Here is how Mungo MacCallum explained the decline in Labor’s electoral fortunes in today’s edition of Crikey:
The government’s popularity has been falling for months, and it has now got to the point where the slide looks unstoppable. How has it come to this?
Well, stand and take a bow, you factional bosses. These are the men (they are all men) who insisted that Kevin Rudd abandon his climate change stand, the retreat from conviction that started the rot. And when the rot set in, they demanded that he be replaced, precipitating a vicious split in the party that utterly derailed Julia Gillard’s already abysmal campaign for re-election.
Polling replaced principle; the views of a shonky focus group in the western suburbs of Sydney were considered more important than consistency, decency, commonsense and the ideas and ideals on which Rudd had been elected in a landslide less than three years before. Rudd’s real crime was summed up by one of his executioners, Senator Mark Arbib: “he has stopped listening to me.” Julia Gillard, apparently, still is listening, and is likely to suffer ignominious defeat as a result.
Not a long way from my position in Lose the strategists, Julia.
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