The Bob Carr Of Federal Labor

by Paul Kelly - The Australian

After seven months as Australian Labor Party leader, Kevin Rudd has destroyed much of the old orthodoxy about himself: there can be no doubt he is apopulist from the Centre, a media junkie, a community-based politician and a relentless student of public sentiment and the 24-hour political cycle.

Rudd's trajectory is remarkably similar to that of Bob Carr, who was once dismissed as a goofy, bespectacled, head-in-the-clouds intellectual, keen on policy but assumed to be hopeless on politics, warming the NSW Labor leader's seat until a real politician could take over. But he became a political master, an unparalleled media manipulator and Labor's longest continually serving NSW premier.

The doubts about Rudd in recent years have been similar. He was typically branded as boring, remote and unsexy. The smart chatter was that he conducted television interviews like a university tutorial, with a diplomat's aloofness and an intellectual's bent that meant he would never relate to the common man.

One person who saw through such nonsense was Carr. He was one of the first senior ALP figures to commit to Rudd as the future leader. And he never wavered. Carr regarded the entire Mark Latham experiment as a disaster and was happy to share his private view that Rudd was the man.

The sustained polling lead that Rudd has established over John Howard was not inevitable. His political persona has been to reassure, thereby sanctioning people to express, not repress, their anti-Howard instincts.

Rudd's political-media skills have kept the Government under sustained pressure. He is elusive as a target and quick on the attack. Above all, Rudd is a populist who invites comparison with other populists such as Howard, Carr and Tony Blair.

He has Howard's popular instincts as a social conservative and hardliner on terrorism; he has the essence of Blairism, a populist modernist who has compassion, cares about the environment, Christian values, young people and the world of smart casual; and he has Carr's effortless penchant for spin, conducted with a fluency and conviction that beguiles a media that otherwise would be cynical.

Like Carr, Rudd is a serious intellect. Carr would attend the beach volleyball at Bondi during the 2000 Olympics, only to plug in his Walkman to hear a lecture on James Joyce.

The Australian media will tolerate intellectuals being populists but not populists being populists.

Carr lived comfortably in the parallel universes of populist politics and intellectual life. The signs are that the Mandarin-speaking Rudd thrives in this dichotomy.

Asked about Rudd's performance, Carr says all his sound bites are designed to expound "a great truth: that a change of government will be a change for the country but it won't be threatening change".

Selling such an idea is the essence of populist leadership.

"The voters are smarter than the commentators," Carr says.

"If they see a leader speak with authority, sincerity and a spark of intelligence, they give you marks. The superficial things - like wearing glasses, reading books, being able to finish a sentence - don't hurt you. The so-called nerd is probably smarter at a press conference or being interrogated at a media event."

Consider Rudd's populism during the past fortnight: he has joined the Facebook generation, become a supermarket-sensitive guy, alert to grocery prices, while launching a national compassion strategy over mortgage stress. Carr, like Rudd and Howard, was a driven politician prepared to get out of bed early and bury his opponent in a media blitz.

As NSW premier, operating in Howard's home state, Carr was usually with Howard: witness his tough line on boatpeople, terrorism and law and order, and his projection as a fiscal conservative. With Howard as his opponent and Carr's success as a model, Rudd's path should hardly surprise anybody.

He learned from Howard that politics is the permanent campaign. The decline of ideology, class divide and traditional voter loyalty has produced a new brand of politics: the leader as populist. Howard as populist penetrated the Labor base. Blair as populist won votes from parts of Britain that had never returned a Labour MP. So Rudd is creating his own populist model.

Populism is a technique that can mobilise policy strength or conceal policy weakness. And this leads directly to the deeper question about Rudd. Where is his populism leading and does Rudd himself really know?

The modern leader becomes a fusion of politician, celebrity and therapist. Take Rudd's recent performance on the economy. Knowing that he cannot defeat Howard on the "better economic manager" question, Rudd has pulled the populist lever. It is based on Labor's market research and highlights a contradiction of contemporary Australia, as a very rich economy with many households under considerable stress.

Prosperity is measured in economic growth, strong increases in household income, higher asset prices and plenty of jobs. The stress is a more complex function of a hi-tech, faster pace of life, higher expectations, fraught personal relationships, conflict over values, rising household debt, work-family pressures, increased interest rates and the compulsion to maintain income growth in a user-pays society.

Consider Rudd's exploitation of stress via price pressures. He offers no solutions, no guarantees and, so far, no policy likely to make a difference. Perhaps we should be relieved. The purpose is to show that Rudd cares and Howard doesn't, that Rudd is listening and Howard isn't. This fits into Labor's main theme of Howard as yesterday's man.

Rudd pledges, instead, to have a petrol commissioner within the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, an ACCC inquiry into grocery prices, a housing minister within the cabinet, a housing-affordability strategy in office and a housing summit next week.

No disasters here. But the risk with populist politics is that they produce populist policies.

So far, Rudd and shadow treasurer Wayne Swan have avoided this. They are talking about more transparency and better competition policy. But Rudd will have to make in-principle pledges from his housing summit and this looms as another test of his economic policy credentials.

Labor has one hefty economic policy negative: its industrial relations policy. It cannot afford another negative. This point is reinforced by Labor's determination to have a winner-picking climate change strategy and uncertainty about the extent of its manufacturing policy interventionist plans.

Remember, Rudd has sent conflicting messages on the economy: he is for business and for the unions; he believes in the market and he believes in intervention; he is a fiscal conservative yet pledges a series of revolutions in Australian economic policy.

On the economy, Rudd presents as a populist and a policy man. His messages are contradictory and confusing. He needs to bring more strategic clarity to his economic policy.

This is Howard's last hope of winning and it will occasion an extensive heavy assault.