From Crikey 30 May 2008

14 . FuelWatch may have cost the PM more than he knows

Peter Brent from Mumble Politics writes:

In Queensland in June 1998, when Peter Beattie snatched office with the support of conservative independents, he announced that he would govern as if he had a majority of ten.

Kevin Rudd is the opposite. He won by 16 seats last November, but acts as if his majority is razor-thin.

Peter Garrett was wrong: not much has changed. We've still got Rudd the opposition leader. 

It is the opposition’s job to avoid saying anything contentious. If things get sticky, they must flee to fight another day. Rudd did all this last year. He was very good at it. The problem is that he is still doing it. He doesn't seem to realise that when in government you can -- indeed must -- move across the popular grain from time to time. It earns respect, it’s what leaders do. If they don’t do it, they are marked down by the public.

Rudd is too busy burnishing his record-high approval ratings to invest them in the future. It is the nature of things that people will tire of him and his ratings will decline; this will happen more rapidly if he has little to show for his initial popularity.

Paul Keating and Peter Walsh used to call PM Bob Hawke “jellyback”, but Hawke floated the dollar and abolished exchange controls nine months after taking government. (Like FuelWatch, it was against the advice of bureaucrats.) It wasn’t an election pledge, but it’s the sort of thing governments do.

John Howard by contrast mishandled his first term 1996-98, squandering initial popularity by seeming to be little interested in much apart from taking retribution on a few pet-hates. He began way ahead as preferred prime minister, but 18 months later opposition leader Kim Beazley was regularly beating him.

In the end, Howard had to come up with something big and bold (the GST) to capture the public imagination.

In the short term, things will probably improve for Rudd. Commentators are locked into Brendan Nelson's low preferred PM rating in Newspoll, and that is unlikely to improve much next Tuesday. Then the attention will turn back to the Liberals and their leadership woes.

But imagine if the political capital depleted this week on FuelWatch had instead been spent on an important, meaningful reform – something that would reap future political dividends.

Note also that Howard almost lost the 1998 election.