By ABC's Annabel Crabb Posted February 20, 2012 10:39:02
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It is entirely in keeping with the pattern of contrived silence now typical of the Federal Labor Party that - late on Saturday night - the Foreign Minister of Australia conducted what may be this continent's first entirely euphemistic television interview.
It was nearing midnight when Mr Rudd, immaculately besuited, stopped in to Sky News for a chat with political editor David Speers before boarding a flight for Mexico.
At issue was the YouTube video that had been posted just hours earlier, featuring Mr Rudd alternately cussing out staff members and staring-with-the-eyes-of-a-killer into the camera while filming an otherwise routine message in Mandarin to his Chinese supporters.
Mr Rudd was there to talk about the video, and definitely not the leadership, or anything like that.
And so we learned, in great detail, about how the Foreign Minister would conduct himself in future sweary videos. For starters, he couldn't promise to eradicate swearing entirely. He's only human, after all, and he's never pretended to be otherwise. But viewers could definitely assume that in future videos Mr Rudd (or K-Rudd, which is how the Foreign Minister referenced himself at one transfixing point) would consult more widely, delegate tasks where appropriate, try not to work so hard and experiment with being nicer to people.
That Mr Rudd could insist so fervently that he had changed, while conducting an interview at midnight, more or less on the tarmac, before haring off to South America, London, Washington and Tunisia on a category 11 global diplo-binge ("including meetings with Hillary Clinton", Mr Rudd helpfully interpolated; he might aspire to dropping the F-bomb a little less, but there are no key undertakings on name-dropping) gives us some idea just how deeply bonkers all this is.
But in a party where "Don't mention the war" has gone from being a Fawlty Towers quote to being a central guiding principle, Mr Rudd's Sky interview is perfectly routine.
For 20 months now, Julia Gillard has been unable to explain publicly why she offed her predecessor. Even now, she cannot acknowledge that there is a problem. And Mr Rudd, for his part, cannot disclose his intentions without employing a complex parable about a video. Absence of candour is now a settled, systemic and multipartisan feature of the federal Labor Party.
And if Mr Rudd or Ms Gillard could speak frankly about the current impasse, what would they say? Their silent tussle is surely the most nihilistic in Labor's organisational memory. It's not about clashing, passionately-held convictions, or the parties' spirited disagreement on what to do about schools, or nukes, or Syria. It's a classic corner-office dispute of numbing mundanity. She thinks he shouldn't be prime minister because he's nuts. He thinks she shouldn't be prime minister because she's hopeless. And that's about the size of it. Caucus members now arrange themselves into Team Bloodnut and Team Bowlcut, driven by nothing except the clinical extent of their own despair.
Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.
