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McCrann: Its now a choice between our worst and second worst ever PMs

Posted on: Wed February 22, 2012

ONE way or another the choice will now have to be made. Between Australia\'s worst-ever prime minister and our second worst.

But whichever one emerges in the job next week, he or she will still be presiding over a disastrously inept government in an utterly dysfunctional parliament.

This isn\'t going to be a vote to get rid of the job-destroying Bob Brown as de facto deputy prime minister - someone would say he effectively holds an even higher office.

Or of the independents propping up this carcass of an administration.

It is a decision not-very-pure and exactly simple to determine who gets to continue in the big office - if only temporarily - and who gets consigned immediately to the scrapheap of history.

With the other to follow at the election.This should be a decision about the future of this country. It\'s not even that in the - very - small world of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.There\'s not a slither of difference between them on policy. They jointly gave us all the disastrous policies - from the waste of pink batts and school halls, to restarting the boats, and the two big ones.

First, the $50 billion waste of the National Broadband Network.

Second, the carbon tax which is going to decimate what\'s left of manufacturing that manages to survive the high value of the Aussie dollar.

Plus making you pay more for electricity and just about everything else as the tax is passed through into prices.

Thank goodness for China. But for the resources boom, the devastating cost of all those Rudd and Gillard failures would have already made us look like a down under version of Greece.

Thank goodness, that is also, for what was bequeathed by the Howard-Costello government. A budget in surplus and NO GOVERNMENT DEBT!

That enabled Rudd in particular to embark on that crazy debt-fuelled spending binge. A binge, which he - and too many others - think \'\'saved Australia\'\', but has left us with a debt headache and precious little to show for it.

There\'s nothing to suggest that either camp has a clue about the challenges - and potentially worse - posed by the turbulent world out there.

Despite the very clear signals coming from all those job cuts - from manufacturing companies like Holden, retailers and even the big, seemingly highly profitable banks.

This government continues to doze in the lazy assumption that China will keep pouring money into Australia; and that as a consequence, so will global investors.

We don\'t need an election to decide between the worst and second worst prime minister. We need a REAL election to sweep both of them from office and to get a real government that can actually start to build a sustainable future.

And of course, to limit the damage that both the Rudd and Gillard governments have already done; and hopefully to ditch the most destructive policies, and especially the carbon tax.

There actually seems a chance of that thanks to what Rudd has now set in train. If Gillard is still prime minister after next week, it\'ll be a case of the turkeys voting for Christmas.

That would guarantee Labor lost at the next election. And perhaps an early Christmas, if Rudd resigned and left the parliament.

If Rudd lost only narrowly, and stayed, the whole disastrous circus would lurch on.

And if Rudd won, it would be back to the chaos of 2009 - multiplied by all the hate and dysfunction around the cabinet table.With the added chance of one or more of the independents triggering an election.

Courtesy: heraldsun