Sometimes only a cliché will do, especially when the subject is the Australian Labor party. Labor is holed beneath the water line and is sinking fast. No one, not even its newly reinstated skipper, Kevin Rudd, is capable of keeping the boat afloat as the nation heads for a general election on 7 September. In a couple of weeks, barring an act of God or a military coup, the conservative Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal-National coalition, will replace the left-liberal Rudd as prime minister of Australia.
It was not meant to be like this. In June Labor’s greatest electoral handicap — its party leader and prime minister, Julia Gillard — was stabbed in the back and replaced by Rudd, who three years earlier had in turn been backstabbed and replaced by Gillard and her gang of Labor heavies. The brutal reinstatement of Rudd seemed at first to have been a stroke of genius.
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