Rudd to fight wailing

Somehow it has all gone horribly wrong for Kevin Rudd. Along with Wayne Swan, and Lindsay Tanner, Rudd has played every one of his 300 free “Blame The GFC” cards in about the same month that he bought every Australian a flat screen TV. And now it seems that both their policy and their spin are being written by the same person who thought the only thing better than bringing back Hey Hey It’s Saturday would be airing it on Tuesdays.

But will the whining lefties, greenies, moderate righties, “senior Labor sources” and disgruntled backbenchers just stop complaining, even for a second, and look at all the green good this government has done?

Okay, so the only reason that any $43 billion nation-building future-proofing cash splash went green at all was because of pressure from the Greens and Nick Xenophon in the Senate. And more than just a backflip, Kevin Rudd’s complete abandonment of any attempt to regulate carbon emissions until 2013 was a total pike. And lets not even mention the expansion of uranium mining.

Out-Abbotted on the right, barely visible by the left, and with the ratification of Kyoto totally faded from memory, Kevin Rudd is going to make it all better. He’s taking Japan to the International Court of Justice over whaling…after the election.

Never mind that Australia said nothing when Japanese whalers effectively imprisoned the New Zealand captain of a multimillion-dollar anti-whaling vessel they had recently sunk. Never mind that he, Peter Bethune, was defending whales in Australian waters off Antarctica at the time that this all happened. Never mind that he was trying to enforce Australian environmental law that no Australian government has sent ships to enforce itself. Never mind that he is currently being held in a Japanese prison as a prisoner of conscience having just plead guilty to four of five charges against him.

Never mind any of this or the fact that we are doing just as much damage to the environment as we ever did under John Howard, because of all the options he could have chosen to fight for whales and the environment, Kevin Rudd has chosen to make a symbolic gesture in an international court that won’t be recognized by the defendant or achieve anything for anyone.

But it might of course deflect some of the increasing number of harpoons being thrown quietly by his own party.