WHY bother much with voters? Kevin Rudd now takes his cues from a hand-picked elite.
Last weekend 1000 of our "best and brightest" - as chosen by the Prime Minister and his mates - ended their two-day "ideas summit" by handing Rudd his policies.
This may have surprised you since it is only five months ago that you voted in as Prime Minister a man who'd said he already "had a plan for the future".
Well, scratch that. The voters last year let Rudd down by giving him just 52.7 per cent backing for a platform he'd had to make mild and unscary to win over the mugs.
So he last weekend got himself what he really wanted: 99 per cent support from his newest best friends for a much richer plan.
These friends are well-connected people you never voted for, but they have what Rudd craves - star appeal, and the full spectrum of fashionable thought from A to B, as in (Phillip) Adams to (Cate) Blanchett.
Yes, they are largely Leftists from our cultural elite, some with such an inflated sense of their worth that they claimed to be at Parliament House to represent you, dear voter, without ever having bothered to ask if you agreed.
Not surprisingly, these are also people who've turned out to have an agenda very different to the one you thought you gave Rudd last November.
For instance, I don't recall Rudd at the last election talking about a vote on a republic within two years, or a bill of rights giving judges more say over politicians, or a whole new tax system including who knows what new tax, or 20 new government bureaucracies, eating your money by the billions.
Labor dreams they may have been, but Rudd kept mum on them.
Likewise, I'm sure he never mentioned before the election that he'd pinch 1 per cent of the spending of every government department from Defence to Veterans' Affairs and spend it on friendly artists instead, or that he'd force up the price of new houses by making every one "carbon neutral".
I also don't remember Rudd promising a treaty with Aborigines, a ban on traditional coal-fired power stations, or a huge new health agency with the power to force bosses to have you "include 30 minutes of physical activity" in your working day.
I'm sure I'd have remembered that last bit, or any Labor manifesto demanding that "in classrooms across Australia, children . . . be encouraged to grow something real". I've got a memory for jokes like these.
Yet all of these policies, and more of this Government-Knows-Best kind, turned up in the document solemnly handed to Rudd on Sunday at the end of a summit that was not just ludicrous (of which more below) but sinister.
Gee, what would voters like you have said about such stuff before the election, when you still had a say and Rudd was desperate to reassure you he was a "conservative"?
But back then Rudd was keen to pretend he was just a younger John Howard, just as nerdily safe but even tougher on the pennies, roaring: "This reckless spending must stop!"
So tough was he then that he promised you big tax cuts, with just three tax brackets instead of four.
You believed all that, didn't you?
More fool you. The day after last weekend's summit, Rudd said he wouldn't give a time for making good his election promise to cut the tax scales - the second stage of his tax cuts. "Economic circumstances" were holding him back. And now he seems keener instead on the summit idea of a "root-and-branch" tax reform.
I'm not surprised. As it turns out, Rudd might need that tax-cut money for the new Big Government agenda given to him by his Chosen People.
A protest just in! Rudd insists, hang on, he will stick by his election promises, and that all his ideas summit produced were, well, ideas - not official Labor policies at all. He's still free to pick and choose.
But that's not how it's turning out - nor how it was intended, I suspect. Already summiteers are claiming that they, in fact, are the authentic voice of Australia, and Rudd will be judged most by how he delivers on their agenda. Not yours.
Here, for instance, is one of the summit's 21 co-chairs, World Vision boss Tim Costello: "Rather than certain groups, powerful groups, setting the agenda, the direction, it's actually throwing it over to us."
"Us", to explain, are Rudd's 1000 summiteers - many of whom seem to have got the notion that being flattered by Rudd as the "best and brightest" made them representatives of the less-bright rest. Made them real politicians, only smarter. Hear it from the delegate who told the summit how glad she was that "Australians" were finally in Parliament House - as if the politicians we'd chosen were aliens.
Hear it from former ABC staffer Maxine McKew, now a Labor politician, who told the unelected summiteers that the Parliament she wanted to see in 2020 would look "much like the people in this room".
Hear it especially from Sam Mostyn, a former Labor aparatchik and now insurance PR, who instructed her session on global warming: "We do represent the entire community."
No you don't, sister. Not one Australian voted for you. Indeed, you barely represent even yourself.
I say that because every sign is that the summiteers were pulled together to give Rudd exactly the mandate voters never got around to giving him - a mandate for what Labor wanted to really do, but was too afraid to ask.
First step in this con was to select a crowd that would agree to any scheme involving Big Government, global warming alarmism and the rest.
And so of the 1000 delegates, an astonishing 118 came from a single Left-wing activist group, GetUp, whose former spokesman is now Rudd's press secretary. Dozens of serving and former Labor politicians were also dragged in, from Bob Carr and Barry Jones to John "No Water" Thwaites and even Joan Kirner.
Naturally, heads of the biggest green groups were drafted, such as WWF's Greg Bourne and the Australian Conservation Foundation's Ian Lowe, as were a whole glacier of professional global warming alarmists, from Tanya Ha to Tim Flannery. They were joined by a dozen past or present ABC staff, including David Marr, Geraldine Doogue and Jeff McMullin, and a generation of "stolen generations" propagandists such as Robert Manne, Lowitja O'Donoghue and Pat Dodson.
It worked. Of 100 summiteers asked to discuss climate change, for instance, not one was an identifiable sceptic. Of the 100 brought in to discuss the arts, none protested against the summit's demand for an explosion in government grants in exchange for an absurd promise to "double cultural output by 2020". This lot even called for artists to be put into factories around the nation to teach the yokels "sense-making".
Most significantly, of the 100 brought in to discuss the republic, only one - Liberal senator and token conservative George Brandis - was against. Just one out of 100 against the republic?
What are the odds, when even the summit's briefing papers admitted public backing for a republic has for years been under 50 per cent?
To get a 99 per cent result at the summit when the public support is half that takes rigging of the kind Robert Mugabe is arranging in Zimbabwe.
Yet hear Rudd crow that this was in some way the genuine voice of the people: "I think what the summit was saying loud and clear was that there is a big groundswell of support for a republic in Australia."
No, Prime Minister. That was no "groundswell" you heard from the stage on Sunday. That was just the sound of your friends, courtiers and carpet-baggers - all chosen by your team - clapping wildly.
And they were clapping hard not just for your republic of the elites, but for the power you're giving them right now over the millions of voters who never got a say in your farce of a summit.
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fair doos if you guys want a republic, i see one of our problems in the UK as the loss of identity, we bend over backwards and accomodate for other cultures and ours has disappeared incase we offend anyone, in certain places theres an influx in foreign nationals and they dont intergrate into society, they are more like seperate societys.
