By Shaun Carney
The PM can't take a trick, and his attempts at communication are going from bad to cringe-worthy.
KEVIN Rudd must understand by now that only a victory at the election will earn him any restoration of respect from the nation's political media, his opponents and probably even the bulk of the voting public. Right now, the Prime Minister is bumping along the bottom, with his political authority very shaky indeed.
The man simply cannot take a trick. On Wednesday night, he gave a speech at the press gallery's midwinter ball in Canberra and tried to be funny. This is in keeping with the event, an antipodean version of the annual White House correspondents' dinner in Washington. Being funny in public requires a special skill and very few leading politicians have it. Rudd certainly doesn't. His tone and rhythm are all wrong, and even when he's trying to be self-deprecating, he appears smug.
That shouldn't matter; political leaders are there to do a serious job. But when you're travelling badly, it doesn't matter what you do, it's going to come out all wrong. If Rudd had played it straight at the ball, he would have been pilloried. He tried to do funny and that didn't work either.
The journalist David Marr, in his profile of Rudd in the latest Quarterly Essay, declared of the Prime Minister: ''If Australia saw him through Canberra's eyes, he would be done for.'' It was a striking observation; perhaps the rest of us got to view the Rudd prime ministership through the Canberra prism this week.
On Thursday night, about 712,000 people tuned in to the ABC's 7.30 Report to see Kerry O'Brien interview the Prime Minister. O'Brien began with this question: ''Kevin Rudd, when you singled out the mining industry table at the midwinter ball in your speech last night and said to them in relation to the current dispute over the resources tax, 'We've got a long memory', what exactly did you mean?''
For Rudd, it was a bad start. The best way to kill a joke is try to explain it. This is what Rudd had said at the ball: ''The mining industry are here tonight. I extend my greeting to each and every one of them. I notice there's a small fire which has been erected down the back. I understand that myself and Wayne Swan and Martin Ferguson will soon be erected above that fire. Can I say, guys, we've got a very long memory.''
Obviously, he was trying to conjure a gag out of his disagreement with the miners, which also made fun of his own government's predicament. His audience, most of whom don't like him, didn't like it, apparently. Fair enough.
Had Rudd, as O'Brien claimed, ''singled out'' the mining industry table? Yes, if you ignore his references in the speech to the radio reporter whose clothing he had remarked on earlier in the week, David Marr, O'Brien himself (the reference to the interviewer was: ''If Kerry O'Brien is here tonight, it's good to be with you, mate. We're going to track you down in the morning, and watch ABC funding for the year ahead.''), Malcolm Turnbull, his own staff, his family and Tony Abbott.
Rudd's dismissal of the mining company joke as just one attempt at humour among many was not accepted by O'Brien, who asked four more questions about it.
What Rudd's 7.30 Report interview demonstrated was how his parlous political situation keeps feeding on itself. His appearance on the show started badly with a series of pointless questions about a non-issue and then got progressively worse because of the Prime Minister's seemingly irreparable failings as a communicator.
The starting approach of all media encounters with Rudd now is antagonistic. In response, he can either use charm or forthrightness.
Many voters are confused by Rudd. He said some things mattered to him and now they don't seem to matter to him, and it has all happened without any convincing explanation.
In that sort of situation, a politician in trouble has no option but to be direct. Slice the sentences in half, get rid of all the excess verbiage, dispense with the self-consciousness.
On the evidence of Thursday night's absolutely appalling performance, Rudd either cannot do this or does not want to. In a 19-minute interview, in which he was asked 33 questions, he began almost a third of his answers thus:
- Well, I think it's pretty interesting, Kerry.
- Well, you know something, Kerry …
- You know something, Kerry?
- No, Kerry, we've gone about this in two, well, in fact three stages. Firstly, in terms of consultation …
- Well, the first thing I'd say to you, Kerry …
- Well, my answer to your question, Kerry, is in two parts.
- Well, you know something, Kerry …
- On the question of the internal deliberations of the cabinet …
- Can I say to you, Kerry, this business of reform is a tough business.
He also threw in a ''So, in terms of'' in the middle of one answer. As it progressed, you could almost hear voters in lounge rooms around the country deciding not to vote Labor.
Every time the Prime Minister begins his answer with these idiosyncratic prefaces, he does several things, all of them bad.
He sounds smarmy. He sounds like he thinks he knows more than you do. He sounds insincere. He sounds like he's trying to buy time to allow him to come up with a trouble-free answer. Worst of all, from his own point of view, he sounds boring and predictable. He sounds like he's saying the same things over and over, and he's saying them for his own benefit, not the voters'.
The Rudd government is not in crisis, but the Prime Minister is experiencing a crisis with his ability to explain his government - its actions, its plans, its reason for being - to the voting public. If Rudd is to get another term, he needs to understand that his audience wants him to change. Does he have it in him?
Shaun Carney is associate editor.