Julia Gillard might be excused for thinking this leadership business is pretty straightforward after swapping a few ministers around and fixing the mining tax. But this was not so much political genius as common sense. From here on in however, it gets harder.
At her first press conference as Labor leader, Julia Gillard said she wanted to get three things sorted before she pulled the election trigger. First order of business was the issue du jour, resolving the Resource Super Profits Tax. Then came asylum seekers and community anxiousness over continuing boat arrivals, and finally, repairing Labor’s standing on climate change.
But first things first. Kevin Rudd’s clumsy reversal on emissions trading aside, it was his self-started fight over the RSPT more than anything else, that was killing the Government.
Not since Gough Whitlam took on private medicine to bring in Medibank in the 1970s and before that Ben Chifley tried to nationalise the banks in 1949, had a government had such a ferocious fight with private capital. In Chifley’s case, it cost him government. In Kevin Rudd’s, the prime ministership.
His sales job on the Resource Super Profits Tax was botched from day one. The ``we have the balance about right’’ approach seemed tailor-made to maximise its own opposition. Worst of all, the policy was a solution in search of a problem. And a complex one at that.
The Government miscalculated the RSPT on four levels. First, it assumed a latent community resentment about greedy miners getting fat on our resources. Second, it assumed that people would therefore readily welcome a massive new impost clawing back those excessive profits for re-distribution to the community. Third, it assumed that because of the first two, the Government need not vex itself about the miners squealing because it merely proved they were greedy and unreasonable Rudd insiders privately welcomed the fight initially thinking it was good for them to be seen fighting with the big end of town. And, fourth, that it possessed the communications skills to carry a complex argument in simple terms in precsiesly the way it did not do with its emissions trading scheme. All four were wrong. The longer the dispute dragged on, the worse it looked for the Government.
That Ms Gillard has apparently pulled this one out of the fire is a major turning point. While the polls have already shown the switch to Ms Gillard has pleased voters, the material justification for the change-over, the first tangible dividend from that painful but necessary coup, has rolled in with her resolution of this imbroglio.
Its swift settlement proves that a new leader, even where she was intimately involved in the creation of the problem, has a leave pass to draw a line under the past and move forward untainted. Or put another way, what for Mr Rudd would have been a humiliating capitulation, is for Ms Gillard, a sensible and productive way forward.
But she knows that it’s the early stuff that is, in some ways, the easiest to fix - the low hanging fruit.
The next two hurdles are more difficult. The mining tax has been resolved over the negotiating table. Voters don’t need to know the complexities of it all but will be relieved that those ``in the know’’ are satsified. If they’re happy, so are we. Job done.
But border protection and climate change policy are arguments that must be won not across the PM’s coffee table but in the notoriously tough court of public opinion. In the case of border policy, what Ms Gillard must do now, is address irrational but nonetheless real fears about boat-loads of asylum seekers over-running the country. She must adjust existing policy in a way that convinces aspirational swinging voters in the outer-suburbs, that she is tough on border security. Extra Navy and border patrol boats are likely but they don’t stop the flow - nothing will. Hardening rhetoric beyond that may come at a considerable cost on the left of the spectrum. Much of Labor’s poll resurgence since Ms Gillard took over has come from the Greens. Presenting as John Howard lite on asylum seekers risks sending them back again.
On climate change, she has to come up with a policy that is both simple and convincing - a carbon tax fits that bill but word is a simpler ETS is favoured.
It’s one problem down, two to go. But the worst hurdles lay ahead and managing expectations will be critical to success. Labor MPs will be hoping she has not already set the bar too high.
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@AndrewCatsaras Agreed. Kills more people than AIDS. Yet tolerated. Meanwhile: Good Insiders piece again Andrew.
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