Ok, show's over, I don't want to add to the pessimism surrounding Julia Gillard here but there's been one final sign which shows for sure that Kevin Rudd is going to be Prime Minister again. This morning he went on Fairfax radio and told listeners that he was more likely to captain the Brisbane Broncos than come back as PM.
I know it's a lifetime away but if you cast your memories way back to 2010, Julia spookily enough said very similar things, albeit with an AFL tinge, just before she became PM in that unforgettable overnight coup. So that's it. Game over, man, game over. This is the final sign of a pending Labor armageddon.
Before Kevin's fall, there were many colourful Julia linescoming out of constant media tussles over the leadership issue. In one interview, where she promised she wouldn't be leader before the 2010 election, she said that the interviewer may as well have asked her if she was "anticipating a trip to Mars". In another she said she was more likely to do a Jessica Watsonand sail around the world, or that she'd sooner be expecting a call from Steven Spielberg before a leadership ballot.
It seems somehow we've gotten trapped in a loop. Someone has accidentally torn a hole in the political time-space continuum, allowing us to go round and round in ever more depressing circles. There a few signs of this, including the above-mentioned, weirdly similar leadership denials. The other patterns are more obvious, part one is that carbon pricing is on the agenda, part two is a PM slumps in the polls with a rival who's gaining popularity and then part three, they get the boot. We've got part one and part two already lined up in the chamber, someone just needs to pull the trigger and we'll have part three.
As Mary Jo Fisher said recently in parliament, in all of this carbon mess we seem to be dancing the Hokey Pokey and doing the Time Warp all over again. Even Pauline Hanson is getting back into politics and so the broken record goes.
What Julia needs is something to break the cycle, switch gears. If Kevin says that he'd sooner go to Mars than be PM again, we know it's really the end of Labor's world. Tony Abbott and the shock jocks need to settle down, have a juice box and a nap. And the moons need to be aligned so that we're not condemned to replay this.
Otherwise Kevin becomes a dead cert to be PM again, and then maybe he'll bring back an ETS, we'll have a poll dive, and Julia will come back. Maybe this is the Groundhog Day of Australian politics and we're just doomed to repeat and repeat this terrible mess until someone does something right, something different. What else do we do? Time to hold on while we go ever further down the rabbit hole.
Bella Counihan works at the Canberra press gallery and writes for the National Times.
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