Of course, we also wanted a leader who believed in things and would stick to his guns. A leader we could respect. A leader who, if he went on and on about something being really important, wouldn’t just ditch it when the going got tough.
A big part of Rudd’s problem is inexperience. As a result of that inexperience and bad advice he has seriously underestimated the electorate. He thought he could stay popular by appearing to pander to our whims.
Turns out we have no respect for a leader who merely gives us what we say we want. Somewhere inside us there is a semi-conscious understanding – probably born of our experience as children – that we need a leader who sometimes imposes on us things we don’t fancy but he knows are for our own good.
The tyro politician’s error is to assume success is simply about never telling us anything we don’t want to hear. That’s the appearance but there’s a deeper and more complex reality.
In the months before the 2007 election, Labor’s focus groups detected public dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living. Rudd tried to capitalise on this disaffection by expressing great concern about the issue and implying – without actually promising – there was something he could do about it.
This was the origin of two of the early setbacks in Rudd’s term as Prime Minister, the failures of Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch, the first bits of evidence fostering the public’s growing (if unfair) conviction that Rudd is all talk and no action.
Guess what? If you conduct focus groups today you’ll find much dissatisfaction over the rising cost of living. It is, I suspect, an almost permanent state. The cost of living is always rising – but so too are wages and pensions. We have genuine cause for complaint only when the rise in prices is outstripping the rise in our incomes. And though that happens from time to time, over the past 10 or 15 years wages have grown a lot faster than prices.
So our unceasing complaint about the rising cost of living – always changing its focus, from the cost of petrol to interest rates to the price of electricity – is just another case of us wanting to have our cake and eat it. We wish we lived in a world where prices never rose but incomes rose as they do now. Dream on.
Our problem is not with the rising cost of living but with our efforts to keep up with the rising standard of living. We worry about every price rise because, in our unceasing attempt to keep up with the Joneses (who strive to keep up with us), we over-commit ourselves. When you spend all your income – perhaps more than your income – you always feel poor, always have trouble making ends meet, no matter how high your income.
Politicians who imagine this kind of foolish selfishness defines the electorate underrate us. We’re looking for politicians who, in their concern to protect and advance our interests, demand more from us.
Rudd thinks we went cold on his emissions trading scheme because his opponents gave us an exaggerated opinion of what it would do to our cost of living. But Hugh Mackay, the noted social researcher, has a roughly opposite take: having been convinced by Rudd and others that our greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced, we expected to be asked – even compelled – to change our behaviour.
When cities were running out of water, we had to stop using water in certain ways. Few resented this and almost all complied. The more we complied the more convinced we became of the seriousness of the problem and the need for strong action.
With climate change, however, no immediate demands were made on us. This was partly because of Rudd’s misguided fear that making demands on us would make him unpopular.
Mackay makes the psychologist’s point that our changes in attitude don’t last unless they’re quickly and strongly reinforced by a change in our actions (a truth that doesn’t fit easily with economists’ aversion to moralising, compulsion and even voluntary action, in favour of mere changes in prices).
Now, thanks to his great misstep in abandoning his trading scheme, Rudd lacks the moral authority to be believed even when he assures us the mining companies’ claims that the resource tax would damage the economy are self-serving scaremongering.
Ross Gittins is economics editor.