WAS RUDD ‘DOG WHISTLING’ TO FAITHFUL FLOCK?
One cannot serve two masters, otherwise one will receive devotion and the other will be despised.
This may be the take home message after the Labour leadership catharsis. Not so much for the Caucus members who voted between two leaders, but for KRudd himself.
As a professed Christian, KRudd had to choose between his messiah complex and his morality, but it appeared that the latter was temporarily suspended.
The ‘messiah’ mockery was of KRudd’s own making, when he announced that he would contest for leadership: ‘I want to finish the job the Australian people elected me to do when I was elected by them to become prime minister’. Not only was he exploiting the disconnect between popular opinion polls and his political colleagues, but also shunning the Christian principle of humility.
While his predecessor John Howard was often accused of playing the race card in his dog whistle politics, it appears that Rudd played the religion card throughout this ‘soap opera’.
In his recent speeches, the Honorable KRudd repeatedly referred to himself as honorable: ‘the only honorable thing and the only honorable course of action is for me to resign’. This was presumably intended to contrast him with the ‘dishonorable’ actions of Julia Gillard and her ‘faceless men’ when they deposed him from the ‘job the Australian people elected me to do’. The repeated references to honor may have been mischievous dog whistling to the faithful flock reminding them that an atheist and Godless leader who does not believe in marriage may not believe in honor or morality either.
During his resignation speech from Washington, the capital of the great bastion of presidential elections, Rudd positioned himself squarely in the camp of the morally right. He condemned those who were ‘party to a stealth attack on a sitting prime minister elected by the people…We all know what happened then was wrong and it must never happen again’.
This reads like a new covenant, evoking religious parallels that he was robbed of his rightful throne and we had been robbed of our elected leader in order to satisfy the hunger of the ‘thieves in the night’, all in the guise of ‘moving forward’. Ironically, KRudds’s own king-hit was launched after midnight, but we were not supposed to notice that hypocrisy.
His self-portrait evokes sacred images of the sacrificial lamb, and the one who had to personally pay for the sins of his faction-driven party. His dramatic departure from the prime minister role was like some passion play where he was betrayed by his own followers, reduced to tears, publicly humiliated, relegated to a foreign ministry and then awaiting his second coming.
On ABC TV’s QandA in April 2011, KRudd proclaimed that he never wanted to abandon his covenant for the emissions trading scheme but some wanted to ‘kill it for good’. And again pleading for forgiveness in martyr style: ‘It was a wrong call for which I was responsible’. Hence he fuelled the prophetic speculation that he would soon seek to right the wrongs: ‘I might have learnt a thing or two for the future’.
KRudd’s repeated references to ‘the truth is’ echoes of gospel readings from a pulpit. It exploits the Ju-liar smear campaign where he is juxtaposed as an honest man who is ‘plain speaking’.
When responding to the You-Tube video of the old Rudd, who appeared more like a bully than a wounded bull, he insisted that he had learned not to control every aspect in his office and to consult more broadly. Perhaps this was his act of contrition that he wanted his parliamentary colleagues to forgive him in a similar spirit to his ‘stolen generations’ apology.
KRudd prides himself as a passionate Christian who proudly integrates his faith into his politics. He conceded this when he resigned as prime minister: ‘It is probably not the occasion for high statements of theology, but I’m sure you’d be disappointed if I didn’t add something, given it’s been the subject of comment over the years in which I’ve led this party’.
It is a relief that his recent litany of religious dog whistling fell on deaf ears. There was a disturbing disconnect between the Christian preaching and KRudd’s practice. His faith, and indeed my faith, teaches us to love our enemy, never to exact revenge and to be humble: ‘he who humbles himself will be exalted (in heaven) and he who exalts himself will be humbled’.
His call for a phone referendum to reinstate the people’s popular choice of prime minister was not revolutionary, but delusional, and the antithesis of humility. This chapter saw KRudd not as serving God, but playing God and serving his own Messiah complex. Thank God most of us could see right through that.
In the 1994 Disney animated classic Lion King, we meet a baboon named Rafiki who is the king’s wise adviser. Rafiki nudges the main character Simba to return to the Pridelands ‘to challenge his uncle to take his place as king’. This begs the outstanding question: who was the baboon who nudged KRudd to challenge the prime minister?