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        Not Pete Atkin >> Off-topic >> Clive on the recent Australian elections.
        
(Message started by: Kevin Cryan on Today at 17:00)

Title: Clive on the recent Australian elections.
Post by Kevin Cryan on Today at 17:00

Generally, I'd steer well clear of politics and political discussion, but for once I make an exception, The reason is that Clive has a very good essay (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22960870-28737,00.html) in the December the 2^nd edition of The Australian in which he argues that John Howard lost in the recent Australian election “not because he stayed too long in Iraq but because he stayed too long in office" and that his opponent, Kevin Rudd, was “clever enough to spot that no other issue really mattered except the incumbent's hubristic estimation of his own indispensability”

As always with Clive, you really don’t have to know much about the minutiae of Australian politics to follow the general drift of the argument, or to see how some of the things he says, while obviously intended, in the first instance, for his Australian readership, are far less parocial in their implications than their appearance in The Australian would suggest .

I can see this essay appearing in, say, the Home Thoughts from Abroad section of some future James collection, and even though the events it deals with will by then have faded from memory, I shouldn’t think the essay itself will have become so irrelevant that a strong case can't be made for its inclusion.

Kevin Cryan