Songs Of A Sentimental Geek

"Ding, dong - the myth is dead!
Which old myth? The Howard myth!
Ding, dong - the Howard myth is dead!

"It's dead like the Democrats -
they'll go, the party will implode
now Costello has flown,

"So everybody:

"Ding, dong at Bennelong -
Howard's gone, he won't hang on -
Ding, dong - the Liberals are dead!"

Pardon the obscene gloating, but after eleven years of having my views utterly unrepresented at a federal level, it's hard not to scooch down the hallways in a semi-permanent victory dance.

Since Saturday night, I've been drafting this blog in my head, plotting out new and inventive ways of repeating myself - health, education, infrastructure, Aboriginal affairs, trade with China, Kyoto - but everything I want to say has already been said, intelligently and ad nauseam, by more knowledgeable commentators than me. Howard is gone, and that's the bulk of what matters.

But politics is never so clear-cut as The King Is Dead - Long Live The King.

Because Kevin Rudd, although, yes, a Labor Prime Minister, and a decent economic manager, and a fluent speaker of Chinese, and quite emphatically not John Howard, is still worthy of suspicion, even - perhaps especially - by those who voted him in. There are two extremely good reasons for this, viz:

1. He is still human.
2. He is still a politician.

The day any Prime Minister, President, Dictator, Chancellor, God-King or Lord High Screaming Oligarch gets into power and does everything they said they would, exactly as was promised and as easily as they said it is the day hordes of demonic cherubim flood the Earth and institute a global moratorium on pants. It has not happened. It was never going to happen - and, indeed, never will. Even as I write, some pre-election promise or other is undoubtably being sidelined in accordance with the ever-shifting, primordial muck of compromise that is federal government. But should something dear to my heart get shafted, then I will feel every bit as happy to complain about Kevin Rudd as I have been about Howard - without the slightest tinge of hypocricy.

Here's why:

Back when I was in primary school, I used to play soccer at lunch. In keeping with the fact that we were all nine years old, the only rules involved the presence of two teams, a roundish ball and a mutual desire to kick said ball between either of two "goals" - usually a pair of fence posts versus a tree and a rubbish bin. Everything else was fair game, a policy I wholeheartedly embraced. Running with the ball, I decided, was not nearly so much fun as trying to take the ball from someone else, and so my method of play became to switch sides as soon as the team I'd been playing for had possession. In the run-up to the election, these fond memories started to worry me, because deep down, I've always loved being the underdog. Had those soccer games actually been a disturbing harbinger for my future moral/political life - would I go on to become a Liberal voter as soon as the ball changed hands?

And then I came back to reality. Soccer, like most sports, is a poor metaphor for politics, because it involves two mutually exclusive agendas, well-defined goals, evenly matched teams and zero grey area. No one party will ever entirely support your views - or at least, their actions will never be identical to their rhetoric. At its most basic level, politics is about finding someone who can do what you want and making them do it, either by granting concessions elsewhere, twisting their arm or offering incentives. Beyond the necessary evil of party loyalty, fidelity has, in practice, little or nothing to do with good government, simply because the Perfect World option is so rarely compatible with the pragmatism of what can actually be managed.

All of which means that even though I think Labor is far and away the lesser of two evils, they'll still deserve backlash when the feces hits the rotational cooling device.

But, in the interim, I've still got this pesky speck of optimism left. Colour me crazy, but I just can't seem to stop smiling at the thought that the economy might become important, not for its own sake, but as a means of providing better social and public services. As wild cheers grip the floor of Parliament, I imagine Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd climbing onto one of those spectacular wood-and-leathern tables and making like Paul McCartney, singing:

"I'll give you all I've got to give
If you'll say you love me too,
I may not have a lot to give
But what I've got I'll give to you
'coz I don't care too much for money -
money can't buy me love!"