Danger signal for Garrett in weekend story

Danger signal for Garrett in weekend story. There’s danger aplenty for Peter Garrett in a story in The Age on Saturday about an apparent reluctance to release a safety risk assessment on the government’s insulation rebate program prepared by lawyers from Minter Ellison early last year. The Environment Minister promised to make the document available when being interrogated by Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report on Thursday night.

On Friday his office confirmed that it would be released, reports the Age, but did not say when.To me the delay smacks of desperation as the spinners try and figure out a way of pretending that what is contained in the assessment does not really add to the case that Garrett should be dismissed. If there was nothing damaging in what the lawyers say I’m sure it would have been released to Parliament as part of the Minister’s defence. Yet again we could be seeing an example of how it is the cover up which costs a Minister his job rather than the actual offence.

Kevin Rudd has so far been steadfast in supporting his Minister yet this is emerging as the biggest political problem the Prime Minister has yet had to confront. The deaths of young men in ceilings and an outbreak of house fires are things that can be understood by all of the voters whether they have an interest in politics or not. And in so far as we yet have an indication of what the mob think about it all the news for Messrs Garrett and Rudd is not at all good.

They are by no means a definitive guide to public opinion but these little opinion polls from newspaper websites at the weekend should not be dismissed as completely irrelevant either.

Watching a PM under pressure. A true measure of the kind of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will be has been impossible during the last two and a third years for not once has he been under any political pressure. His personal popularity has been high, the media generally treats him kindly and with respect, his opponents until recently kept arguing among themselves and the pollsters continually reported an election would see Labor returned with an increased majority. It has to be the longest honeymoon for a new boy Prime Minister in the country’s history.

Only in the last couple of months have there been signs that the Prime Ministerial easy ride might be coming to an end. A couple of Newspolls have suggested the gap between Labor and the Coalition might be narrowing at last as Tony Abbott brings an appealing manner to Opposition campaigning while climate change and problems with an insulation policy give him some issues to campaign on.

The initial Rudd response to a modicum of criticism in the press is to talk of the need to better explain the Government’s policies. He and his ministerial colleagues are pretending that it is the salesmanship to blame rather than there being anything wrong with the product being sold. That is a common delusion of politicians when things start to go wrong.

So perhaps we soon will see how this Prime Minister stands up to the kind of pressure that comes when it is necessary to sack a friend from the ministry because he is threatening to drag the Party down. Then we will get a measure of how Kevin Rudd will stand in the list of the nation’s leaders.

Setting the record straight. The Cut and Paste section in The Australian this morning resurrected a quotation about my Crikey colleague Mungo MacCallum suggesting that when he was depressed he drank “to the point where I think it’s endangering his health – a least a bottle of wine a day.” One bottle of wine a day? That’s not the man I remember from the old Parliament House. I can assure you that when I used to lunch with Mungo we would have one bottle each before even starting lunch. Surely the paper will publish an apology forthwith.