AS Kevin Rudd ploughs through the media analysis of his political woes and weighs the counsel of advisers and the trends identified by pollsters, the man known as Kevin 24/7 may be in need of some more homespun and maternal advice.
Kevin, it’s past your bedtime. Get some sleep.
The fatigue factor has been largely unexplored in the context of the Prime Minister’s poll slump and the corresponding surge by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. There has been a longstanding and well-documented view within Labor circles that Rudd’s workload and sleeping habits are so punishing as to be unsustainable.
The turnover of staff, not just working for Rudd but other ministers, has become the stuff of legend. It was reported in October last year that Rudd had lost 23 of 39 staff, Julia Gillard had lost 13, and Wayne Swan and Penny Wong had each lost 10.
Although Rudd is now in domestic mode for this election year, his globetrotting exploits must have knocked him around during the past couple of years.
In November last year The Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Farr chronicled one of Rudd’s mad jaunts, which read like the policy wonk’s equivalent of a weekend away with a country footy team. In the course of three days Rudd and his team got up at 4am to fly from Afghanistan to India and the next day were in Singapore where, addressing a university audience, Rudd deadpanned: “It’s been busy.”
One staff member told Farr that Rudd and his team averaged just three hours’ sleep a night during the full six days of the trip.
It’s the kind of stuff that invites bravado. Many people like to push themselves on occasion, during the weekend or in the December Christmas party season, or pull the odd all-nighter at work, but the experts say that it cannot be sustained.
While refusing to offer any specific thoughts on the sleeping habits of our Prime Minister, University of Sydney professor of sleep medicine Ron Grunstein says the idea that even the most talented and gifted people can get by indefinitely on little or no sleep is a myth.
Grunstein cites examples such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a four hours a night woman who later in her career was often seen dozing and famously passed out face-first into the podium at a Tory conference. Tony Blair got by for years on about four hours a night and lots of coffee, but his diagnosis with arrhythmia was attributed to decades of insufficient sleep.
And while it’s the blue-collar workplace that often provides the most tragic examples of the effect of worker fatigue, Grunstein says exhaustion was identified as a key factor in incidents such as the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, when engineers had been working 100-hour weeks, or the Challenger space shuttle disaster earlier that year, when NASA crews had been working so busily to hit the launch date that someone forgot to check the O-rings.
“If a person says they sleep four hours a night, and never recover and never catch up, it’s a myth that they can get by on that forever,” Grunstein says. “Genetics play a part. Some people are better equipped to deal with it than others, but it doesn’t matter who you are, it eventually catches up with you.”
There was something in Rudd’s demeanour last Sunday, when he launched what has been described as the orgy of self-flagellation, that had a mildly defeatist or brow-beaten air about it that could stem from fatigue. Both Labor and Liberal MPs were surprised by the repetitious nature of Rudd’s contrition, with his mantra-like references on ABC1’s Insiders to the whacking he expected in the polls.
Equally, his handling of the insulation fiasco suggested a kind of listlessness or distraction. In the course of a few days Peter Garrett went from being an excellent minister and the insulation scheme a brilliant idea to Garrett being a humiliated and demoted minister and the scheme a dead duck, the subject of its very own rescue package.
If Rudd realised at the end of last year that he had been burning the candle at both ends, the timing of his first genuine break was, in retrospect, less than ideal.
The Prime Minister took off pretty much all of January, when new Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was holding a press conference every day, be it clad or otherwise, often looking more like the Alby Mangels of politics as he’d come charging out of the surf to issue a quick one-liner about Rudd’s great big tax on everything.
Abbott used that four-week stretch to reintroduce himself to the people of Australia, and he did it without being challenged by the incumbent.
Much was made of his prodigious work ethic during that period and since. But it can’t have been that hard for the bloke.
The difference between Rudd and Abbott is this: Rudd basically hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep in about four years. In the final year of Kim Beazley’s leadership Rudd was obsessive and vigilant in positioning himself for the job, lobbying his colleagues, courting the media. He then worked tirelessly before the election and, aside from his break this January, has not really stopped since.
Abbott, by his own admission, has hardly done a thing for two years. He went AWOL after the 2007 election defeat. He publicly likened the loss to a bereavement; he even complained about readjusting to a lowly backbencher’s salary; he had a bit of a sulk when Malcolm Turnbull passed him over for shadow treasury. In short, after the rigours of being in government, he took things pretty easy as part of an opposition that he didn’t think was going anywhere.
So the contest is now between a guy who has been working like a maniac for about four years, surrounded by staff and MPs who are suddenly worried that they might lose, v a guy who’s just come off the bench after a luxuriant rest and is surrounded by staff and MPs who are suddenly thinking they may be able to win.
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