Kevin Rudd has found out the hard way that he is neither Cory Aquino nor Evita Peron. His People’s Power push to regain the prime ministership was tactically flawed from the get go. The numbers bore it out in dramatic style.
The vote Rudd received in Caucus was not a springboard for a second tilt at the leadership. It was, you would have to think, the end of his leadership tilt.
As former leader Mark Latham said on Sky yesterday, this wasn’t the Arab Spring. Urging a popular email uprising while also jumping out of bed to yuk it up with Mel and Kochie on Sunrise was never going to win Rudd a vote inside the Caucus. Quite the opposite.
Rudd believed that by urging voters to pester their local MP about the leadership he could harness the public sense of disenfranchisement at 2010’s ham-fisted leadership coup. Wrong. It was only ever going to succeed in angering those MPs and locking them in behind Gillard.
Rudd’s tactics were also undermined by a third factor, and that was the use of an unelected former lobbyist in Bruce Hawker to spearhead his leadership campaign. Hawker is a smart guy who has been on the right side in some 30-odd Labor campaigns over the past two decades, but he has been battered by this process. Rudd was too. The central and obvious flaw was that if Rudd’s pitch was that the party needed to stand up to the faceless men, it seemed curious that he enlisted someone who has never been a member of Parliament, never received a single vote, to run the operation for him.
Politics moves on fast. The public has had an absolute gutful of this stupidity and will have stopped paying much attention to it within 24 hours. The only question which matters now is what happens next.
Labor might have destroyed Kevin Rudd - for all time you would think - but the party still faces electoral destruction.
Most voters prefer Rudd over Gillard as prime minister. Many of them also prefer Rudd over Abbott as prime minister. Julia Gillard is still prime minister.
The first and most obvious point goes to unity. Labor will be public reassured but privately sceptical about the public reassurances from Kevin Rudd and his supporters that they will now put this behind them. If they do – or more specifically if Rudd does – it will be a 180-degree change of approach. It is impossible to capture in words the unyielding sense of fury which Rudd feels over the circumstances of his removal in 2010. This sense of betrayal is compounded by his conviction – born out by every poll – that he and only he can defeat Tony Abbott, and that there is no way the public will ever hand Julia Gillard a second term after her role in his knifing and her troubled prime ministership leading a minority government.
The one thing which might make Rudd baulk at continuing his destabilisation campaign is the knowledge that he will be seen as the greatest Labor wrecker of all time if he continues. Bob Carr wrote a brief post on his blog yesterday which best captured the grass roots Labor mood.
“If after Julia Gillard’s expected victory today there is a revival of white-anting against her, the whole party will explode with anger…the public reaction against Labor if after today leadership speculation is resumed will be catastrophic.”
Rudd handled himself with great dignity in his concession speech yesterday. He knows that the sentiment Carr describes is a powerful one. Rudd’s reassurance - “I bear no grudges, I bear no-one any malice” – was emphatic. Should he resume hostilities these words will come back to haunt him.
The second question is what the public will now think of Gillard given the aggressive manner of her leadership campaign and the decisive nature of her victory.
Many pro-Rudd voters will have been appalled at the personal attacks on Rudd over the past few weeks. Gillard may cop some heat for having presided over this smash-up job. But the more optimistic view is that voters needed to be told why Rudd was removed, why he should not return (although you have to wonder why they didn’t bother telling the public in the first place).
For all this though, it worked. The numbers were brilliant for Gillard. There is now a hope – and it’s a very large hope – that Gillard can emerge from this looking stronger. The Prime Minister has looked and sounded confident over the past seven days. Now that she has such a strong Caucus victory behind her, she might take some of this new confidence as she moves forward, to borrow from her lame 2010 election slogan.
The third and most important point is the one thing which has been absent from this indulgent brawl – policy. This fight was not about policy at all. It was about personality. Voters don’t want juvenile fights. They want to know that the Government is fully focussed on the business of governing. Protecting our borders, smoothing the introduction of the carbon tax, getting the budget back to a legitimate surplus, responding to the school funding report…you know, it would be kind of nice to see them doing some actual work for a change.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Ukraine song pinches chord progression from The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Fo real #sbseurovision
RT @GerardDaffy: @antsharwood all the talk over there is the grannies will win.they entered to get a church built,feelgood story
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
Abbott’s crass logic: trash the Parliament in order save it
An email was sent to almost every politician in Australia this week saying that someone should cut off…
Our special forces don’t always need special treatment
We admire them, but we’re not entirely sure why. We allow them to operate in the shadows; we rarely…
A good holiday is about unrest, not rest
Like a fat full-stop, it lay in my hand. A small orange – not exactly fresh, but purchased anyway…
Nosebleed Section
choice ringside rantings
From: They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
Michael S says:
"A teacher at Geelong Grammar had criticised her for using words that were too long, which had left her confused and had made her doubt her ability to write essays. She became ''quite distressed'' when her English marks began to fall." I can sympathise. My scholastic mentors conveyed to me a causal relationship… [read more]From: Welfare for breeders is a bonus for everyone
Change Up! says:
I have no problem paying my taxes. As a single, childless person on a very decent income, I can afford it and not have my life severely altered. Plus I understand that my taxes paying for things like schools, childcare and infrastructure is ultimately a good thing. A better community is better for me… [read more]Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented