Another year of living dangerouslyDecember 20, 2009 Comments 1

The past 12 months have had their fair share of conflict, upheaval, and man's continuing inhumanity to man.

THOSE of us who have lived long enough well recognise the irregular pattern of horror that sometimes coincides with Christmas.

In Australia we had Cyclone Tracy, which devastated Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974. Thirty years later the world stood aghast as the Boxing Day tsunami swallowed villages of families and changed irrevocably our view of Pacific and Asian shores as tranquil playgrounds.

Last Christmas gave rise to an ugliness that would usher in 2009. After thousands of rocket attacks on its civilians over many years by Hamas militants, Israel sent its planes, tanks and troops into the Gaza Strip on December 28, reminding us again of the failure of politics to tackle man's inhumanity to man.

Hope, however, quickly came on the heels of the horror, with the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th US President. Rarely had a US president been sworn in amid such expectation, domestic and global. Rarely, too, had such onerous events conspired to ground optimism.

And so, Obama's vow post-Gaza to make Middle East peace a priority by tough diplomacy and hard talking with the Israelis, amounted to little more than incremental argument about settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Domestically, meanwhile, Obama's pledge to close the great equality gap in American society with an initial measure of universal health insurance was steamrollered by a hostile Senate – and the more pressing need to steer his country through the global financial crisis and end America's involvement in the Afghanistan War.

Obama, like Kevin Rudd, ends the year in Copenhagen, where the chasm between developed and developing worlds has been put in sharp relief by acrimonious debate about who should sacrifice what to arrest climate change.

While Australia, a global player of minor significance, was never going to determine outcomes in Copenhagen, the Rudd Government had hoped – indeed banked – that the summit would deliver it a significant domestic political boost.

This was not how 2009 was supposed to end for Labor. It envisaged that December would be a milestone in Rudd's first term, the point where he took Australia's freshly legislated emissions trading scheme to the Copenhagen summit so that he might punch above Australia's international weight and lead the world by example.

Until barely a week or so before Tony Abbott emerged as Liberal leader on December 1, Labor was utterly convinced Malcolm Turnbull would win party-room support for the Government's trading scheme.

The Labor leadership believed the amendments it had negotiated with the Opposition would be just enough to win carriage of the legislation through the Senate – and to carry Turnbull's wounded leadership through the Christmas break and probably to the next election.

"He'll end up getting enough – just enough – to stay in the job," was how one senior Labor figure put it.

Not quite.

The palace coup against Turnbull stunned the Labor leadership, ending its plans for a triumphal end to the 2009 political year.

No sooner had Abbott, the wildcard, emerged as the new Liberal leader than a colleague of Rudd's confided that Christmas had come early for Labor.

The mercurial Abbott may yet prove to be the gift to Labor that just keeps on giving. But harder heads who have observed Abbott – with all his manifest weaknesses and strengths – closely over many years, are unwilling to be quite so judgmental yet.

The emergence of leader Abbott, while freighted with enormous risk for the Liberals at the beginning of an election cycle, is nonetheless a negative for the Rudd Labor Government.

Quite simply, it has created uncertainty for the Government in the countdown to an election year. Rudd has been steadfastly setting the domestic political agenda since he emerged as Labor leader in 2006, and as Prime Minister he has faced opposition leaders who have largely sought to fight on his turf.

Abbott has vowed to be different, to set his own agendas where possible and to lead rather than follow in the debate.

As fate had it, Abbott emerged as the Speedo-clad Opposition Leader just as another famous budgie smuggler, Bob Hawke, celebrated his 80th birthday. Hawke, like Abbott as a leader, wore his human shortcomings openly.

Abbott will be colourful and fiercely adversarial; among his greatest strengths is his capacity to appear – and to genuinely be – human. The contrast with Rudd's somewhat detached bureaucratic style and confected jingoism will be stark.

Hawke once famously declared that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990. Abbott offers great promise, meanwhile, that no Australian political journalist nor cartoonist will go hungry in 2010.

Rudd's 2009 is characterised by Australia's emergence as one of just three advanced economies to grow in the past year amid the maelstrom of global recession. While the opposition argued that the Government's $42 billion spending package was reckless and ill-targeted, Labor's weathering of the crisis will consolidate its economic credentials in the run-up to the election.

The year was not, without political pain for Rudd. He lost his first minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, thanks to a combination of the knockabout former defence minister's sloppiness and his relentless pursuit by an autocratic Defence establishment that is resistant to change and accountability.

Rudd also floundered on how Australia should deal with asylum seekers. He promised the impossible in a tough and humane response, but effectively delivered a non-policy that will shadow him to the ballot boxes.

But nobody hurt quite like Turnbull who, in a spectacular "I put it to you, gentlemen of the jury" moment, effectively accused Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan of corruption in relation to government financial assistance for car dealers.

True, Godwin Grech – a public servant who concocted the emails on which Turnbull based his allegations – probably hurts a little more.

There was a milestone or two. Camelot ended with the death of US senator Ted Kennedy, whose life was just a little too flawed for the presidency – which is quite an achievement really.

And the world also marked 20 years without the threat of Cold War since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But there's always another fence, as the growth of the wall around the Palestinian West Bank illustrates.

And another enemy, as Israel sights its weapons on emerging nuclear threat Iran.