In science
fiction, there is a story element featuring an aberration in a greater force –
space/time continuum, the force, fate. An event occurs that throws the natural
order of things out of whack, and for the duration of the story, everything
goes weird. The Russians won the Cold War, Earth was enslaved by aliens, mum
and dad never got together. The hero, trapped in this strange, recurring
aberration, spends his or her time trying to rectify the tear or warp or
magical twitch, and in the end, everything slurps back down a vortex of time
and reverts back to normal, with none but the hero any the wiser.
If Kevin
Rudd wins this next ballot and returns to Labor leadership, and then his party
is defeated, there’s a nice symmetry that would, in a science fiction plot, be
the perfect plot device that brings everything slurping back to the way things
were.
Rudd was
heading to a Labor loss when Julia Gillard stepped in. The following election
cycle, with its hung parliament, the constant battle between Rudd and Gillard
and the invisible but omnipresent opposition leader were all so bizarre, the
years felt like that warp, that tear, that divergent timeline where everything
was wrong.
I hope Rudd
wins the ballot, because then he’ll lose the election he was meant to lose, and
all in the Labor party will be razed, torn out, slurped away as that ‘shadow
universe’ and Australian politics, maybe, will return to a more regular,
comfortable, predictable, forward moving world.
Only we’ll all know, and there were no heroes.
