opposition’s crushing lead in opinion polls. Their gamble shows early promise. A poll on July 1st showed Labor’s support six points higher than a week earlier, when Ms Gillard was prime minister, though the government was still behind after second preference votes were distributed. Mr Rudd, on the other hand, grabbed a 14-point lead over Mr Abbott as preferred prime minister, compared with Ms Gillard’s earlier 12-point deficit.

The poll, and the cabinet departures, highlight the conundrum Mr Rudd will have to solve if he hopes to lead Labor back to power. Although many voters prefer him to Ms Gillard, plenty of his colleagues despair of his micromanagement—autocratic but not often decisive—which was on display when he was prime minister in 2007-10. The opposition has already prepared a video for YouTube of his colleagues citing “dysfunction”, “contempt for the cabinet” and other bitter memories.

Mr Rudd’s ousting of Australia’s first woman prime minister could also hurt him with some voters. On the other hand, six women sit in the new cabinet. Some ministers, such as Chris Bowen, the new treasurer, supported him in previous leadership battles, but others are new faces. Mr Rudd protests that he has learned from his past mistakes and that he will listen better to his ministers. After the first cabinet meeting Tanya Plibersek, who survived in her job as health minister, said Mr Rudd had taken a “very collegiate” approach.

He will need more of that as he seeks to fix some policies that had made Ms Gillard unpopular, including a carbon tax and dealing with asylum-seekers arriving by boat. But at least Mr Rudd has shown that Mr Abbott can no longer expect the election to be a cakewalk.

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