Lazarus Rising

by John Howard

  Rudd and Abbott could not have presented a sharper contrast. Abbott was direct and authentic, Rudd wordy and process-driven. As a result, the PM lost his nerve on climate change and passed up the opportunity of a double dissolution, which he would have won. He then completed his capitulation by deferring the ETS for several years. So the ‘great moral challenge’ (always a ludicrous description) had become just another malleable policy. It was his biggest single mistake, from which committed Labor and swinging voters concluded that he didn’t really have strong convictions about anything. That began his poll slide, which ultimately brought about his replacement by Gillard.

  Just as Rudd had lost his nerve on the ETS, his colleagues lost theirs over his popularity. All leaders have poll slumps. In both 1998 and 2001 my approval rating, in Newspoll, fell as low as 28 per cent. The lowest Rudd’s score ever went was 36 per cent. Moreover his narrowest lead on the preferred Prime Minister measurement was 9 per cent, whereas in both of the years mentioned I fell behind on that measurement, and on a number of occasions.

  Rudd was astonishingly friendless when the knock on the door came, a consequence of his bad people skills. Yet he was like that when they made him leader and he won the 2007 election. Those Labor MPs who now blame the faction leaders for this historic political setback for the ALP, which Gillard’s deal with the independents narrowly prevented from being a disaster, are themselves collectively to blame. In the Australian political system, it is the MPs alone who vote for the leader, Labor or Liberal. If Labor MPs believed the factional heavies, their judgement was abysmal; if they were bullied into it through fear of losing their endorsements, they were cowards. Either way they were the guilty men and women.

  Gillard’s campaign was shrill and negative, relying much too heavily on demonising Tony Abbott. The ALP underestimated Abbott, as epitomised by Bob Hawke’s statement that although he was ‘a good bloke’ he was ‘as mad as a cut snake’.4 How foolish that assessment appears now. The claim that Abbott would bring back WorkChoices lacked credibility. As explained earlier, Abbott was never a zealot about industrial relations changes.

  Tony Abbott deserves hero status amongst Liberals. His high intelligence and superb discipline in the campaign confounded his many patronising critics. No other person leading the party could have achieved what he did.

  He may have secured the Liberal leadership by just one vote, but he quickly pulled his party together and dealt in such a way with his National Party allies that the Coalition remained impressively united. One of his great strengths is his consultative style. He is a good listener; he understands the ambitions of others as well as striving to realise his own. When he suffers a poll slump, as he surely will, there will be no shortage of colleagues prepared to stand by him. His conduct will accrue loyalty.

  The Greens polled well, partly by courtesy of Labor voters unhappy with the ALP’s shillyshallying on climate change and its opportunistic shift on asylum-seekers. These were protest votes and not lasting gains for the Greens. There was a similar phenomenon in 1990 when the Democrats increased their numbers in the Senate to eight. Twenty years later, the Democrats have gone completely from federal parliament. For some years after 1 July 2011, however, the Greens will have the balance of power in the Senate. This bodes ill for any long-term economic reforms.

  Its alliance with the Greens means that, at best, the new Gillard Government will tread water on reform.

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  THE NEW PARADIGM?

  When the members of the federal parliamentary Liberal Party met to elect a new leader after its defeat on 27 November 2007, the outlook for the party and its cause, nationwide, seemed bleak. The gallows humour started early. Campbell Newman, the Liberal Lord Mayor of Brisbane, was quickly named the most senior Liberal figure in Australia: he actually held elected office.

  Not since its formation in 1944 had the Liberal Party been so bereft of political power. Labor was in office everywhere at a national, state and territory level. The reasonable expectation was that the newly ensconced Rudd Government would have at least two terms in office, more if it performed well.

  Peter Costello’s decision not to seek the leadership confronted Liberal MPs with a totally unexpected leadership choice between Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. Tony Abbott wanted to stand, but could not muster enough votes to make a run respectable; so he withdrew.

  The party was quite divided in the choice between Nelson and Turnbull. Downer (who had taken himself out of frontbench calculations) backed Turnbull, but Costello and Nick Minchin, then Senate Leader, strongly backed Nelson, who won narrowly by 45 to 42.

  Loyal liberals wished Nelson well, but few believed that he would lead the Coalition back into government — not because they doubted his ability and commitment, but because history was against ‘first up’ opposition leaders taking a party into government. On that issue at least, the history books were an accurate guide as to what happened. In so many other respects, they have not been, with political fortunes and forecasts being turned on their heads. Mocking rational expectations, from the dazzling heights of coast-to-coast Labor governments after the Rudd victory, the ALP has plummeted in public esteem.

  In the early months of his prime ministership, amid much euphoria, Rudd fulfilled two symbolic promises: the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol and the apology to Indigenous peoples. The period of his stratospheric approval ratings had begun.

  Most observers (me included) believed, by May of 2008, that Australian politics had settled into a familiar pattern. The new government was being given a fair go. Indeed the new Prime Minister was being given more than a fair go. His stellar approval ratings made many of his predecessors look quite pedestrian by comparison.

  Yet this was deceptive; Rudd was a clean-skin. He brought no popularity baggage to the Lodge, largely because he had only been on the national political scene for a short while; there was no in-built hostility to him; there were no Rudd haters. To committed Labor voters, Kevin Rudd was a hero. He had defeated me.

  To many Coalition voters he seemed innocuous enough. They lamented our loss but felt he was a safe pair of hands, and a lot of them would, for a time, give him the benefit of the doubt on the measurements of preferred Prime Minister and job satisfaction.

  Rudd’s first big political error was to read too much into his strong personal approval ratings. He didn’t understand that although initial public support for him was broad, it was not very deep. Thus began his imperial treatment of the Labor Party.

  A taste of this was his arrogant insensitivity to Labor feelings in choosing to visit the newly mothered Cate Blanchett in hospital in preference to attending the funeral of John Button. Button was a revered Labor identity; he had probably been, in overall terms, the most competent minister in the Hawke Government. Rudd’s action must have caused many Labor MPs to begin to wonder whether or not their new PM believed that loyalty in a political party should flow both ways. These were only the tiniest of straws in the wind. Three years on, they are seen as early signs of fatal political character flaws.

  So, in the shadow of a remarkable political victory, were sown the seeds of an even more remarkable and highly dysfunctional relationship between the senators and members who comprised the federal Labor caucus and their leader, which culminated in the abrupt and ill-advised removal of Rudd as PM on 24 June 2010.

  Kevin Rudd’s implosion continues to haunt federal politics. It, coupled with Gillard’s failure to win in 2010 in her own right, has denied her a quality crucial for any prime minister — authority.

  Gillard needed to win a Labor majority at the 2010 election to validate the assassination of Kevin Rudd. His removal confused and angered Labor supporters, and left other Australians mystified and cynical.

  We may not have a presidential system in Australia, but we know our governments by the name of the serving prime minister. Australians voted for a Rudd Labor Government in 2007, not a Gillard Labor Government. Given the chance to do just that in 2010, they re
fused to do so. That is the essence of Gillard’s problem; she will struggle to break free from this encumbrance. The broken promise on a carbon tax has added to her burden.

  Rudd’s removal was without precedent in Australian politics. Only three Labor leaders since World War II have defeated the Coalition from opposition: Whitlam, Hawke and Rudd. Yet Rudd was struck down before he had completed his first term.

  The demise of Rudd, compounded by Gillard’s weakness as a leader, has crippled the morale of Labor supporters. Campaigning for Joanna Gash, the Liberal MP for Gilmore in the Shellharbour shopping centre just before the 2010 election, I encountered a Labor supporter who said to me, ‘I am strong Labor. I couldn’t stand your policies, but I don’t know about this Rudd business. I voted for him, not Gillard. I am cranky. They didn’t ask me.’ Those comments encapsulated the alienation felt by so many Labor people about Rudd’s downfall.

  The Labor MPs who knifed Rudd displayed political naïveté, acting, quite literally, in the dead of night. Party activists accept that it is for MPs to choose the leader, but they want the opportunity to at least express a view. There was all the more need for this when the leader being dispatched was a prime minister yet to finish his first term. The whole episode served to reinforce the sense of irrelevance felt by ordinary party members.

  I wrote earlier that if Rudd had stayed PM then Labor would have won the 2010 election. Those who organised Rudd’s demise not only panicked, but showed contempt for Labor’s foot soldiers.

  The Labor caucus may have blundered in ousting Rudd, but he carries immense blame for becoming vulnerable to his colleagues’ brain snap. He treated them and the public service contemptuously; he travelled abroad far too much in his early months, thus creating the impression that he had no serious domestic policy agenda.

  Ironically, so far from Kevin Rudd saving Australia from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the reverse was almost certainly the case. Reacting to the economic plunge of 2008 gave him a challenge to respond to. Before that he had begun to appear as a prime minister in search of a rationale. As early as June 2008, there were rumblings that Rudd had no reform agenda and reports emerged of the chaos in his private office. In a little over six months he had shown a capacity to establish inquiries but not bring about change. Brendan Nelson put it aptly when he described Rudd as ‘all backswing but no follow-through’.

  The Gippsland by-election, on 28 June 2008, should have warned Rudd that he had a problem. When Brian Loughnane, the Liberal Federal Director, texted through the Gippsland figures to me in London, I immediately rang Nelson and said, ‘You should compare this with the Parramatta by-election in 1973, just nine months after Whitlam won.’ The swings against Labor in the two by-elections were very similar.

  I hoped I was providing Brendan with a useful political debating point. Little did I imagine that comparing Rudd with Whitlam would come to have more than a grain of truth.

  Rudd likened the GFC to a ‘rolling national security crisis’ — an absurd description, given the fiscal strengths of the Australian economy (bequeathed by the Howard Government) and the advantaged position Australia enjoyed by dint of China’s demand for our resources.

  Rudd’s overkill response to the GFC caused Labor ongoing damage. Not only were millions wasted on pink batts, school building programs and ill-directed $900 cheques, but in the process this Labor Government acquired the indelible mark of profligacy. The Australian people believe that it wastes money. Their cynical response to the recent budget proposal for set-top boxes for pensioners illustrated this.

  Gillard is regularly defied by Rudd; the public senses this but she is powerless to act. She can’t risk a by-election in Griffith, but I doubt that Rudd would leave parliament. He fantasises about a return to the leadership.

  If Gillard sacked Rudd, then he would go to the backbench and even more actively undermine his leader. Rudd would, however, find the bleachers much lonelier than he might hope. He is deeply unpopular with Labor MPs. He ignored them when he was riding high and, moreover, many think that he has been treacherous towards Gillard. It is probable that Gillard will lead Labor to the next election: so bad is the legacy of Rudd’s personal arrogance that it is unlikely his colleagues will have him back, and changing to yet another leader would evoke comparisons with the revolving door disaster of New South Wales Labor.

  No doubt Kevin Rudd is mesmerised by the polls which rate him ahead of Gillard. He should take a reality check. Those polls reflect the public’s disillusionment with Gillard more than enchantment with Rudd.

  If Rudd’s vainglory created the circumstances for his ill-advised removal, Gillard has appeared totally out of her depth as Prime Minister. Not only is she devoid of authority, there is no sense of what she believes in. On major issues she is without coherent direction, other than political survival. Her handling of the asylum-seeker issue, which has pleased no one, is a case in point.

  As deputy to Rudd she prospered, often being favourably compared to him. Her indifferent performance in the top job is a vivid reminder of the crushing responsibility involved in the sudden assumption of the highest office in the country, without any real warning or preparation and certainly without the sanction of having achieved that office through electoral victory.

  Julia Gillard rarely feels the need to explain to the Australian people why particular government actions have been taken. She didn’t explain why Kevin Rudd had been removed. The reasons may have seemed apparent to Canberra insiders, but not the broader public. Australians understood why Hawke replaced Hayden, or Rudd himself had replaced Beazley. Much speculation and debate preceded both events.

  By contrast the Rudd decapitation seemed to come from nowhere. All Gillard could do was vaguely refer to the Government losing its way.

  She has repeated this error with the carbon tax. For almost six months, the prime minister kept telling the Australian people that we needed a carbon tax, and that she was committed to it, but never why we needed it.

  Major economic changes require detailed explanation, even when there is bipartisan support, as was the case with the tariff reductions of the Hawke Government, when the Coalition made life easy for Labor by supporting those reforms. And that change occurred against the background of more than two decades of constant advocacy that cutting tariffs was good policy from the Treasury, the Industries Assistance Commission (the forerunner of the productivity commission), the economics profession, many journalists and other commentators.

  Julia Gillard has also demolished one of the great reform pillars of the past generation. She has done more than abolish WorkChoices; Gillard has re-regulated the labour market. She has succeeded in corrupting the language of the industrial relations debate by creating the impression that all of the workplace relations changes of the Howard Government occurred under WorkChoices — nothing could be further from the truth. Her first act as Workplace Relations Minister in the Rudd Government was to reestablish the union monopoly of the bargaining process by prohibiting future Australian Workplace agreements, which had been introduced not by WorkChoices but by the Workplace Relations Act of 1996.

  The dire consequences of the Labor Government abandoning the historic renovation of Australia’s industrial relations structure become more apparent with each passing month. No long-term policy issue is more important to Australia’s economic future than reversing Gillard’s calamitous retreat.

  The Gillard Government is unlike any Australia has previously had. After the 1940 election Menzies’ United Australia Party/Country Party coalition relied on two Independents, Coles and Wilson, both of conservative pedigrees. There were no counterbalancing MPs from left of centre and they only switched to supporting Labor’s John Curtin when it became apparent that the United Australia Party (the non-Labor forerunner to the Liberal Party) and the Country Party could not unite behind a leader.

  Earlier I described the four MPs who keep the ALP in power as a cosmopolitan coalition. One, Adam Bandt, is a Green; another, Andrew Wi
lkie, was elected as an Independent, with the assistance of Liberal preferences, but had run in the 2004 and 2007 elections as a Green. Then there are Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, the two former members of the National Party who both represent conservative non-metropolitan electorates. For ideological reasons Bandt and Wilkie will stick with Labor, despite what Wilkie will regularly hint. Absent a political force majeure, so will Windsor and Oakeshott. They both made a huge call in defying the wishes of their electorates to back Labor. Having made that covenant with the devil they are stuck with the consequences.

  The Australian Greens represent a paradox. They assumed the balance of power in the Senate from 1 July 2011, and made much of the running in the preparation of the carbon tax plan. The Greens have nine Senators, an undreamed-of level of representation. It is now harder for the Gillard Government to get legislation through the House of Representatives than the Senate.

  Yet there are signs that the wheels have begun to come off the Green machine; historically the 2010 election could well have been the zenith of their political achievement.

  The Greens are no longer a toy party, entitled almost by right to warm and fuzzy media treatment. They now have real power and with that has come closer scrutiny. For the first time the Australian media has begun subjecting Bob Brown to the same probing as Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.

  The early signs are that he does not like it. He had an easy ride for too long and was often able to deflect difficult questions with a metaphorical tree hug. Radical Green policies were left alone, but that has begun to change.

  Also, the Greens have scored two spectacular own goals. Brown’s absurd claim that climate change was responsible for the Queensland floods shocked even his own supporters as being irrational and insensitive. Then there were the antics of Fiona Byrne — the Greens mayor of Marrickville, and its candidate for the state seat at the NSW election — in pushing through her council a trade ban on Israel.