The celebrated psychoanalyst Carl Jung once observed that “The man who promises everything is sure to fulfil nothing.”
Jung could well have used Kevin Rudd as a clinical study.
It is hard to think of any other person who has come to the office of Prime Minister of Australia with such high expectations.
And these were not the usual expectations that can sometimes come with public office – these were expectations built on Rudd’s vast platform of overblown promises.
There was no aspect of society where Rudd failed to promise the Australian people he would attend to it and improve it.
Whether it was grocery prices, petrol prices, child care costs, binge drinking, or climate change, Rudd promised he would fix it.
The promises came thick and fast. The private health rebate would be safe under Rudd, government advertising would be reformed, and every student in years 9 to 12 would receive a computer.
Rudd seduced many people into believing that he was an economic conservative, that he would be a safe pair of hands in managing the economy and that he was committed to budget surpluses.
Australians are reasonable people and are prepared to give a new government a fair go.
The Rudd Government has been given lot of leeway in its first two years and its ‘honeymoon’ period has been generous.
Yet the opinion polls indicate that the Australian people are now realising they were duped.
The seducer has betrayed their trust. The grand promises and the towering rhetoric have turned to dust. The reality is coming home.
Not only has this government and this Prime Minister failed to deliver on promises to date, there is little hope that it will ever deliver.
The economic conservative has turned into a big spending, high taxing old fashioned Labor socialist.
Yet again a Labor Government has plunged the budget into a deep deficit, with the $20 billion surplus inherited from the Howard Government turned into a $57 billion deficit, one of the highest ever recorded.
Rudd sought to harness the power of rhetoric while his popularity was on the increase.
He used highly emotive language to exaggerate the scale of virtually every challenge faced by his government, thereby seeking to position himself as a saviour of the nation during a time of great crisis.
He has declared a “war” on about a dozen or more issues from drug taking to whaling, to inflation, to doping in sport, and executive salaries.
At least half a dozen different issues have been identified as his ‘number one priority’ for the nation.
The global financial downturn which the Reserve Bank has likened to a North Atlantic crisis was called a ‘rolling national security crisis’.
Climate change was described by Rudd as the greatest moral, economic and environmental challenge of our age.
Such was the urgency to act that any failure to implement his emissions trading scheme, he said, would destroy the Great Barrier Reef, threaten vast tracts of agricultural land and potentially the very existence of the human race.
Rudd said repeatedly that ‘the economic cost of inaction will be much greater than the economic cost of action’.
Any delay in embracing his emissions trading scheme was “absolute political cowardice”, and an “absolute failure of leadership”, an “absolute failure of logic”.
Many Australians believed Rudd, or they at least believed that he meant what he was saying.
Many Australians trusted Rudd and assumed that he would not have made such strong and passionate statements unless he was absolutely convinced of his own rhetoric.
Many Australians believed Rudd was so committed to urgent action on his policy on climate change that he would call a double dissolution election in order to make the policy law.
Then came the moment when the Australian people saw the real Kevin Rudd. Any bond of trust was smashed when he announced that he had effectively cancelled any plans to introduce an emissions trading scheme any time in the foreseeable future.
He wouldn’t even call an election on the issue.
This bombshell was followed by a rolling national policy dumping as a number of other signature promises were ditched.
The promised 260 childcare centres, the 36 GP super clinics, the 750 new homes for Aboriginal people would not be delivered. And the list went on. Each new back flip or broken promise undermined the foundations of the trust placed in Rudd when he was elected in November 2007.
The key to the next election will be which party is able to establish a level of trust with the Australian people to the point where they will elect that party to govern.
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