Journalists let Leftist leader off the hook

By Christopher Pearson

Some commentators on national politics are content to put a point of view. Others always seem to want to dictate the terms of the debate and to patrol the boundaries, announcing where the middle ground is and what questions are out of order. I think of them as the orchestrators of the national conversation and note, in the wake of damaging detail about Kevin Rudd's dealings with [corrupt] Brian Burke, that they were especially busy last week.

Matt Price is The Australian's Sketch columnist and, along with columns in various Sunday papers, he also has regular spots on radio in NSW, Victoria and South Australia. On Wednesday he wrote that most of Australia was heartily sick of hearing about Burke. He reckoned "the shellacking Rudd has been copping from the Government has been both preposterous and counterproductive". He even promised, if the Burke imbroglio improves the Coalition's standing in the opinion polls, to buy a panama hat and eat it, an undertaking I'm looking forward to watching him honour.

Of course it's only natural that Price, the leading chronicler of Kevinism and its rich vein of comic possibilities, should want to keep the Opposition Leader in play as long as possible. He probably thinks of him with something of the proprietorial fondness most 1970s cartoonists felt for Billy McMahon or the Schadenfreude evident in Max Gillies's impersonations of Bob Hawke.

Far less forgivable were Michelle Grattan's performances as political editor of The Age and daily contributor to ABC Radio National's Breakfast program. Her measured tone in either medium belied the fact she was engaging in a lot of special pleading on Rudd's behalf. Her most brazen moment was on Wednesday, when she led a comment piece with the line: "The federal Government's attack on Kevin Rudd over the WA corruption scandal backfired yesterday when John Howard promoted to the front bench a senator with shares in companies linked to disgraced lobbyist Brian Burke."

The suggestion was that there was some kind of moral equivalence between the Opposition Leader's entanglement with Burke and senator David Johnston, in common with thousands of other people, having bought shares in two publicly listed mining companies that paid Burke to lobby for them. But as Johnston pointed out, it was a ridiculous suggestion. Ordinary shareholders have no say in such decisions; they're matters for company directors.

Try as the fourth estate may to trivialise Rudd's problems over Burke, there's no getting around his demeanour from Thursday afternoon until Sunday, when the heat was really on. His body language during the first long press conference was shifty and evasive. He seldom looked directly at the people who'd asked questions as he answered them. In later encounters with the press he ignored unwanted questions, stuck to a script and looked sweaty and sometimes panic-stricken. For the most part the media may have decided that there was no further case to answer, but he behaved like a man who could see everything coming horribly unstuck. Even on Monday, during his press conference in the Treasury Gardens in Melbourne, a reporter from The Age noted his right leg was trembling.

It is a pity that so few commentators at the time pointed out something the whole of the political class takes for granted. Rudd's decision to face the media may have looked courageous. However, it was far less risky than the traditional recourse of those who claim to have been misrepresented, which is to state your case in parliament, where misleading statements, even if unintended, can have direr and more immediate consequences.

Just how much less forensic than political opponents the press gallery is apt to be is obvious from a reading of Thursday's transcript. Take, for example, this exchange over Rudd's reasons for being in Perth:

Journalist: "Could I put it to you that while the leadership wasn't on the boil then, that you'd been engaged in a long-term strategy to have yourself known to the far regions of the party empire and that ... you went to Western Australia three or four times in the year for, at least in part, that purpose?"

Rudd: "No, that is not the case. I had a job as the shadow minister for foreign affairs. I also had subsequently a job as the shadow minister for trade. The presence of me in the west was because we were receiving general requests from the national secretary and others to get the message of the party out to every part of the country, and I was doing that. And I can't recall what other functions I was attending at the time. I'm sure there was a number of them. I remember, for example, on one of those visits, I can't exactly remember when, speaking to a whole bunch of students at the University of Western Australia. I remember also speaking to a large number of, a gathering put together by KPMG in Western Australia."

Rudd denied it point-blank, but even his most one-eyed supporters should acknowledge the benefits that constantly criss-crossing the country in 2005 had for his long-term leadership ambitions. The claims of the press conference as a place for testing politicians' truthfulness pale by comparison with the forum of parliament. Apart from showcasing Rudd's phenomenal recall of precisely what he didn't say, Thursday's encounter demonstrated that most modern journalists are too polite - at least when it comes to dealing with Labor leaders - to do their jobs properly.

If that sounds a harsh judgment, think about Rudd's vagueness on the matter of what he could remember about what he was doing on his visits to Perth. The public has a right to know and you might even imagine it would be in the leader's interests to set the record straight. In fact, we don't need to rely on his memory because we know that, along with everyone else on the front bench, his staff members keep a diary for him and hard copies of it are routinely printed out for them so they know where he is and when he can be contacted. If the media were interested in finding out what commitments he had in Perth, they should have demanded to see the diary entries for the relevant days.

Had he been making a statement to the house about his doings, as the Prime Minister often does, he'd have been expected as a matter of course to consult his diary and furnish details, and woe betide him if his account was less than exhaustive.

What was on Rudd's mind that set his leg trembling? Why did he repeatedly accuse Howard last weekend of taking the nation to war "on a lie" about weapons of mass destruction when he did not reject the evidence of WMDs in such terms at the time, if at all? Why accuse Howard of lying - that word again - about the AWB fiasco, when he knows a royal commission cleared all the relevant ministers of misconduct and found AWB had misled them? Why, most intriguingly, was he upping the ante so far as to call for a snap election, despite all the practical difficulties with getting half-Senate polls out of alignment with general elections and plenty of candidates not yet preselected.

Accusing someone else of lying when your own truthfulness is in question is a primary school gambit, although I seem to remember teacher's pets sometimes got away with it. Can Rudd have thought most people wouldn't notice that's what he was doing or that they wouldn't care? Or was he perhaps hoping to send a semi-coded message: I may have been a bit loose with the truth but he's a habitual liar, far worse than me?

As for the cry of "bring it on, let's have an early election", the obvious attraction is that it's a great way to change the subject. Winning an election would also be the best way to establish, or to reinforce, his moral legitimacy to govern, especially if it had been called into question or was at imminent risk of being impugned. Burke hasn't had anything to say about his meetings with Rudd but, then, he doesn't have to say anything and it doubtless suits his purposes better not to do so. Right now his silence is worth a great deal to federal Labor. Can there be any serious doubt that Burke probably has the power to destroy Rudd with a single phone call, where it's a case of his word against the Opposition Leader's? Such is the cunning of the snare that Burke wouldn't even have to be telling the truth to end Rudd's leadership.

Rudd has allowed himself to become a hostage for the foreseeable future. Never mind what may or may not emerge of what he said to Burke in the course of at least one call to a phone line we now know was being tapped by the Corruption and Crime Commission. Rudd may not have realised until last week it was suddenly brought home to him, along with the rest of us, how comprehensively Burke had got his hooks into him. As Peter Costello put it, "Burke saw him coming and played him like a piano."

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Dear fun police, you'll never take me alive

By Caroline Overington

Late in 2004, gadfly Christopher Hitchens was asked by his editor at Vanity Fair to take a walk around New York City, breaking all manner of rules. Hitchens did as bidden: he sat on a milk crate, put his feet on the subway seats and rode a bicycle without putting both feet on the pedals. (It must have been something to see, since Hitchens often wears his shirts open to the waist to better display the hair on his belly, apparently known as the "Pelt of the Hitch".) He tried to smoke while drinking at a bar, putting forward the position that cigarettes improved his memory and digestion, and made him a finer writer. Still, he was quickly told to put it out.

For this orgy of lawlessness, Hitchens could have been fined many hundreds of dollars. The point, of course, was to demonstrate how safe (and dull?) New York has become, with so many petty rules in place. Surely the people would soon rise up and riot? In fact, it's getting worse. Last month, a New York lawmaker proposed a ban on the wearing of gadgets such as iPods while crossing the street because people have been killed doing just that, oblivious to cars while grooving away to loud music. There is talk of banning the word nigger - even in music - because it's so offensive.

Hitchens says there is "nobody good enough in the world" to be a censor, let alone of language. "No one should have that job," he said recently. "That is a flat-out fundamentalist proposition to me." Why, he complained, "is one not allowed to go to hell in their own way?"

Of course, what starts in New York spreads like lava across the globe and so the pettiness has come to Australia. Last week two Sydneysiders were banned from smoking in their home, a decision that came after organisers banned the Mexican wave at the cricket, which came after Sydney's Waverley Council announced a plan to ban trans fats, which came after music fans were warned not to wave Australian flags at the Big Day Out.

Then, last week, organisers announced a list of restrictions for the walk celebrating the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. People would not be able to just turn up on the day and saunter with abandon. Walkers would have to register in advance and say how many people would be in their group. They wouldn't be able to bring a skateboard or an excited puppy. Worst of all, they would be told what time they could start walking, and there would be no stopping on the way.

Australian Privacy Foundation chairman Roger Clarke who, as with Hitchens, has had it up to here with officialdom, says the issue is basically one of "gutlessness; we are quivering at the ludicrous". My colleague Peter Lalor, author of The Bridge, is also dismayed. In his magnificent book, he tells the tale of a nine-year-old boy who rode more than 1400km on horseback, unsupervised, from Leongatha in Victoria just to make the official opening. But that was 1932: now, even Lalor admits he won't let his nine-year-old cross the street without supervision.

We know why it's happening, of course: we are trying to take the pain and risk out of living. The trouble is, it can't - and shouldn't - be done. When I wrote about the rules for the bridge walk in The Weekend Australian last Saturday, a kind reader got in touch to say: "Yes, it's as if the length of life is the only thing that matters." Which, in turn, is like that old joke: if you give up alcohol, cigarettes, red meat and magnificent sex with people you hardly know, you may not live longer but it will certainly feel like it.

I can't count the number of reckless things I've done in the past week, but here's a sample: I rode my retro-styled motor scooter to the beach wearing not leathers but a bikini; I dived from a cliff into the sea at Tamarama while carrying a handful of my recently departed dog's ashes, even though the beach was technically closed and there were blue bottles all about, because I wanted to have one last swim with her; I sat in the garden with a neighbour and we laughed and drank so much red wine that we forgot it was a school night and let the children fall asleep in their uniforms on the loungeroom floor.

The following day, we bounced around on our trampoline, which is the old-fashioned type with no fence around it, so we could have fallen off at any time and snapped a bone. And when it started to rain we got so soaked we had to peel off our clothes. None of it was safe, not all of it was painless, but we felt magnificently happy and alive, and that is more important.

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One big happy nuclear family

Nuclear power is looking palatable to more people, and this will please the Government, reports Dennis Shanahan

For a while it looked as if John Howard had leaped too far ahead of public opinion on nuclear energy and got himself into serious electoral trouble. The ALP certainly thought so and at the last Labor national executive meeting eight days ago, approval was given to a draft letter for ALP candidates to frighten the life out of their constituents about a nuclear power station in their back yard.

Howard and the Liberal leadership are convinced the benefits of being seen to be forward-looking with nuclear energy as a carbon-free energy source is a long-term winner with those concerned about a cataclysmic future from global warming brought about by the use of fossil fuels. There are, of course, Liberal MPs in marginal seats who are frightened of Labor's not-in-my-back-yard campaign. The Prime Minister's campaign for the past two years has been directed at a big-picture image of doing something practical about greenhouse gas emissions, with a view to metropolitan seats that worry senior Liberal ranks.

Labor, as it battles accusations of being anti-job for adopting green policies and urging the the limitation of the coal industry through the Kyoto protocol, is trying to give way on some of its longstanding ideological positions and recognise the futility of a ban on new uranium mines. An expected change of policy at the national conference next month allowing new uranium mines in Australia could easily lead to the opening of several new mines through to 2012 in Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and the expansion of our $570million-a-year uranium export industry. That could lead to all sorts of jobs in prosperous mining areas and greenfield sites with high levels of indigenous unemployment - not to mention prolonging the resources boom. This is consistent with Labor polling on uranium mining being more acceptable than nuclear energy.

The other side of Labor's coin is to run all the harder against nuclear power in Australia and conduct a populist not-in-my-back-yard campaign while promising to address the greenhouse gas emissions problem by ratifying the Kyoto protocol and lifting targets for renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Labor has polled people on the impact of a nuclear power station on their real estate values and found devastating results. Hence, the questions to Howard about whether he would allow a nuclear power plant in his own lower north shore Sydney seat of Bennelong. Howard steadfastly refused to rule it out, but there's little doubt a floating wind farm taking over Lavender Bay on the harbour or a pig manure bio-mass plant on the city foreshore would be taken equally askance.

Historically the issue of nuclear power in Australia has been flirted with by various governments - Liberal and Labor - but opposed by the population on the basis of not wanting a nuclear plant nearby, the prospect of adding to radioactive waste and the sheer expense.

Al Gore's Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth and the British Government's Stern report, which warned of the catastrophic economic and social impacts of man-made greenhouse emissions - "worse that the two world wars and the Depression combined" - have changed public perceptions around the world. Every peculiar local weather event is seen as a result of global warming.

While a storm of public opinion was brewing, practical steps by governments around the world on nuclear energy, as well as self-interested actions undermining emissions-trading schemes, have combined to change the underpinnings of the nuclear industry. It's like a perfect storm building in disparate Atlantic nations. Nations with unimpeachable social progressive agendas, such as Sweden and Finland, are choosing to expand nuclear power; the British Labour Party, under greenhouse zealot Tony Blair, is considering renewing its nuclear power stations; neutral organisations such as the European Union are promoting safety in the former Soviet states; long-term nuclear nations such as France are providing waste treatment; and nuclear holocaust threats such as Russia and the US are moving towards recycling nuclear waste.

The EU's attempts to establish a carbon-trading market and push a price incentive to cut greenhouse emissions have effectively failed. The price for a tonne of carbon has slumped from E33 ($56) to just a single euro per tonne after a second round of overallocating carbon credits. Even Brussels-based green groups such as the Climate Action Network are despairing and describe the lax credit allocation and market as "a major disappointment and worrying precedent".

The Australian nuclear debate, such as it is, has missed these developments politically although the public appears to have raced ahead. According to the latest Newspoll survey, when asked about nuclear power linked to solving greenhouse gases there has been a dramatic reversal with more people supporting nuclear power than not for the first time. During the past four months support for nuclear power has risen from just 35 per cent in December to 45 per cent last weekend and opposition has fallen in the same time from 50 to 40 per cent.

Previous Newspoll surveys in May and December last year had the highest support at 38 per cent and lowest opposition at 50 per cent with 40 per cent being "strongly opposed". The key difference stems from the question of trying to reduce greenhouse gases. While there was traditionally a higher level of support for nuclear energy among job-loving males, at 53 per cent, there was little support among health-conscious women, at 38per cent. Interestingly, support for nuclear energy was up at 49 per cent among 18-to-34-year-olds, suggesting a sharp awareness among younger Australians about greenhouse gas emissions. People are still overwhelmingly opposed to having a nuclear power plant in their back yard, with only one in four saying they would support a nuclear plant in their region. The strength of Labor's NIMBY campaign is political. Yet it is a dangerously narrow proposition given the speed with which popular opinion is shifting.

In France, where 80 per cent of the domestic electricity comes from nuclear plants, there is now a PIMBY effect - Put It In My Back Yard. One of the key reasons to build a new, third nuclear plant at Flamanville in Normandy was positive lobbying from local councils, business and people wanting to add to the more than 10,000 direct jobs in the area dependent on the nuclear industry. There are court challenges to the planning for the plant but they are not locally popular. France has come to live with nuclear plants and the jobs and cheap electricity that go with them. France's leading-edge nuclear recycling and reprocessing plant at La Hague has encouraged French politicians and power generators to claim France has solved the nuclear waste problem. It is said to cut net waste by 95 per cent. The French are returning remaining waste locked in a vitreous mass to the customer.

By about 2012 Australia will be accepting back its processed waste from the Lucas Heights nuclear research centre and will be confronted with a practical demonstration of nuclear recycling and waste storage.

Sweden and Finland, bastions of social democracy and environmental protection, are also expanding their nuclear energy programs because they fear less snow will result in less hydroelectricity in Scandinavia and they don't want to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. All these countries want energy security first and in a form that is greenhouse-friendly second. Of course, they are expanding their renewable energy sources with huge offshore wind farms, solar plants and solar thermal heating but they believe they cannot provide base-load electricity from these sources.

These are some of the iron laws of energy logic - all nations, including the developing economies of India and China, want energy security. Even China is prepared to cut projected economic growth to cut greenhouse emissions. Fossil fuels and nuclear energy will provide the bulk of the world's electricity needs at least until 2050. If you accept the need for immediate action to reduce greenhouse gases a lot by 2050, you have to consider the options of expanding renewable energy sources, taking advantage of "low-hanging fruit" by lifting energy efficiency, developing clean-coal technologies, using more natural gas and using more nuclear energy.

Howard's response to the Newspoll results this week was cautious and he still wanted to reassure the coal industry, which affects so many seats: "We have a future and growing demand for electricity and I think what over time is going to occur, if we are sensible, is that nuclear is going to be factored into that and it will contribute to the generation of electricity in the future and that will not necessarily mean that jobs are going to be lost in the coal industry." Australian politics is still sensitive to nuclear scares and coal industry job losses but the speed and strength with which the public has grasped concerns about global warming could override both sensitivities in the near future.

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Bipartisan Australian support for Bush's Asian policy

Democrat win worst scenario for Asia

By Greg Sheridan

Labor leader Kevin Rudd is a strong admirer of George W. Bush's foreign policy, especially in the area of most importance to Australia, namely Asia. Rudd recently told the Nine Network's Laurie Oakes: "There are many things that the Bush administration, its foreign policy in east Asia, has done absolutely right. "For example, the success in recent times in bringing the North Koreans to their senses over their nuclear program, the very skilful management, so far, of the China-Taiwan relationship."

This is a view shared not only by the Howard Government but by all arms of the Australian bureaucracy. Australia's ambassador to the US, Dennis Richardson, told The Australian this week that the Bush administration's record in Asia is impressive. Richardson said: "Over the last few years, the US has improved its bilateral relationship with each of China, Japan and India. I think you would have got long odds a few years back on that happening. And that set of trans-Pacific relationships determines the strategic environment in which Australia lives."

Richardson is dead right. The implication of both Rudd and Richardson's judgments (certainly shared by the Howard Government) is that the most difficult thing a Rudd government would face in Washington would not be the dying days of a Bush administration but a new Democratic administration, led by Hillary Clinton or someone else.

Just consider the scale of the Bush success in Asia. In US foreign policy, Asia is basically a Republican gig. The Democrats do Europe. When Bush came to office he stacked his foreign policy team with people with deep and diverse Asian experience: Colin Powell, Rich Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, Jim Kelly and many others. They implemented highly effective Asia strategies. Remember in the early days of the first Bush administration the wiseacres were all predicting a war between the US and China? Instead the relationship has been exceptionally stable. The Bush administration, while making sure China does not cross any red lines over Taiwan, has also disciplined Taiwan and dissuaded it from any grand pro-independence gestures, while protecting its de facto independence. The Bush administration has eschewed any protectionism towards China. China-US relations have had their ups and downs, but broadly they have been an unqualified success.

Japan has been an even bigger success. Mike Green of Georgetown University, writing in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, describes the ties between Bush and Japan's recently retired prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, as "the strongest relationship between a US president and a Japanese prime minister in history". More than that, just as envisaged in a pre-election document authored by Armitage, Japan was encouraged to a strategic and diplomatic renaissance, including renegotiating the US-Japan alliance so Japan is more a reciprocal security partner for the US than previously, and encouraging the trilateral security dialogue between the US, Japan and Australia.

India has been even more dramatic. The new strategic partnership between Washington and Delhi, including the nuclear partnership, is potentially more important than Nixon's opening to China, and also proceeds from long-standing analysis by Bush's senior Asia hands.

Now there is the agreement with North Korea, which admittedly still has a long way to go. There are two salient points about it. It was a triumph of the US mechanism, the six-party talks, because it involved South Korea and Japan giving aid to North Korea that the US Congress would never have allowed the US to give itself. And it represented success by the Bush administration in finally getting China to put some pressure on North Korea.

Add to that renewed high-level US attention to Indonesia, including the administration's long and successful battle to get Congress to lift restrictions on US-Indonesia military-to-military relations, and the most intimate US-Australian alliance since World War II.

The Republicans get Asia because they like Asia and spend a lot of time there. The Asian security system is essentially a US Cold War construct that Republicans have been running for the majority of the past 60 years. But there are deeper, structural reasons why Republicans do Asia and Democrats do Europe. In Asia, the nation state reigns supreme and everyone guards national sovereignty. They co-operate but they co-operate as separate nations. In Europe, liberal international institutionalism - the UN, the European Union, and others - has more of a hold. Obviously, with exceptions, Republicans are comfortable in Asia, Democrats in Europe.

So while the Middle East is a mess, Asia is an unqualified success for Bush, and this is of primary importance to us. Australian officials have already worked systematically to identify key figures in a likely future Democrat administration. Those nominated include: Bill Richardson, the Hispanic former governor of New Mexico; Jim Steinberg of the Brookings Institution who was formerly Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser; Kurt Campbell, a former Pentagon official who has extensive Asian ties; and Richard Holbrooke, who went within an ace of being Clinton's second secretary of state.

Holbrooke is a worry. Around Asia there is a lot of quiet concern about a future Democratic administration on several grounds: will it be more protectionist on trade, will it be weaker in the war on terror, will it have the same military commitment to Asian security, and what sort of secretary of state would Holbrooke make from an Asian perspective? I have heard Holbrooke argue, to a room full of Asianists, that the US is a European power but not an Asian power, and that the US will always be more deeply concerned with the internal politics of Europe than Asia. That's a fair summation of the default Democratic view. Whether Rudd, Howard or Peter Costello is PM in 2009, perhaps the worst thing he could confront would be a Democrat in the White House who would be less attuned to Asia, and therefore far less helpful to Australia.

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