Australians still unconsciously ‘dips their lid’ to a ‘guvna’.

By David Kehoe

Kevin Rudd’s return to the prime ministership raises again the question of why he is so popular with a significant section of Labor and swinging voters.

Quietly despised by Labor insiders who knew him before he was first elected to leadership of the Federal ALP, and proved intolerable to MPs and senior public servants who had to work with him in his first occupation of the nation’s highest political office, Rudd owes his resurrection to the political power of the adoring innocent citizens who see only his cherub face and, surprisingly, his toffy, un-Australian and prat-like language.

Who in all of Australian European settlement has ever heard a successful Australian politician talk about the electorate as “good folk” and that he must “zip” off? Isn’t this the language of nuns and parsons? Didn’t the Currency Lads and Lasses throw the “good folk” and the Bunyip Aristocracy into the tidal muds of Sydney Harbour in the 1820s to be rid of this prat language?

But, it’s a significant section of the descendants of those lads and lasses – the first-born of the convicts – who now seem to accept this pompous Rudd dialect.

This correspondent had a hopefully happy insight into this perplexity that is Rudd’s attraction among working class voters, even after Rudd had been exposed as a straw man in the art and science of governing a nation.

Chemistry

At the local pharmacy that does a roaring trade in one of the most socially and economically poorest suburbs in Melbourne’s south-east, customers line up to place and pick up their prescriptions. So? That’s what they do at every chemist.

But there is a significant difference at this pharmacy: the customers routinely halt in a line several metres from the counter when, in many pharmacies elsewhere in Melbourne, customers approach the counter immediately and ‘up-front’ to the counter. When it is suggested that a waiting customer move closer to the counter, the friendly request is rebuffed as if the interlocutor is attempting to push in. At other shops in the retail strip, no such hesitancy is displayed.

Kevin Rudd: celebrity candidate in the non-real world of public popularity.

Contemplating this scene one day from the waiting seats, it dawned on the writer that what is at work in the pharmacy is a version of the ‘upstairs, downstairs’ syndrome. To the residents of the area, the pharmacist occupies the same social strata as the doctor, lawyer, professor or clergyman. It is the realm of special knowledge and what the disadvantaged regard as high culture.

For customers for whom a fluoro work vest is the passport to social acceptance, seeing a university-educated professional in this way is a fact of life, not a fault on the part of struggle town. But it can give an insight for political pundits into why Kevin Rudd draws such uncritical support from some sections of traditional Labor support.

Toffs rule, OK?

The key is that, for a significant section of the Australian working class, Rudd talks in the manner that they think a Tory toff or a British public servant or a university-educated MP or public servant talks. Unfortunately, members of the innocent, uneducated and otherwise unread non-chattering class ‘who-don’t‑rule’ think that only MPs who talk like the upper classes as seen on TV soap operas really know how to run the country.

The socially and economically disenfranchised lower levels of Australia’s working class – which includes many migrants as well as old blue-collar Australian Irish-British workers – may never elect anything other than a larrikin to be their local member (and even a larrikin PM in Bob Hawke) but, when it comes to the leader of their country, they want someone who knows their way around the big end of town.

As most Australians don’t get to mix with decision makers, they can only go on appearances to decide who has the substance to deal with the big national issues. Rudd – like the lord of the manor in some British period soap opera that television is full off — speaks and subtly lectures down to workers and this makes those Australians who still unconsciously ‘dips their lid’ to the ‘guvna’ feel secure. It is this group who could not understand why Labor heavyweights — who found they couldn’t work with Rudd’s unstable political personality and feared for the good government of the nation — killed off the worker’s friend, Kevin 07.

Of course, the heavyweights hate loss of political power more than the good of the country so they have returned to the man who can give them a 10 per cent boost in the poll, despite the fact that they know that their celebrity candidate in the non-real world of public popularity suffers a form of egomania that would make even former Labor PM Gough Whitlam blanche. Whitlam was another Labor PM whose demeanour was that of a toff, but he was able in his better moments to stand back from his strong sense of competency and realise that he was not the only person who could save Australia.