For What It's Worth...

Why, if I think it's great Australia now has a female Prime Minister, do I feel so heartsick?

Sure, the coup - and let's not be pedantic about this, it was a coup, albeit a political rather than military one - was conducted with swift, sure precision, the kind of clinical surgical strike the American military only wishes its so-called "smart" weaponry could achieve. There was no long, drawn-out saga of innuendo and undermining, leaving behind great tearing wounds of bitterness and public disillusion. We quite literally went to bed one night with Kevin Rudd as PM and woke up the next morning with Julia Gillard as our new Prime Minister.

I don't for a moment believe that Gillard didn't know what was happening. Even if only indirectly, she would have been aware of the numbers tilting against Rudd as his popularity declined and the ALP "brand" became ever more on the nose with the electorate. Maybe she even tried to warn Rudd, perhaps obliquely at first and then directly, that the forces of deposition were gathering against him. Either way, Gillard is too experienced and assured a political operator not to have seen what was coming and to have positioned herself accordingly.

But that isn't what has got me feeling as though our country has taken one almighty step backwards. True, the fact that a politically astute woman has shown herself to be as ruthless and unsentimental as "the boys" doesn't give me much confidence that our political culture specifically - or our social culture generally - has matured much. Which doesn't mean that I don't think Gillard will be a competent, perhaps even excellent, PM. But I suspect the circumstances of Gillard's ascent to the Prime Ministership tell us that while women are able to play "the boys" at their own game, the fact remains that it is still "the boys" game that is being played. No new territory has been staked out, no new paradigm has been put into place.

Still, I kind of expect that from Gillard. She is, afterall, a product of the same cynical, mercenary party "machine" that has produced her factional contemporaries within the ALP. So why am I feeling like I want to curl into a foetal ball and start keening for my country?

In part, I think it's because I'm angry with Kevin Rudd. In party political terms, Rudd was a relative outsider, having been "foisted" upon the federal parliamentary ALP via the party's Queensland administrative wing and his connections to the Queensland Premier's office. This meant that he largely lacked either a factional power-base or cross-factional support - as is the case with most parliamentarians, who do their time as footsoldiers in the factional machine before being given the nod to step up to the bright lights of elected office. But the fact of Rudd's outsidership meant that he had a great opportunity to change the political narrative of our country, both in terms of the ALP specifically and the wider political process generally.

Remember when Rudd was Leader of the Opposition, and when he first came to power? Back then, he articulated a cohesive political-social framework founded in a set of principles that spoke to the yearning of the Australian public for a new kind of politics: a politics of ideas, a politics of engagement, a politics of the "big picture" whose vision extended beyond the horizon of the three year electoral cycle. For the first time in a long time, Australians glimpsed a vision of the political process that transcended both the cynical "consensus pragmatism" of ALP factionalism, and the conceited "natural party of rule" arrogance of the Coalition and its neo-classical ideologues.

For the first time in a long time, Australians began to hope for something more.

But Rudd blew it. Once in power, and despite an impressive catalogue of initiatives that included affirming the Kyoto climate change protocols and the much-delayed apology to indigenous Australia, Rudd lapsed into an autocratic, presidential style of leadership that brooked no dissent and heard no other points of view. Decision making was limited to a restricted coterie of senior parliamentarians (the so-called "gang of four", which ironically included Gillard and Treasurer - now deputy PM - Wayne Swann), as well as a select group of staffers appointed by Rudd himself. Moreover, stories soon began to leak out about personality flaws in Rudd that presaged problems for the future: his frenetic, almost insane addiction to work; his short fuse and temper tantrums; his apparent insensitivity to the human and personal needs of those around him.

None of which was going to threaten Rudd while he was so spectacularly popular. The alienated parliamentary colleagues and factional mandarins couldn't move against a leader who so obviously had the nation's confidence. But it was in this fact that the seeds of disaster lay. For instead of using his outsider status to bring change into the ALP - and, by extension, the whole political culture of Australia - Rudd refused to persuade his colleagues to back his vision, instead demanding obedience and loyalty. Had he done so, once things turned sour he could have drawn on depths of goodwill and support that were previously absent. Indeed, it seems that Rudd's own consciousness of his "outsider" status provoked a sense of personal insecurity that drove him toward authoritarianism and the hostility from others which it engenders. Instead of being able to draw on the support of others, he found the knives were drawn against him.

And those knives came out for two reasons. The first was the "reform obsession" which seemed to characterise the Rudd government. Like the Whitlam government before it, Rudd tried to push through a raft of reforms at every conceivable level of policy, from industrial relations to climate change, from tax policy to health services. And like the Whitlam government, the Rudd government found itself swamped by the logistics of trying to implement reform across such a wide spectrum of policy areas. Which, combined with the relative inexperience of most of Rudd's ministers, and the corresponding inexperience of their personal staffers, resulted in some monumental policy disasters. Instead of tackling a couple of major projects at a time and getting them attended to in detail, the Rudd government tried to do everything at once - and paid the penalty for its poor judgement.

But the second cause of Rudd's downfall lay in Rudd himself. As noted above, rumours about some of Rudd's less attractive personality traits began to circulate earlier in his Prime Ministership. But when these were just "quirks" of the man himself, they were - electorally speaking - more or less harmless. But when they manifested themselves on the policy stage, they were disastrous for Rudd the politician, and gave the signal to his factional enemies to start organising the numbers.

Perhaps the most egregious example was Rudd's handling of the Trading Emissions legislation. Having tried and failed to get the legislation passed on more than one occasion, Rudd should have explained to the Australian public that the parliamentary process had not enabled the government to pass its legislation, as a consequence of which, the government would go to the next election seeking a clear mandate for both houses of parliament so that the legislation could be put in place. However, and in an almost inconceivable display of petulance, Rudd did the policy equivalent of taking his bat and ball and going home, declaring unilaterally that there was no community consensus on an emissions trading scheme, and delaying any legislation until at least 2012.

A response that only served to disillusion the public who had believed Rudd's image of "big picture" commitment, and who now not only questioned that commitment, but began to wonder whether his personality traits made him fit to be PM. The polls began to plummet, the knives were sharpened, the numbers counted. Rudd's continued refusal to realise his peril and change his ways only hastened the end. To borrow a classical allusion, Rudd started off looking like Australian politics' equivalent of Marcus Aurelius, only to end up its Tiberius: an isolated, ill-tempered, suspicious, and mistrusted individual whose unpopularity was largely of his own making.

And, ultimately, I think it's the rather pathetic humanity lying at the core of this tragedy that makes me feel the way I do. The almost unbearable sight of Rudd making his all-too-late appeal for support based on his record the night he realised the chickens had come home to roost; the gut-wrenching agony of watching him realise and struggle with the extent of his failure at the next day's media conference; the indescribable pathos of Rudd sitting in the backbench while parliamentary colleagues and opponents alike poured out their crocodile tears (a spectacle made all the more poignant by the presence of a delegation from Vietnam in the chamber). All these sights had me thinking: well, we could have one in a different direction in this country, but we blew it. Rudd blew it, the ALP blew it, the whole Australian electorate has blown it.

Maybe I'm being melodramatic. Maybe I'm being sentimental. Maybe I'm being a fool. But there's something within me that says, no matter how good a PM Julia Gillard turns out to be, there was a moment here for the seizing which, collectively, together as a society and a body politic, we have let slip through our fingers. And I think we're all going to be the poorer for it.

Talk to you soon,

BB.

Quote for the Day: Opportunity: that which comes disguised as hard work in order that it not be recognised by most people. (Ann Landers)