Time to dump the rest of Rudd’s gang

It’s become increasingly evident that the fatal error that Labor’s factional chiefs committed when plotting Kevin Rudd’s dumping on June 23 last year was failure to remove every one of the so-called ‘gang of four’.

If they had done so on grounds of gross and persistent incompetence, Labor would now be electorally far better placed, even if in opposition.

Neither Julia Gillard nor Wayne Swan is suited for senior ministerial duties. A junior ministry or better still, the backbench, was more appropriate.

Instead, they emerged leading an increasingly bamboozled party that they are transforming into the Greens’ policy cat’s paw.

Failure to rid Labor of the gullible four means ambitious second rankers like Bill Shorten, Greg Combet and Stephen Smith are now tarred with incompetence since they have publicly backed the Greens’ outrageous CO2 taxing proposal.

So tarred, voters can no longer consider this trio as credible future leaders.

It’s now evident that what actually occurred on that June day, was that Labor’s powerbrokers chose minimum surgery – removing only incompetent ‘loose cannon’ Kevin07 – whereas drastic party-saving operating at the top was desperately needed.

Trying to save Labor with only one big cut was like the European Union’s increasingly costly band-aid moves to save Greece from insolvency.

The sooner bankruptcy is declared the better.

Just as Greece can no longer pay its way, so too Ms Gillard and Mr Swan are not up to the calling of wise and far-sighted national leadership.

Both caved in to the outrageous idea of taxing Australia’s most essential and efficient energy and job-generating sectors by, of all things, targeting CO2, an essential plant nutrient.

Forests, grains, vegetables and grass lands can’t grow without it. They actually relish more.

The Gillard-Swan duo simply fears telling the Greens to go jump with their crackpot schemes.

The Greens have ensnared Labor in an economic and political quagmire that threatens national economic life and betterment.

The duo keeps repeating that Labor under them has embarked on reforming the economy when the opposite is the case.

They’ve embarked on creating a deformed Australia, which is the Greens’ vision.

Neither is anywhere near intellectually capable of distinguishing between reforming and deforming.

When one reaches such a point, the only option is to ensure such individuals are quietly dispatched from the political stage.

The various calls over the past month for Mr Rudd to leave parliament because his very presence destabilises Labor are not enough.

Gang of four member number four, Lindsay Tanner, wisely departed.

Unfortunately, the Gillard-Swan duo survived and, incredibly, managed to snap up both Labor’s top jobs, which they’re simply not equipped to handle.

Just as Greece is in need of what financial experts call a haircut, meaning confronting reality sooner rather than later by defaulting on loans unlikely to ever be repaid, so too should Labor confront the fact that it desperately needs a haircut at the very top.

The duo simply must go. There’s no other option. They’re both out of their depth.

And that does not mean Mr Rudd returning.

He should instead regard their departure as an opportunity to also leave the political scene, as Mr Tanner did.

A quiet deal can surely be devised with the coalition that after a ‘decent interval’ – a year or so – Mr Rudd would be nominated for a far away diplomatic post, perhaps even a United Nations job he so covets.

After all he’s been generous to several non-Laborites, including one-time leader, Brendan Nelson, now ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg and the European Union.

Ms Gillard and Mr Swan could be similarly cared for after ‘decent intervals’ with appointments to say London and New York respectively.

Anywhere but Canberra.

Australian industry simply cannot afford having them further deforming the economy.

We can tolerate silly peripheral ideas cooked up by undergraduates in Germany like the minority Greens’ CO2 gas tax, as long as they’re never implemented to fatally wound ourselves and future generations.

Enough is enough.

Stupidity can only be permitted to go so far. The whole Green CO2 taxing insanity must now be ended. This nightmare has simply gone too far.

No-nonsense American Congressman, Jim Sensenbrenner, recently put it well: “A carbon [dixode] tax is akin to unilateral economic disarmament.”

Yes, bald-faced appeasement, economic appeasement.

Although Australians, like others, make their fair share of blues they’ve only once come close to a fatal one; when they failed, during the dangerous 1930s, to fully and promptly re-arm.

Luckily, Uncle Sam’s GIs, airmen, marines and sailors arrived in the nick of time.

Unfortunately, Labor last year failed to re-arm for the long economic haul ahead by opting instead to continue kowtowing to Greens’ economic deforming madness since the Rudd and Gillard-led gang was displaced with Gillard-Swan, plus compliant Mr Combet.

Their continued proselytising of silly Greens’ obsessions continues to pull no weight.

Take the following paragraphs from a Sydney Morning Herald report:

“Support for climate action continues to erode and more Australians say they don’t want to pay anything to help reduce greenhouse emissions as the Gillard government prepares to unveil a carbon tax that will impose costs on industry and families earning more than $150,000.

“The prime minister pledged yesterday (June 27) that nine out of 10 households would get assistance to cope with the costs of a carbon tax through tax cuts and increases in family payments and pensions – with the bulk of compensation for households earning less than $150,000 a year.

“But an annual poll by the Lowy Institute underlines how hard it will be to sell the new tax, with 39 per cent of Australians saying they are not prepared to pay anything to combat global warming, almost double the proportion who were prepared to pay nothing when the Rudd government was working on its first emissions trading scheme in 2008.”

Voters increasingly realise Ms Gillard, convenor of the hard-left Socialist Forum during the early 1980s – when real Labor reformers, Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating laid the basis for an increasingly competitive Australia – she sided with leftists vehemently opposed to that path.

That’s why she’ll remain a deformer, not a reformer, as she’s claiming. It’s in her ideological DNA.

She knows no better. She’s incapable of changing.

Ask yourself: what has Ms Gillard ever done except spend and misspend other peoples’ – our – money?

Australians rightly ‘smell a rat’ when Labor moves to wholeheartedly appease and embrace Greenism by imposing a jobs and industry-killing tax, then claims “nine out of 10 households would get assistance to cope with the costs of a carbon tax through tax cuts and increases in family payments and pensions”.

Why, then, have the tax? Why bake magic puddings?

That’s unreasoned, screwball thinking.

Economists call such utter silliness churning; people are taxed and then, via a costly bureaucratic money go round, the money is returned to those slugged the unnecessary tax.

The only beneficiaries, as most Australians – but not Ms Gillard or Mr Swan – appreciate, are costly make-work bureaucratic empires.

The best, indeed only, way out from such self-inflicted stupidity is for Labor to promptly bite the bullet, tap Ms Gillard and Mr Swan on their left shoulders and say: “Enough is enough; it’s time you went – like Kevin O’Lemon.”