The Keating style of leadership is evident in Rudd’s new government. As Alexander Downer said about the 2020 Summit:
“This was just a Keating-style gabfest with the Keating-loving elite. I think there were 25 conservatives altogether out of 1000.
“It was a Keating cheer squad with a sprinkling of conservatives to make it respectable.”
Like Keating, Rudd portrays a sense of inevitability about major issues to avoid serious debate, uses a coalition of black-arm band historians, celebrities and other self-proclaimed elites to tell the main stream of the country what is best, and uses symbols and words to satisfy the chattering classes over changes of substance to provide deliver-ables to the electorate.
Rudd has yet to give into the chattering classes own uncertainty about Australia’s national identity. Keating tried to foster a sense of national inadequacy as justification for avoiding consultation with the public on major nation building policies – such as race relations.
As Tony Abbott said:
…the “total package was a giant Kevin cheer squad”, while Mr Rudd was attempting to remake himself as former Labor leader Paul Keating.
“I think the whole dynamic was carefully stage managed to become a kind of Festival of Kevin and basically to rubber stamp, not just the agenda that Kevin Rudd took to the election, but the agenda which is very reminiscent of the era of the Keating government,” he said.
Consider this, Rudd went to the general electorate with a set of policies and a ‘vision’. Surely his victory would be mandate enough to implement the changes he wants. So why the appeal to the chattering classes for ideas and ‘visions’? Weren’t his election commitments, by themselves, good enough? For the public yes, but the leftie ‘elites’, apparently not.