Illustration: Jim Pavlidis
Politics doesn't have to stink, but all too often it does. A few days ago, Victorian Planning Minister Justin Madden rated high on the funk-ometer when he tried to play down a leaked memo from his then media officer that proposed, among other things, a sham approval process to block a redevelopment plan for the Windsor Hotel.
The memo was appalling, an essay in naked cynicism, deceit and opportunism. It embodied the conscious fakery that often characterises modern politics - what is generally referred to as ''spin''. The only decent thing for any minister to have done would have been to repudiate it in toto.
Instead, in an interview with the ABC's Jon Faine, Madden embarked on a long verbal voyage and waved the memo off as bagatelle. If the Land of Spin is an archipelago, Madden circumnavigated, mapped and colonised all of the islands. The document, he said, was a "draft", "sort of a draft", "an internal working document", "inappropriate", and contained "speculative language", "a fair degree of poetic license" and "inappropriate use of language".
For Madden, the surface was everything. He could not bring himself to condemn the ideas and perverted principles within the memo, just the way they were expressed. The moment called for some grounded honesty. He went the other way and opted for more spin. Surely after that episode, people within the Brumby government will stop wondering why public support is slipping away.
Of course, it's unrealistic to expect politicians to never proffer gilded lilies or hyperbole. In politics, it's important to show faith with supporters and to win over waverers. Accentuating the positive for your side and highlighting the deficiencies of the other side is the default position.
But there is a line past which a sensible politician does not go - a sort of "would a mug believe this?" test.
The federal Coalition's education spokesman, Christopher Pyne, probably got close to the wrong side of the line with his knee-jerk attack on the government's draft national curriculum on Monday. Pyne's only objective was to find a way to criticise the curriculum before he had a chance to absorb it.
So he cooked up an outraged claim that it was devoted to teaching Aboriginal history at the exclusion of Australia's British heritage. Unwisely, he chose to do it on the day his leader, Tony Abbott, visited Aboriginal camps in Alice Springs to highlight the Coalition's concerns about indigenous disadvantage.
Pyne was criticising a government initiative because, under Abbott, that is the opposition's remit: to attack everything Labor says or does because, in Abbott's analysis, that is what all oppositions should do. The danger for the Liberals is that, come election time, their relentless criticism could end up looking empty, ill-considered and contradictory.
Context counts for a lot. Because the polls have tightened - that is, the lead enjoyed by Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party has shrunk - during the past three months, the focus is, quite rightly, on the government.
It's fair to say that Rudd's expressions of contrition and regret on two appearances on ABC TV and in a weekend newspaper interview have triggered a mild existential crisis within the ALP. Rudd has sent out a clear message: he thinks the government has not progressed enough on delivering on its promises, he contributed to the home insulation scheme screw-up, and Labor has not managed its issues - in particular the emissions trading scheme - effectively.
In a sign of the poor condition of political dialogue and the lack of faith within the community about our politicians in contemporary Australia, Rudd's introspections and apologies have met with perplexity.
Predictably, they have been dismissed outright by his Coalition opponents and their supporters as spin or outright lies or merely the latest confirmation of the Prime Minister's weak character and professional incompetence.
On the Labor side, a few have seen them as fair, more have been shocked because they like the usual approach in which all problems are denied and nothing is ever conceded. Few really understand why Rudd has done it.
Within the media, pretty much universally the assessment is that it is a tactical manoeuvre. The notion that Rudd might actually mean it apparently does not compute. Political analysis in Australia does not extend that far.
Rudd remains an enigma. He is the least known, or possibly least understood, prime minister for a very long time. Think of Howard, Keating, Hawke, Whitlam, even Fraser, McMahon, Holt, possibly even Gorton. All had been in politics or national life for decades before becoming prime minister and their personalities were known before they assumed the office.
Compared with them, Rudd is a neophyte. When he uses colloquialisms, even the term "mate", many see him as a fraud because he seems more comfortable with jargon and sentences containing half a dozen elements.
He does not enjoy a close relationship with the public. Some of this is down to him, but some of it is also because he has only one dot on the graph of public understanding, which is his 2007 election victory. Further election victories would add extra plot points and possibly deepen the public's connections with Rudd.
His apology could simply be a cynical, attention-seeking circuit-breaker. Or not. More likely, he simply wanted to remind swinging voters that his government was mortal and that a protest vote could result in an Abbott government.
Either way, in our political culture, the safe course is to assume a politician isn't genuine.
Shaun Carney is associate editor of The Age.
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