A SECRET Labor Party report has criticised the government led by Kevin Rudd as lacking purpose and being driven by spin and implies that the former prime minister or his supporters were behind the leaks that almost destroyed Julia Gillard's election campaign.

It says the leakers ''should be condemned by the party''.

The report is the so-called sealed section of the 2010 election review conducted by party elders John Faulkner, Steve Bracks and Bob Carr and was never meant to be made public.

KEVIN Rudd has branded the Labor Party's conference a failure, saying it squibbed the chance to kill off the power of factional heavies who ended his leadership and installed Julia Gillard.

In an extraordinary intervention, the former prime minister lashed out at his party for ignoring calls to give a greater say to ordinary members - including proposals that could have helped him in his campaign to return to the top job.

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.

Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts — but that doesn’t stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn’t stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama’s “massive defense cuts.”

Mr. Romney’s strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn’t a stupid man — but he seems to play one on TV.

Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party’s nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/opinion/send-in-the-clueless.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Clueless!????... That the middle name of our own extreme ritewingnutter, Mr No — Abbott... We've been living the same scenario as the Yanks for quite a lot longer... Yes, Abbott has been dishing out his own cluelessness for far too long — thus poisoning the "decency" of Australian politics process, beyond the usual argy-bargy...

Abbott cluelessness has an element of nastiness in it.

Last year Julia Gillard told journalists at the National Press Club: "Don't write crap. Can't be that hard." How well is the media covering politics today? What is the future of political reporting, given the financial conditions for newspapers?

George Megalogenis from The Australian, ABC Online writer Annabel Crabb, the Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Hartcher, the Federal Opposition's Communications spokesman Malcolm Turnbull, and former press secretary to Kevin Rudd, Lachlan Harris, tell the ABC's Barrie Cassidy what responsibility the media bears for our political culture.

Presented by Sydney Writers' Festival, May 2012

http://www.themonthly.com.au/cant-be-hard-politics-and-media-landscape-5457