Just what a prime minister needs: a crisis

Not everyone is suffering as a result of the global financial crisis. In fact, the possible catastrophic collapse of the financial system as we have come to know it has done wonders for at least two dull, middle aged men, namely Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd.

Gordon Brown was a dead man walking a month ago; now the newly minted Nobel economics laureate, Paul Krugman, has praised him in the New York Times, and even people who hate Brown have grudgingly expressed approval. “I can’t stand Gordon Brown, but he hasn’t done a bad job,” says one man, a researcher in an investment bank who appears to still have a job. “He’s a bit like Churchill. He wasn’t that great a peace-time prime minister. But he came alive when you needed him.”

Even Rudd’s detractors are being forced to be nice about him.

As one reader of the Daily Telegraph put it, “I’m not a fan of Kevin Rudd or the Labour Party. All I have seen him do is call for inquiries and travel the globe. However, I am for the first time impressed with the PM.”

Prior to the crisis, Kevin Rudd — Kevin07 during his election campaign — was renamed Kevin747 in recognition of his globetrotting activities. (Remember that South African president, the one who seemed to spend more time solving the problems of others instead of those in his own backyard? What was his name again?) He was seen as a man of all talk and no action and his popularity had already started to slide. When the Liberals elected a charismatic new leader, Malcolm Turnbull, who made no bones about his intention to ensure that Rudd was a one-term prime minister, the government was worried.

And then global financial markets sank faster than a Qantas Airbus on the way to Perth.

Like Brown, Rudd is dreadfully worthy, though he is more hectoring where Brown is lugubrious. One can imagine Rudd as a school prefect, lurking through the grounds in search of grade eights late for assembly. You watch him on TV and you can imagine him lecturing you on the importance of wearing a blazer and boater and not use bad language while you wait for you mother to pick you up in her X5.

So the personality change that the crisis seems to have precipitated is entirely welcome. Political commentator Annabel Crabb noted this week that Rudd — “the sire of stimulus” — seems to have come into his own:

“With the global economy tanking, the dollar taking a graceful swan-dive and Australian taxpayers being drawn inexorably into a minefield of fiscal liability, the prime minister should be a hollow-eyed, gibbering wreck by now. Instead, he looks better and better the worse things get. Stimulated? He’s looking positively politically priapic.”

Crabb, the most consistently entertaining of Australia’s political columnists, had earlier observed that a Crisis was a lovely thing for a prime minister: “It’s like being a wartime PM without actually having to go out and survey troops or telephone the mothers of the fallen,” she noted. “Anything he does, if it’s sufficiently overlaid with the solemnity of impending financial doom, will look statesmanlike.”

As indeed it does. People are even prepared to forgive Rudd for his unbelievably turgid and dull speeches. (On that point, Crabb suggested that the solution to the problem of Osama Bin Laden is right in front of us: simply encircle the Tora Bora “with tank-mounted loudspeakers and broadcast a full-volume loop recording of the prime minister’s UN general assembly speech. Osama bin Laden would shoot out like a singed ferret in the space of a day, I guarantee it.”)

Rudd had initially guaranteed Australian banks for the next three years; this week he unveiled a $10.4 billion payout to pensioners, low-to-middle income families and first time home owners. The intention is to prevent a recession by encouraging Australians to spend, spend, spend in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

The reception of such decisive action has been broadly positive; there was unhappiness over the government’s support for the banks (Australians hate their banks as much as South Africans do) but the general view is that Rudd’s penchant for methodical, rational assessment is actually a good thing.

In fact, at this rate, Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown might be hoping that this crisis will continue in some form — manageable of course, so that they can be seen to be improving matters and proving global leadership — for years to come.

It would make their jobs so much easier.