Mood:
quizzicalTopic: aust govt
PM Rudd's biographer Robert Macklin stated on abc 702 recently some psychology about Ruddbot (over) working through the emotional reality of outliving his father who died at 50 in a car accident. From drink driving.
Our gloss would be you see it in the alcopops tax policy, and concerns about binge drinking. You see it in the manic workload as if there is no tomorrow. Well there will be no tomorrow in a self fulfilling prophesy at this work rate. A high class problem for the federal ALP, and maybe unavoidable.
We have read of this parental related fatalism before, from the world of politics too.
There is not a South American Spanish speaker who does not know who Victor Jara was. All 250 million of them. Try him on Youtube or wikipedia though Pinochet's thugs did their best to destroy his master tapes.
Better than Bob Dylan musically, ideologically, and possibly more influential politically and socially, and most of it in a non English paradigm.
His widow biographer Joan Jara makes a profound point in Victor: An Unfinished Song (1998, Bloomsbury Press, London) about the prescience of his own death, at an age we observed as roughly around the time of his own mother in her early forties (dead from overwork in poverty stricken Chile in the 1960ies):
One day at breakfast, for some reason I was cross with him, and Manuela and Monica sided with me against him. It was a women's club against the only male in the house. I think that Victor said that it wasn't his job to make the toast and we all joined in telling him off for having macho attitudes. Suddenly he said, out of the blue, and only half-joking, 'You'll be sorry later. You should make the most of me while I'm here, because you'll be a long time without me! I shall never get beyond forty.' We all laughed at him, but I knew that he meant it.
It was Pinochet's thugs that killed Victor Jara around 15 Sept 1973, not bad health 13 days short of his 41st birthday. It seems to us it was Victor's choice to stay or go and face the neo nazi Pinochet thugs, never reconstructed after WW2, shamefully endorsed by the USA govt.
That's the point - it's PM Rudd's choice whether or not to devolve and delegate, more so after the recent first budget. There is a growing consensus that the guy should take a week's holiday and stop being so arrogant about his indispensibility.
Young Lachlan Harris running media surely had his wings clipped this last week. Swan has delivered a reasonable budget, as per Michelle Grattan this morning on abc RN.
Maybe PM Rudd should listen up. It is a democracy after all and 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien is not such a fool to be making a weak point about over work. Maybe the voters prefer a longer lived PM Rudd, not a wooden box.
