Should Julia Gillard just cut her losses and quit? Or should Caucus make the decision for her and just put her out of her misery?
With the High Court striking down the Malaysian solution on asylum seekers as an unconstitutional non-solution, the perception that the Gillard Government is listless and unable to deliver has never been more pronounced.
Some of the names being bandied about to step in save the party from electoral Armageddon now border on the absurd. There has been speculation for months about a leadership change involving everyone from Stephen Smith and Bill Shorten to Greg Combet and Simon Crean, all of which make a kind of sense on paper.
Kevin Rudd has obviously been touted too even though he’s probably the only person who would support his candidacy.
Things have now gone so bananas that even a former premier who has been out of politics for years and is firmly entrenched in the private sector, Queensland’s Peter Beattie, is being touted as a possible candidate. Maybe John Curtin or Ben Chifley could throw their hats in the ring too.
There is no way Julia Gillard will resign. There is probably no way that Caucus will force her aside. The idea of dumping Gillard to save Labor from electoral disaster has at its centre a major flaw – namely that her removal would instantly precipitate a general election which the party would lose in a landslide anyway.
The deal which the independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott and Andrew Wilkie made to form government was not a deal with the ALP, but a deal with Julia Gillard. As Rob Oakeshott has said, his handshake was with her. It is more than likely that in the event of Gillard’s removal, one or all three of these men would withdraw their support for the Government and force a snap poll.
As an aside, it seems crazy that through their actions some of these independents continue to act in a manner which is only making the Government less popular. The proposal from Rob Oakeshott for a congestion tax to be examined at Treasurer Wayne Swan’s tax summit is an act of madness at a time when the Government is already struggling to sell an unpopular carbon tax.
Many voters clearly think that it’s time for Julia Gillard to go, and be replaced with another Labor leader, or for the Government itself to go to an election. Several polls have now shown that Kevin Rudd is a more popular choice with voters to lead the ALP.
In a national poll published across News Limited websites yesterday, readers were quick to hit the “yes” button when asked whether Gillard should resign. Within the first hour of polling almost 3000 votes were cast, with 93 per cent saying yes and just 7 per cent saying no. Obviously, the people who are most likely to vote are the people who do not like the PM, but the numbers still make for pretty grim reading.
The reality however is that if Labor were to move against Gillard there is every chance its numbers won’t shift and could possibly get worse. This is because the party, as a brand, to borrow from the lexicon of modern marketing, has now damaged itself in several states by making politically expedient leadership changes which leave the voters feeling dudded and disenfranchised.
There have only been two successful mid-term leadership transitions in the past decade – Bob Carr to Morris Iemma in NSW and Peter Beattie to Anna Bligh in Queensland. Both Iemma and Bligh were able to secure improbable victories, albeit victories which said more about the uselessness of the oppositions than the strength of their governments.
In every other instance the leadership changes have been a disaster and have cemented the perception that faceless factional heavies have usurped the role of the voters in hiring and firing political leaders.
In NSW the transition from Morris Iemma to Nathan Rees to Kristina Keneally was an absurd bit of deckchair-shuffling which laid the foundations for last year’s second-worst ever performance by NSW Labor at a state election. The shift from Steve Bracks to John Brumby ended in tears. In South Australia right now there is the absurd situation of Mike Rann insisting on an extended lap of honour while he leads Jay Weatherill up and down King William Street wearing a pair of L-plates. And volumes have been written about the shift from Rudd to Gillard last year.
Labor has done this so often in the past few years that it cannot afford to do so again. A leadership change would suggest that the party is less worried about delivering good government than simply remaining in government.
The only hope Julia Gillard has is that she can somehow tap into her former political self, when she was the highly rated and highly regarded deputy to Kevin Rudd, kicking goals in the education portfolio, holding a commanding presence in the media as the best communicator of the government line. Her inability to get a message out and to promote the government’s achievements or explain and defend its shortcomings is being lost, not just because so many voters are hostile towards her, but more alarmingly because so many of them have stopped listening to her at all.
Waking up that 20 per cent or 30 per cent of Australians and getting them to engage and reconsider their vote is the greatest challenge she faces and if she can pull that off it will be the greatest political miracle Australia has ever seen. The only thing we can be pretty sure of is that this challenge will still fall to her, not to another leader, unless of course the Labor Party has completely lost the plot.
penberthyd@thepunch.com.au
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