The polls show that he is the people’s choice for prime minister.
And Kevin Rudd believes that, if the Labor Party still has a soul, it will soon heed the will of the people by committing an act of mass contrition, recognising that the factions were wrong, and reinstalling him to the job he secured so comprehensively at the 2007 election.
Rudd’s mind at the moment is driven by two things. One is personal, the other is pragmatic.
The personal stuff goes to his unyielding disgust shared obviously by many voters at the events of June last year where a democratically elected prime minister was removed not by the public who put him there, but by some faceless men whom the public couldn’t identify in a line-up.
His pragmatic assessment goes to his belief shared by pretty much everyone inside the Caucus and a vast majority of the voting public that Labor will not win the next election under Julia Gillard.
That is, not just lose the election but get utterly smashed, with MPs in safe seats being turfed and Labor unable to even cobble together a viable opposition in the aftermath.
Rudd is trying to adopt a Zen-like approach to the leadership question and at this stage is not even preparing for a challenge.
He views his possible return as the politics of contrition, whereby the impetus for change comes from within Caucus itself.
It is a myth that Rudd has no backers within Caucus. The number is the subject of fierce debate; Gillard’s people think they can be counted on less than one hand, and that the current festering coverage is the result of a tiny, embittered rump of troublemakers, and also the work of Rudd himself.
The one factor which can force a sudden and dramatic switch in the numbers is the thing which motivates politicians of every ideological hue—the prospect of an unavoidable defeat, where you not only lose government but you lose your seat and job.
Rudd is banking on the collective recognition of this political reality.
He is then hoping that the process for change can be put in place with just one of the so-called faceless men admitting publicly, or even making it known internally, that in hindsight the coup of June 2010 was a mistake, that the voters had never copped it, felt dudded and disenfranchised, and that it is now time to put things right.
His reading of Caucus is that there is really only a hard core of about 15 MPs who are rusted on the serious factional leaders: Stephen Conroy, Bill Shorten and David Feeney in Victoria, Wayne Swan in Queensland, Mark Arbib in NSW and Don Farrell in South Australia.
Beyond them Rudd sees two other groups - the MPs who have always been loyal and friendly to him, and the MPs who got swept along in last year’s coup and have never been comfortable about what happened.
With a Caucus of 104 - a Caucus which knows it is going to lose - Rudd is quietly optimistic at the prospect of winning majority support.
The only real obstacle to his return, aside from Gillard’s grim determination to stay in the top job, is the candidacy of Stephen Smith.
It’s not being driven by Smith, who is a loyal team-player, but by the grouping around Stephen Conroy in Victoria, which helped engineer Rudd’s demise and would do anything to thwart his return.
Team Rudd believes that Smith’s leadership would be forever tainted by his status as the faceless men’s candidate for the top job, which they say is the very thing which got the party into strife in the first place.
Bill Shorten is not considered an option, especially after he said on Friday that he would “never, ever” lead the Labor Party, two words which hold a special place in Australian politics and are hard to come back from.
The one remaining factor which Rudd sees as an obstacle to his return is the suspicion within Caucus that it would be payback time under his prime ministership and that every person who dumped him last year would be on the receiving end of Rudd’s retribution.
So to this end, Rudd is billing himself as a conciliatory figure who can draw a line under the acrimony of the past and simply assemble the best possible team to put Labor back in a winning position.
He expects that neither Gillard nor Wayne Swan would want to serve on his frontbench but that he could craft a working relationship with everyone else. His thinking on the issue is advanced.
The issue is not going to go away.
It makes life almost impossible for Julia Gillard who is possibly one wavering factional warrior away from being a backbencher.
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