When Julia Gillard accepted a ballot for leadership on condition that the loser leave politics, one began to wonder which Hollywood movie she thought she was starring in. The moment Kevin Rudd accepted gleefully, the signals pointed to a Rudd victory.
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This was driven home by Bill Shorten’s declaration of support for Rudd. Shorten looked a trifle sheepish, as he should have, given his critical role in deposing Rudd and installing Gillard. Nonetheless, he clearly enjoys his role as kingmaker and at least this time had ingested a dose of political realism.
While poll-driven politics is shallow politics, there does come a time when a persistent slide in the opinion polls must compel action. Labor was facing not only defeat but also wipeout.
Gillard showed in 2010 that she did not possess the campaigning skills of Kevin Rudd and really was under the impression she was in a movie role when she promised us “the real Julia”.
Rudd is both an effective campaigner and an able communicator. Gillard was a great parliamentary debater and a very skillful negotiator but on the electoral hustings she appeared brittle and unconvincing and far too ponderous.
This gap between her parliamentary and public performance is difficult to explain but it might be something to do with her spin doctors fashioning an image that they thought would sell but which, in actuality, stripped her of the ability to communicate effectively.
So the Labor caucus did need to take action but the move against Gillard highlights a disturbing trend in our politics. The focus is increasingly on leadership and personality rather than policy. This is reinforced by a mass media obsessed with leadership speculation. So when there are leadership tensions, party cohesion breaks down and sometimes spectacularly. Moreover, loyalty is to one or another leader rather than the Party. Rudd promised no recriminations, so why so many leading members of Cabinet refused to serve under him is somewhat puzzling. Their loyalty was to Gillard, not the Party.
This suggests that party solidarity will be hard to rebuild. Still, Rudd will not have Gillard hovering around menacingly waiting to pounce and he might just be able to convince his colleagues that unity and cohesion is a better look than disarray. Anthony Albanese as deputy and leader of the House, and Penny Wong as leader of the Senate will aid him in this. Both have immense respect in the Party and should be able to go some way towards mending its deep fractures.
What, then, of the election? It looks like being more of a contest now but there is always a possibility that people are tired of Labor’s internal ructions. The Liberal attack ads featuring Rudd’s Labor colleagues lambasting him have already begun. The ferocious critiques of Rudd before his first challenge were advocated by Gillard’s main spin doctor John McTernan.
The political stupidity of this tactic was stunning. He also appears to be the brains (if that’s the right word) behind the knitting photo. Spin sometimes backfires badly.
This has been a surreal week in politics, topped off by Kevin Rudd wearing a blue tie at his press conference late last night. Gillard’s ridiculed prophesy has come true but on her own side of politics.
Dr Anthony Ashbolt is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Wollongong. He specialises in American politics and history but has taught and written about Australian politics and media politics for many years. He will be blogging for the Mercury on the Federal election campaign.
He is the main editor of the labour history journal Illawarra Unity and the author of A Cultural History of the Radical Sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). He is also co-author (with colleague Glenn Mitchell) of a chapter in the recently published Red Strains: Music and Communism outside the Communist Bloc (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Many of his other publications can be found at Research Online at the University of Wollongong.
