Paul Keating reckoned you got a certain legitimacy by ``taking’’ the leadership from your opponent in an open contest rather than through having it handed to you.
Certainly in his case, voters had plenty of time to get used to the change when he finally knocked off Bob Hawke after a long-running and acrimonious campaign of destabilisation.
The high profile Treasurer had even carried himself off to the backbench for a spell before launching a successful second challenge. Traumatic as it was, the evisceration of Bob Hawke’s leadership was a bloody and drawn out affair but it was comparatively transparent.
And once Mr Keating was installed, he waited more than a year to convert his party-room triumph into a proper electoral mandate, pulling off the unlikely ``sweetest victory of all’’ in the 1993 poll.
For Julia Gillard though, this legitimacy question is extant.
Dazed and confused by what went on while they slept one night, voters have been asked in short order to rubber stamp a change that they still do not understand. Polls suggest they are not yet ready to do it.
And the visage of a freshly dispatched Kevin Rudd this week has done nothing to assuage their sense of confusion. The jarring, conspicuous absence of ``Kevin-everywhere’’ had cast a dark shadow on Ms Gillard’s nascent premiership, just as his scene-stealing return as Labor’s campaign saviour merely detracts from the campaign message, and re-opens the question afresh, ``why was he ditched if he’s such a positive’‘.
In essence, this is the problem at the heart of what has been a very poor campaign for Labor so far and a very good one all up for the Coalition. That and the fact that both sides have defied expectations.
For most of the last three years, Julia Gillard has been the best performer in the Parliament, certainly better than Rudd, and near enough to the Government’s best performer in the media.
It was her mastery of these spheres that led her colleagues to conclude, somewhat heroically as it turns out, that she should replace the flagging Mr Rudd at the eleventh hour. Thus, she went into this campaign carrying high expectations that she would smash Mr Abbott in the leaders’ debate and out-perform him in the media and on the hustings.
Conversely, Tony Abbott was expected by many to blow up - even some on his own side were privately very nervous. They needn’t have been.
Labor’s assumption that he would come across to voters as doctrinaire and erratic and would turn off women in particular, have so far at least, proved wrong.
Rather, he has generally got the politics right. In policy after policy, Mr Abbott’s announcements have looked more enticing to voters. His ``beds not bureaucracy’’ line for hospitals is a straight out winner, astutely crafted to remind voters of the Rudd Government’s pre-occupation with reforming organisational arrangements such as who runs the system. Most voters could not care less who runs it. Beds on the other hand…
Similarly, his elderly employment grants and greater seniors card eligibility will be popular with grey voters. And his paid parental leave scheme, (turns out it can happen over his dead body afterall) while ludicrously expensive and worryingly inequitable, looks a lot better to families than Labor’s more modest and affordable scheme.
Labor’s campaign has not only failed to inspire, it has been tactically weak. Thanks to the way she got the job, and the adolescent rush to an election to capitalise on the ``wow’’ factor, the new PM has been unable to leverage the authority of the office.
Unlike the afore-mentioned Keating, she never built the case for ditiching Rudd in favour of her, nor did she give voters time to get used to it once it happened. Instead she went to an election armed with no big ideas and little more than the apparent hope Labor’s spike in the polls would simply hold strong.
The result is that election has at times resembled a state poll and even at its best has risen only to a contest between two pretenders to The Lodge rather than the standard incumbent versus contender choice.
It is true that the contest has become massively interesting of late but this is only because of the spectacular way in which the Government’s orderly approach has turned to custard.
It is certainly not due to any great clash of narratives or even charismatic personalities.
The next few days will be critical to the outcome. This weekend will see both the official launch of Mr Abbott’s campaign (in Brisbane like everything else) and the extraordinary prospect of Kevin Rudd campaigning for and possibly with Julia Gillard.
How voters will read these things is anybody’s guess. Certainly Labor strategists don’t know. But what choice have they now got?
As one thoughtful former Labor adviser told me:
``Poor Julia looks like she is a bystander in her own campaign .... this stuff can’t be scripted by Hawker-Britton so its raw and real politics.”
Make that red raw.
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