My first Drum piece for the year has a look at the year ahead… sort of.
God I hate those start of the year predictive pieces that do the rounds. When will Gillard be challenged? Will Abbott survive the year out? Honestly, who gives a damn. It’s all guess work and conjecture and standard pap churned out without any need to actually do any thinking (which is probably why there are so many of them written – churning out an article each day gets a tad difficult when most politicians are on holidays).
The thing about leadership challenges – even those for PM – is how little impact they actually have on the economy or on things going on in our lives. No one guessed Abbott would be leader of the opposition a week prior to it happening – hell no one even predicted Kevin Andrews getting the votes he got in his challenge against Turnbull. Did this matter? Not in the slightest. Abbott won and then things happened, and then our lives continued as they had before. Had anyone written about Abbott a week earlier or two weeks or 6 months (as they are all trying to do with Rudd v Gillard) nothing different in our lives, or even our understanding of issues, would have changed.
A leadership challenge isn’t an event where we all need as much warning as possible to prepare for the change. A week will do – ie “It’s on for this week”, anything too much earlier than that is just conjecture mixed with politics and reporting on it is just the New Idea masquerading as the press gallery.
Will Rudd challenge (update, a bloke from The Age on Twitter is now saying it’s on for Easter!!! – cue headlines about resurrections I guess…), will Morrison or Hockey? I don’t know, and until someone reports to me how their leadership will change the way the economy and aspects in people’s lives will be changed, I not really going to give a stuff. I might as well spend my time reading magazines that tell me Princess Kate is pregnant… or not... or is… or…
Enough rant – go have a read of Matt Cowgill’s blog post on George Calombaris’s latest whine about having to pay his staff a wage. It’s a good ‘un.
Oh and season 2 of Game of Thrones? Can’t wait.
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