Piers Ackerman - Clueless leaders compound fear

A typically incisive piece in the Daily Telegraph from that entertaining columnist Piers Ackerman, in which he exposes Rudd and Swan as politicians hopelessly out of their depth in government:

Rudd tries to look grave and prime ministerial, and Swan does his best to look comfortable in meetings with international economic boffins, but both fail. They don’t look natural. They look as if they’re acting and, increasingly rapidly, the wider electorate is starting to see what too few saw before last November’s election.
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Labor’s problem is it’s not just the economic times denting its popularity, it’s the lack of plausible leadership.

Ackerman queries why the electorate should believe Rudd & Co on the economy when they have set in motion policies that will increase unemployment and damage economic prospects, in particular the ETS:

[Rudd] and Climate Minister Penny Wong persist in their bizarre claim that not doing anything about climate change is going to cost more than doing something, even though Treasury documents quietly released on the Friday before the recent long weekend clearly show that Rudd’s emissions reduction plans will damage the GDP and create further unemployment.

And he sums up the government's problems succinctly:

But at the heart of the Rudd Government is a great emptiness, a void between the rhetoric and the reality, the empathy and the action.
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Eleven months on, Australians have confidence in themselves but every reason to have no confidence in the Rudd Government.

Read it here.