Rudd ready to savage Turnbull if the Senate rejects Labor’s debt package
Chris Uhlmann on ABC1’s Insiders today.
If the Government’s debt package does not pass the Senate and Australia enters a recession, ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann said the Rudd Government will blame the Coalition.
“If, for any reason, it shouldn’t be passed, then you can expect that the Government will say that this is a recession brought on by Malcolm Turnbull. It’s one that we didn’t have to have,” Uhlmann said today on ABC1’s Insiders.
And, of course, Chris, we know that if that happened the men and women of the Canberra Press Gallery, fuelled by indignation and outrage, would unleash a frenzied attack on Mr Turnbull and his colleagues.
Conversely, if the Senate, as expected, passes the Rudd debt package and Australia still sinks into recession, what then? When Rudd tries to pass off the recession as another one “we had to have”, due to international circumstances, will the ferocious watchdogs of democracy rip into the prime Minister and his team, reminding them daily about how they should have listened to the Coalition?
And when the Government’s $200 billion of debt brings home its long-term legacy of high interest rates, will all those fiercely independent and unbiased gallery reporters remind the Government that Mr Turnbull told them so?
Don’t bet on it.
Some of the “highlights” of Keating’s “recession we had to have” were mortgage rates of 17 per cent, overdraft rates of 20 per cent and an unemployment rate that hit 11.2 per cent.
But press gallery veteran Michelle Grattan, reflecting on those Labor years, told ABC radio back in 2001, “the Labor Government’s economic record was good”, merely conceding that “there were some misjudgments”.
You can count on the gallery to be as forgiving and accommodating overall of these Labor economic “managers”.
