According to my local retailer, the release date of Punch & Judy was the 6th of September. The book, however, was only available a week or so later, which suggests that the publishers expected the election to be settled a lot sooner than it was. Mungo MacCallum used the time to get in a few words about the structure of the new government and the twists, turns and convulsions that it took to get there.
Of course, the reason we had to wait to see what the government would look like was that the Labor Party followed a pretty dismal year with a positively dismal election campaign and, in doing so, found itself on the verge of losing office.
So, why? And How? How was it possible that a government with a Prime Minister as popular as Kevin Rudd, a government that had pulled Australia through a global financial crisis relatively unscathed, a government whose implementation of policy – regardless of however strongly the editorial staff of The Australian might disagree – was mostly successful, found itself contesting the election from a less than ideal position and with a completely different Prime Minister? Punch & Judy sets out to answer these questions.
To be fair, there are fewer laughs in this book than in Mungo’s last, Poll Dancing, but one can’t help but feel that it’s more a reflection of the times than the jokes. The last time around we could afford to laugh: after all, John Howard had finally been given the arse after eleven long years, and there was the impression that the new government, though clearly wanting, was well-placed to undo some of the damage of those years.
Three years, however, revealed exactly what Federal Labor was about: moral and political cowardice. This is what made it possible, for example, for the party to delay action on the “greatest moral challenge of our generation” – a move that severely tarnished Rudd’s credibility. It was also what allowed the Coalition to get the upper-hand on the asylum seeker issue; an issue that could have easily been neutralised had the Labor Party simply done the right thing: that is, abided by our international obligations to refugees. Paul Keating once said, “when you change the government, you change the country,” but that can’t happen if you let the other side – dinosaur throwbacks to a best-forgotten era – set the agenda.
When you add to these woes the aggressive campaign waged by the newspapers – in particular, The Australian – against the government, and the equally aggressive campaign waged by the miners, it starts to become clear how and why things went so terribly wrong for the Labor Party.
Mungo MacCallum is often presented as a Labor true believer, and in a sense it’s telling that by considering voting Greens in the Senate he was “breaking the habit of a lifetime.” However, true believer or not, Mungo can be objective, and he will call dirt on the Labor party when they are dirty. He doesn’t pull any punches when isolating how and why the party was responsible for the disastrous position they found themselves in. Of particular and, I fear, lasting importance is the rise and rise of what Mungo calls the professional political class – and what everyone else calls the faceless machine men of the Labor Party. These, the Arbibs and the Bitars – though they are not by any means the only ones – are the ones who, pursuing focus-group politics, convinced Rudd to abandon the ETS. And these are the same ones who, when the opinion polls began to sour, panicked and set in motion the machinations that installed Julia Gillard as Prime Minister. If you want an idea of how they operate look no further than the New South Wales State government.
What makes reading Mungo so worthwhile is the context he is able to provide, both historical and philosophical. Punch & Judy is as much about the 2010 election as it is a note of caution regarding where the soul of the Labor Party is headed.
Punch/Judy
Reviewed on Tuesday, 5 October 2010