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In his valedictory speech, the man who presided over one of the most shameful public policy debacles in living memory made no reference to his failings as a minister.
It was once cynically said that democracy means the “bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”. And so it was for Alan Tudge, whose political legacy has seemingly few points of distinction when cast against the record of the worst government in Australian history.
The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era was, after all, one marked by repeated attempts to leave in its wake a new Australia: one in which truth is denigrated and corruption venerated, where any semblance of ministerial responsibility has been swept away, and where calculated assaults on the most vulnerable and marginalised are reduced to the natural order of things.
In this blended sense, the signal quality of Tudge’s political legacy is not how unusual it was, with its legion of controversies, but how emblematic it was. Writing in The Age last week, Matthew Knott appeared to pick up a variation of this theme when he suggested it was ultimately Tudge’s “tumultuous personal life” inside the Canberra bubble that “caused [him] the most damage”.
Read more of Alan Tudge’s political obituary.
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