Leadership

Like many Australian's I am hoping that one day soon we might see a small glimmer of the leadership that is needed to ensure we are *Moving Forward* in the right direction and heading toward a destination that most of us will be happy with.

But then I have been hoping for that since November 2007 and all we have seen is *me too* popularism and an almost complete *shirking* of responsibility by our political leaders.

Now part of that is because both major party leaders - the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition - and their staff are so disconnected from reality that it hurts.

The Prime Minister looked like an OK sort of person when she was the Deputy. She was coherent and had some passion and a persona despite the fact that she comes from Adelaide. But since she got the main gig she has become Madame Bland. She needs to resurrect some passion, acquire some courage and start to do the things that are expected of a leader and Prime Minister. Like lead and take some risks. Do some good and don't be evil. Stand up and be counted. And so on.

And the Opposition Leader really needs to take a long holiday and book himself in for the necessary surgery to have his personality bypass reversed. Because the man is seriously on the nose with a large subset of our population. He obviously knows this because he has moderated his approach recently and has turned on the invisible shield - hoping we won't notice. Where's Tony they all say? The trouble is that everyone knows he is faking it and can't wait to start rampaging again.

One of the bigger problems is that both parties have a quality problem on their front benches and so support for the leader is thin. But there are actually some good people in the Parliament - the biggest problem is that the party systems tend to bypass the doers in support of the yes men. And mostly they are old white and male ;-)

The real issue is that the party system hasn't grown up - they are still operating as though it is 1970 - fix that and I suspect that you will fix the leadership problem.