Politics, politics

Saw some of Kevin Rudd's campaign launch. He seemed badly unprepared for use of the autocue. When used well, you're not constantly aware of its presence. With Kevin, and the strange angles the autocue seemed to be at, it was clear that he was always reading off them. He is probably tonight punishing some media lackey for this fault.

As to content: nothing to get excited about. Seems to making rather a fetish of computers and students, which seems a little odd in a year when laptops have become so cheap you could pick up a decent enough second-hand one for primary kids for less than $300. (A new one for $700, and that should last a good few years.) Just how many families can't afford that?

On advertising: I haven't been seeing a lot of commercial TV recently, but I still have the impression that Labor seems to have a bottomless bucket of money for advertising this campaign. Liberal ads seems few and far between. If business doesn't like the outcome of the election, it only has itself to blame for what appears to be poor support of the Coalition in terms of donations.

UPDATE: Annabel Crabbe has a typically witty and accurate take on the policy launch.

News Limited headlines and coverage today are so upbeat, it seems they have jumped ship to Labor completely. The End of Certainty indeed, Paul Kelly.

If the next Newspoll is as bad as this week's, I don't know that there would be any downside for the Coalition to come out much more aggressively against Rudd personally. It has always seemed that his control freak and "say whatever it takes" nature irritates journalists, yet they are generally party to helping him maintain this. I thought John Laws' little anecdote on Enough Rope about Kevin was typical:

JOHN LAWS: Yes I’ll tell you I noticed it, I noticed it the other day and it, it intrigued me. I was going to do an interview with Kevin Rudd and I was going to pre-record it at half past seven in the morning because he was going to Perth in an aeroplane or something. I said “Is that you Kevin?” He said “Yes, eh John how are you?” And I said “Good, how are you? I bet you’re a bit a tired.” He said “Oh”, he said “tired, you know it’s hard work.” And I said “Well I imagine it is but the end result if you achieve it surely will be worth the effort?” He said “Oh yes,” he said “but sometimes, you know, just so damn hard.” And then he stopped and obviously one of his people said to him “That’s being recorded” and there was a hesitation and he came back to me and said “Are, are you, are you, are we recording?” And I said “Yeah.” He said “But I was just talking to you.” And I said “Well that’s the idea of the interview.”

JOHN LAWS: And he said “Well my people’d rather you didn’t play that.” Now he’d behaved in quite a normal pleasant fashion.

ANDREW DENTON: Mm.

JOHN LAWS: I mean, I know him, I’ve had lunch with him on more than one occasion and I know his wife, had lunch with her, so it’s not as if we’re not good acquaintances. But he was terrified that he should appear to be natural, which really surprised me. I would have thought it would have done him a tremendous amount of good to sound like just a nor-normal every day bloke. And then when I said “Alright, well if you want to do it, we’ll start it again,” he sounded like a totally different man.

Yeah, OK, you can hardly condemn Rudd for wanting to sound upbeat in an interview, and yes of course I know all politicians manipulate image; but if many journalists are leery of the controlling aspects of his character, as I am sure they are, it's fair enough for the public to be as well.

UPDATE 2: it may well be a case of "any port in a storm" when I start quoting Kenneth Davidson with approval, but he makes some decent points against Rudd's computer and broadband fetish this morning:

If Rudd Labor was serious about an education revolution it would be based on the latest survey of internet usage by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which showed that 76 per cent of households with children under the age of 15 already had access to the internet.

Why subsidise the majority of parents for spending already undertaken without subsidy? If Rudd Labor wanted to extend student access to the internet, and improve overall school retention rates, it would have focused its $2.6 billion on poor primary and secondary schools, poor areas with a low computer-pupil ratio and internet access, and provide the money necessary to provide access supervision outside school hours.

The reason why a targeted approach to funding based on needs wasn't considered is because it wasn't a vote buyer.

As Annabel Crabbe (and I) sad before, the big bonus for Dads across the nation will be that the high speed porn access they already have will be subsidised by Labor.