As this political arm-wrestle between Gillard and Rudd continues there is one question that none of us can get an answer to.
Forget the posturing through the media. ‘You go first’ and ‘no, I dare you, you go first’ My question is: When did the Australian Prime Minister and the Australian Foreign Minister last actually speak to each other? In person or even on the phone?
The last proof of any physical contact was in the middle of last year when they had that awkward, handshake turned into an air-kiss, when Julia Gillard was being congratulated by her mob and the Greens for getting the Carbon Tax through the Lower House.
Simon Crean, a member of the dumped Labor leaders’ club, told Mitchell yesterday that the PM should carpet Kevin Rudd and either pull him into line or sack him.
Apparently she has decided against that saying she’s doing her job and Rudd is doing his job. Sounds like she is in denial.
But this lack of communication is a major worry. The relationship between a PM and his or her Foreign Minister is the second most important pairing after that between a PM and the Treasurer.
For most of their terms Hawke and Keating and Howard and Costello were the Bobsie Twins.
But in times of international conflict the relationship between a country’s leader and the Foreign Affairs Department is crucial.
It would seem....
I’m not suggesting a ‘ Hi Kev, it’s Jools’ sort of call from The Lodge to a Mexican cantina but it would seem that Rudd and Gillard aren’t even picking up the phone and talking about the carnage, the bloodshed, in Syria. Gillard didn’t even brief Rudd about the government’s change in attitude towards uranium sales to India and, I think, Rudd was in India at the time.
I presume apparatchiks in their offices pass on messages: ‘Tell so and so such and such’. Or these days it’s more likely to be ‘ tell the so-and-so…’
According to a report this morning Gillard’s people call Rudd ‘ that C---‘ and Rudd’s people call the Prime Minister ‘ the Bitch’. Charming way to run a country.
This is why one of them has to call a showdown. In coach John Kennedy’s famous words: ‘ Do something!’
In more practical terms: Pick up the bloody phone. One way or t’other get it over with.