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I won't shed any tears for Kevin Rudd. He was an irritating smooth talker, incapable of commanding much personal affection. Julia Gillard seems a nicer person, conveys a deeper sense of commitment to social democratic values in contrast to Rudd's technocratic rhetoric, and is at least equally bright, articulate, and solid on policy detail. She will probably be a good Prime Minister. But there are troubling things about the process by which the transition has occurred, and I'd appreciate help in grasping what this is all about.
1. Was Rudd's sudden decline in popularity due to the postponement of the ETS? The Fairfax editorialists -- Peter Hartcher, Phillip Coorey, Lenore Taylor -- have asserted repeatedly, without providing much evidence, that this is the case. But if the public is impatient for legislation to cap carbon emissions, why would the Government's backtracking cause any of them to switch allegiance to the Opposition? How could the electorate's preference, on a two-party basis, be affected at all? Is it really plausible that voters care more about whether they know 'what the Prime Minister stands for' than about the substance of the policy?
2. Supposing there is some truth in the ETS theory, what exactly motivated the Government to announce such a decisive postponement? Rudd could and did argue persuasively that there was no hope of getting workable legislation past the Senate in the current term. There were also significant risks in taking the double dissolution route. However, neither Rudd nor Penny Wong ever explained why they couldn't fight the 2010 election on the issue. (This question was not often put to them by the press either.) If they simply decided that voters had gone cold on the ETS, then this is in plain contradiction with the theory that voters lost faith because they abandoned the ETS.
3. Should Labor voters be outraged, or at least concerned, that the Caucus has replaced the Prime Minister they elected for reasons that have nothing to do with policy? If Rudd was breaking election promises or departing from ALP policy, while Julia Gillard was upholding them, the Party would have some mandate for the switch. But Gillard has been his deputy and has apparently shared in all the policies, including those that have disillusioned the public. So it seems that she has been installed on the basis of superior personal charisma and management style. Is this legitimate? Don't the defenders of the coup have any responsibility to explain what Rudd did wrong that Gillard would do differently? Or is it their own business whom they want to lead them? Is it enough just to waffle on, as Paul Howes of the AWU did on Lateline last night, about how the Government's 'message wasn't getting through?'
4. More specifically, if it's the case that voters in Western Australia and Queensland are worried about the mining profits tax, and that this policy was indeed a failed gamble, how can a change of leadership possibly fix that problem? The miners are not going to publicly accept any compromise that involves a large burden on them. If Gillard offers a more favourable version of the tax they will continue to campaign against it vociferously, scaring some voters enough to switch allegiance to the Coalition. If she drops the tax completely, she will look ridiculous and presumably lose some the same type of people who are chiefly worried about 'conviction' and consistency, as in the case of the ETS.
In my opinion, Yes. And it has nothing to do with postponing the ETS; as you put it, the Rudd Government has "disillusioned the public". Regarding ETS, the education revolution, the insulation batts, and now the mining tax.
I couldn't agree with you more!
Sorry, I meant to say, 'No' - not due to the postponement per se, but more due to going back on one's word and not sticking to one's promises.
Maybe. It cost him votes on the "left" end of politics and didn't win him any on the "right".Most problematic (for Rudd) was his continuing refusal to recognise that the only way to get an ETS scheme up was to start making deals with (shudder) TEH GREENS.
ALP tribal politics. TEH GREENS insist on undermining the ALP by running candidates in safe Labor seats instead of putting in the hard yards in the marginal electorates.
This Labor voter had Rudd pegged as a one term Prime Minister a while back. Optimistically, I figured that in a contest between the Mad Monk (Son of the Bride of Howard) and Rudd, Rudd would win and then be replaced in short order. So I'm not outraged. I am surprised that it happened before the election - making Rudd a 3/4 term Prime Minister, at most. I'm going to enjoy the coming Swillard* vs the Liberal Clerics (Abbott & Bishop) stoush.
Now that Gillard is playing nice with the miners, and calling on them to play nice too, the whole dynamic of this issue has changed.
* More euphonious than Gwan. But Gwanard might work.
1 and 2): The reason for disillusionment is not because of the ETS dumping per se, but because of a) the unnecessary push by the govt to get the ets through before copenhagen (including referring to it as the greatest moral...), b) the collapse of copenhagen and c) the deferral of an ets till after the rest of the world decides on what they're doing. Prior to Copenhagen the opposition argued that it would be prudent to see what the rest of the world does before legislating. The govt has now effectively adopted the opposition's position. If the govt (and Rudd in particular) didn't make the (hollow) case that Australia must act despite the rest of the world, the backflip on the ETS would not have been nearly as damaging, if damaging at all. The backflip on the ETS was a focal point of Rudd's character flaw which was beginning to be perceived by people generally - that he lacks substance.
3), what he did wrong was expose himself as a phoney political animal. Someone who says executing a policy is a great moral challenge but then shelves it is not true to his convictions.
4)the only way the govt would be able to dump or severely compromise the super profits tax is if the leadership changes, symbolising a change in policy direction. Conviction is about the person, not the party. If gillard reverses previous policy direction she can attribute the previous directions to rudd, distancing herself from an accusation of a lack of conviction.
On 1, I think the ETS was only the largest and most symbolic of all the krudd backflips. For me it all started right at the beginning with Fuelwatch and grocerywatch, two issues he campaigned hard on (fuel and grocery prices for working families) which he did nothing to address. It flowed through onto further policies, leading fake health reform and dropping the ETS.
In the end there was no point listening to what rudd said, you knew it would have nothing to do with what he thought, nor apparently have any influence on what he did.
On 2, who knows? Great Big Tax On Everything?
On 3, I think it is the opposite, Gillard was the only one who kept the election promises, on BER, IR, laptops in schools, the school website. She appears to be the only minister who has actually delivered.
On 4, given the mining tax (which is a great idea, not that that seems to influence anyone) came completely out of the blue unrelated to any policy platform, I cant see why voters would care about its demise.
Conspiracy theory no 1 is that the miners preferred a certain less worse outcome to a possible best outcome, and the unions ditto, so they combined to put Gillard in in exchange for a less worse RSPT (from their perspective).
Gummo - As much as I'd like to have seen it, simple arithmetic made clear how little point there was negotiating with the Greens. Labor + Greens in the Senate does not equal a majority of votes. Since the majority would then have to include Steve Fielding, who denies a problem exist, it is irrefutable mathematical fact that to pass an ETS in this senate would require the coalition, whom would not agree to any compromises from the Greens. No matter how deep, how sincere our desire for said compromises, you can't change the frustrating arithmetic. The failure was not the lack of negotiation with a party that did not have the numbers to pass the ETS, but the assumption that a party would had promises an ETS at the last election and negotiated one in apparent good faith for months would renege.
I don't have a problem with Gillard, but I do have a problem with how this palace coup was instigated and from where it emerged. I find it interesting the way Rudd is being held virtually solely responsible for all the "failures to communicate". Did he have a gag on all his colleagues - it doesn't sound plausible to me. Something completely dodgy and undemocratic is going on - par for the course I guess. I too would like a more thorough explanation of how the ETS was negotiated and dumped. The media behaviour in bringing down Rudd has also been an interesting flexing of muscle. I wonder whether this will do anything to stop the flow of voters to the Greens.
This is personal opinion. I never found Kevin's smooth taliking irritating. I find Tony Abbott's em's and errs in every sentence that comes out of his mouth, precisely because irritating because he can't talk smoothly. Maybe had one bang on the head too many whilst boxing.
The affection he could not command were the factions of the Labor Party. In my view pople would have voted for in again, given the choices available.
Julia Gillard will make a Good Prime Minister imo. The point is she wasn't voted in by my fellow Australian's, but by the faceless factions of the Labor Party. If you are alright with that, then there is something wrong with you imo.
Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard and Peter Garrat and Penny Wong are the big failures of the Labor Party reform policy and they are still there.
Stuttering Tony will have a field day on these facts without Kevin's smooth talking to hide behind. So maybe you will have to put up with a Prime Minister is an irritating non smooth talker in the near future.
It is very clear now who runs Australia - it is the miners( notice the backflip by Julia Gillard), the media, the unions and Mark Arbib. He is is the kingmaker and Gillard has to kow tow to the unions and Mark Arbib.
James,
legally speaking, voters vote for representatives to their constituency, not any leader. Hence if these representatives think the interests of the electorate are better served with a different leader, I see no inherent problem with sacking the pm of the day. Since the gambling markets showed a big swing to Labour this morning, it seems to me that the putsch has so far paid off.
In reality, voters do partially vote for leaders and the platforms on which they are elected, meaning the representatives need to give us an excuse. My guess is Gillard will not want to be drawn into such navel gazing.
The big policy question is whether Gillard will keep the RSPT more or less in its current form, perhaps trying to sell it differently, or whether she will find a way to axe it. Her past record suggests the former, but the major mining companies will undoubtedly argue it is time for the latter.
In fact the problem IMO was that Rudd both oversold the ETS and failed to explain it at the same time. He sold global warming as the "great moral and economic challenge of our time" but failed to explain how his ETS was the answer to it, how the ETS actually worked, or why it needed to be enacted before the rest of the world agreed to such a scheme.
All these things can be answered. Setting up the framework for an ETS was a sensible idea even unilaterally, as long as export industries were exempted and most people compensated until an effective international scheme was brokered and implemented. Rudd's scheme met those parameters but he failed to explain and sell it clearly.
That might have been OK as long as he had Turnbull and the Coalition on board, but once that fell over he had no fallback strategy. Rudd was a rabbit in the spotlight once Abbott took over and started portraying the ETS as a "great big new tax". He didn't seem able to point out that, to the extent it would have had tax-like effects, it was actually a very tiny tax at least in its first few years because 100% of its proceeds were to be returned as compensation for those affected. 90% of the community would have been fully compensated with only the very rich feeling any net effect, and the price effect was estimated at 1-2% at most. It would be a significantly smaller tax in its price effect than Abbott's levy to fund his parental leave scheme, but Rudd seemed unable to get that message across.
Thus I don't think it was so much Rudd's abandonment of the scheme as the fact that he failed to explain it adequately in the first place. The only message most people got was that Rudd had a policy which they didn't understand but that he reckoned was the great moral challenge of our time, but which he then proceeded to drop like a hot potato at the first whiff of opposition.
Finally, the polling suggests that Labor's loss of popularity is better explained by the above than by a simplistic assertion that it was just his abandonment of the ETS. In fact Labor was riding high in the polls (43% primary vote or thereabouts) in November before the Copenhagen conference. That had fallen to 39% by February as a result of Abbott effectively selling his "great big new tax" bullshit line that Rudd failed to counter. Then Rudd's abandonment of the ETS (to counter Abbott's scare campaign) in early April provoked the slide to the current primary vote of 36%. Commonsense suggests that much of the pre-April slide was disengaged voters swallowing Abbott's "great big new tax" line, while much of the post-April slide is more left-leaning voters switching their first preference to the Greens as a protest.
Whether Gillard can retrieve much of that lost ground remains to be seen. She's certainly a much clearer communicator than Rudd, and she's not weighed down by Rudd's hyperbolic "great moral challenge of our time" bullshit on the ETS.
Rudd's communication, first around the ETS and then RSPT, must be one of the political disasters of recent Australian political history. I really don't understand how this could have been so hard as he made it.
"Is it really plausible that voters care more about whether they know ‘what the Prime Minister stands for’ than about the substance of the policy? "
Yes -- in fact I think it's the only thing voters can really do. The real problem is that often what people have is a choice between two or more different and massively complex policy decisions that they can never hope to understand. For example, when we talk about "ETS" I presume there are really 101 different types of ETS, some which work well and others that don't (I don't know, I'm not an economist nor an ETS expert). The same would be true of many other ares where you can summarize policies into nice categorical names, but where the detail of the policy is just as important (e.g., health, education, etc. ).
Everybody is so quick ti judge.Trying to come up with all these reasons, when clearly this had been planned for some time! If labour think this will save their demise then they clearly are clouded in what they see coming.
This analysis kind of ignores the fact that the general public, who were quite willing to believe anything Al Gore or various groupthink scientists told them pre-Copenhagen, now overwhelmingly believe global warming to be a crock of shit thanks to the liars at the IPCC.
The majority of the opposition to the ETS had very little to do with what happened in Australia, and a lot more to do with a worldwide attitudinal shift towards uncritically accepting whatever the "experts" thought about the weather.
Yobbo - why do you hate science and make shit up?
I'd rather like to stop Yobbo from derailing this thread into yet another sterile argument about global warming, so possibly I shouldn't do this. However Mike Steketee wrote an excellent article a few months ago in the Oz that explains it more succinctly than I could and pretty much puts paid to his hypothesis about the cause of Rudd's fall in popularity:
Do you have polling to show this?
Just quoting Ken's post, since apparently on this site arguing this topic is still not allowed, due to the argument being settled years ago.
Funny how since it's so settled, the people who believe in it can drop 13% over the course of a single year.
Imagine if 13% of the world stopped believing in Jesus over just 1 year, there would be massive scale social changes.
Well, the ALP committed suicide today. Tony Abbott has become the drover's dog.
Rudd certainly had his faults, but unelectability was never one of them; Howard spent most of his years in government with worse polls. But putting in an unelected PM a few months before the election means Gillard is now unelectable.
Regarding climate change, I like to agree with good ol' Johnny Howard's stance on the matter:
"The truth is, I'm not that sceptical. I think the weight of scientific evidence suggests that there is significant and damaging growth in the levels of greenhouse gas emissions... [under a new Kyoto agreement] We would be part of a new Kyoto if the new Kyoto embraced all of the countries of the world, put us all on a proper footing and very particularly included all of the world's great emitters [USA, China..]. Now, if that is to happen, then you can seriously talk about an emissions trading system. Until you get that, it is manifestly against the interests of this nation to sign up to the current Kyoto"
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2006/s1788660.htm
James,
We have to decide (a) how much marginal voters know and (b) what they care about given their level of knowledge.
Re (a), I suspect the marginal punter doesn’t really know much about the “substance of [ETS] policy”, nor about the numbers problem in the Senate. This renders them subject to the exigencies of ‘the sales-effort’. As Ken @ #8 says, Rudd (vis-à-vis Abbott) seems to failed comprehensively on this front.
Re (b), I suspect that punters do have a basic moral sense that politicians should strive to do what they promise to do, esp. if they initially seem to be really committed to it. That Rudd backed off the ETS, without ‘selling’ a good reason for it, offends that moral sense.
Should they? Since this seems to be a decision of a relatively small number of backroom party hacks and factional leaders, with the ‘election’ of a new leader just a formality rather than anything that could be called substantively democratic, one could say Labor voters, and esp. ALP members, should be disgusted by that.
Then again, if we are talking about long-term Labor voters, they should know by now that given the ALP machinery, this is just ‘the way of the world’ and so should not be outraged.
This looks like a real bind. there would seem to be a basic choice:
(a) Run with the tax (slightly watered down in some way), presenting the mining companies as greedy bastards who pigheadedly refused to sensibly compromise after Gillard offered the hand of (relative) peace.
(b) Dump the tax, coming up with some compelling reason why it is not feasible or whatever.
Both cases require some pretty fancy verbal dancing. If the ALP ‘powers that be’ believe Gillard possesses a greater ability to communicate ideas simply and more compellingly than Rudd, then maybe the mining tax problem is a good part of the reason Gillard has been installed.
Edward
I think you're overstating the role of faction leaders in these events. Arbib and Feeney certainly did the numbers and worked the phones, and they seemingly had an important role in convincing Gillard to make her move, but that's as far as it goes. It was Rudd's Caucus colleagues who made the decision in every sense. Indeed they'd no doubt made it some time before but had no way to prosecute their decision until Gillard decided to run. David Marr's article this morning is the best summary I've read:
That's all well and good for political analysts and members of the party, but the average Jo Aussie doesn't give two hoots about Polls and Caucuses; one only has to watch the former PM fight back his tears as he steps down, to feel that something is very wrong with this government.
The argument is actually raging strongly on a large number of other blogs, and has been ground into extremely fine detail (at least to the whatever level that you can go where the data and methodology are actually available). It just happens that this particular blog tends to discuss different topics.
I'll just declare my own position as someone who took AGW face value several years back, but I've become increasingly skeptical every year as their predictions fail to eventuate and as close scrutiny of the so called "climate science" reveals all sorts of decidedly unscientific activity. To actually cover this matter would require vastly more time and space, and anyway it is covered elsewhere for those who care to look.
No contradiction: there are many voters with many opinions. ETS is a divisive issue, not something you can find middle ground on. Either you believe that we are headed for an environmental disaster or you don't. CO2 keeps rising (check the measurements) and it has been a perfect straight line increase (seasonally adjusted) for the last few decades. The entire GFC was not even a little plip on the curve, not a wobble. Time will tell, either the ice caps will melt or they won't, but CO2 increase is showing no signs of turning around soon.
If you are a climate non-believer, then might as well go with someone who has declared AGW to be "crap" and you might get cheaper electricity to warm you in winter. Why would a non-believer support a government who puts the tax on the table then off the table then probably put it back on again whenever a poll or two goes their way?
If you believe there is a big issue, then how can you compromise? If it really is the "greatest moral issue of our time" then go and vote Green. Compromising is like steering the Titanic into just a little iceberg, instead of the big one.
The only people left to support Labor are the ones who don't care either way and have some other interest (e.g. workplace issues, unions, want a woman as PM, etc).
"the average Jo Aussie doesn’t give two hoots about Polls and Caucuses; one only has to watch the former PM fight back his tears as he steps down, to feel that something is very wrong with this government."
I heard quite an apt analogy while listening to the radio during yesterday's dramatic events. Someone commented that if you were passengers in a plane and knew your pilot was about to fly you into the side of a mountain then you'd certainly grab the controls if you could and try to avert disaster. You might well die anyway depending on how close the mountain was at the time, but at least you'd be giving yourself the only chance you had. I think Marr's article accurately summarises Caucus's mindset. Moreover, given that at least some of them have got access to internal marginal seat polling and have a closeup understanding of Rudd's personality and capabilities, I reckon they were in a position to know whether the pilot was capable of changing course.
PS On Tel's comment, there have been lots of posts on climate change here at Troppo over the years, and no doubt there will be more in the future. Moreover, all viewpoints are permitted (and even encouraged). However this thread isn't about climate change, and we DO encourage a loose version of relevant discussion.
Moreover (I hope James will forgive me), arguably Tel's comment is relevant in the way it links the merits of climate change (as opposed to the way Rudd managed the issue) to the leadership decision and Labor's poll results:
However Tel's logic doesn't hold up. In fact the scientific consensus (which does exist - see the Steketee article I linked and extracted at #13 above) is that there is a 90% probability that a significant part of measured global warming is caused by human atmospheric emissions. However exactly what proportion isn't known, because of a range of positive and negative climate "feedback" mechanisms which still aren't well understood. They say the most likely increase is around 2 degrees C or more over the next century, which is certainly enough to cause major changes, many of which would be undesirable.
Thus the evidence and application of a moderate precautionary principle justifies prudent, measured policy responses rather than a Henny Penny panic reaction. Rudd's ETS satisified that description, but he failed to explain it to the people and he didn't have a fallback plan when Turnbull got rolled by Abbott. Gillard's strategy of seeking to explain and build community consensus (but not until after the election) is also entirely consistent with the available scientific evidence. I am neither a person who sees global warming as the “greatest moral issue of our time” nor one who doesn't care either way. I think I have a pretty good understanding of the science and I DO think the issue is a very important one, but I support measured action including building community consensus for implementation of a carbon pricing framework that can then be ratcheted up when the rest of the world reaches agreement. Thus I support Labor's position rather than Abbott's cynical and radically dishonest one.
For my money it was the mining tax. The mining industry ad. campaign was effective and caught the Govt. on the back foot. The polls were awful and suddenly Caucus was full of backbenchers who saw themselves losing their jobs within a few months. That situation was a gift to faction leaders who wanted to get rid of Rudd, and hey, presto, he's gone. If the polls had been better and the mining industry campaign hadn't been so good, the backbenchers would have felt more secure and factional plotting would have died for lack of support.
I agree with Ed. Mariyani-Squire on the difficult "verbal dancing" facing Julia. The miners can now force the Govt. to abandon the tax in fact, with Julia left to find a formula for burying it while saving what face she can. Maybe a Parliamentary Inquiry, or referral to the Productivity Commission, or to a Senate Committee, or whatever. I'm just waiting for Ken Henry to rediscover his family, too.
Labor is very short of big policy issues to campaign on. ETS is discredited and dead. Health is so complicated nobody understands it, but people see gaps getting bigger and waits for publicly-funded services getting longer. Labor mucked up child-care and now nobody trusts them with that. Education is now about suicide. I suppose Julia can just go back to the old "we're still better than the Coalition" line, trying to sell a negative message while in Govt. That may work if enough people remember Work Choices, but I'm not sure they do.
Maybe Julia can do with women voters what Obama did with blacks in the US; we'll be hearing a lot about "our first woman PM" over the next few months.
This is patently false. The Greens run in every single electorate. Marginal, safe or other, and they have every right to do so. This might come as a shock, but The Greens would prefer to have Green parliamentarians over Labor parliamentarians. That's why they run.
Your logic is also faulty. Labor is not "undermined" by The Greens running in safe Labor seats. Melbourne is the obvious case, but it's no longer safe, it's now a marginal seat and The Greens are putting in the "hard yards" to win it. The goal posts are moving and perhaps, just perhaps, you should drop the "right to govern" attitude, or not, your choice.
Its an interesting analogy, however, the passengers on a plane should only really be able to make that decision in so far as it affects their lives only - but the people who voted in the Labor government are not sitting on the plane;
As Edward put it:
and then
The thing is; I don't believe the voters who elected Rudd were long-term ALP voters, evidenced by the fact that the previous PM, Howard, was sitting in his Kirribili home for over 10 years.
If I had voted Labor, I would feel pretty jipped right now. At least Rudd had a chance to get re-elected with his smooth talking and fancy promise-making, but after his emotional departure, and Gillard announcing an immediate election, I really can't see how any one would give this government a chance.
Let's not forget, she's our first ever Red Head PM. She'll also be our shortest serving PM. So many firsts..
I have to agree with Patrick (#9), and much of what has been written so far - this government doesn't know how to communicate its policies to the people of Australia.
Gillard's clearly up on the betting markets: centerbet puts Labour at 1:1.35 whilst the coalition is over 3. That's pretty good odds for labour, with a most-likely election date on August 28th. I wonder what can possibly be accomplished about the mining tax in that period though. As Predicted #7, every person and his dog who owns a lot of mining shares has called for the RSPT to be abandoned in the last day.
I have, I think, a little different perspective on this one. For what its worth,here and here
I think that on the ETS they were too clever by half and managed not to get a policy through the senate with the support of an opposition that was, for a long time, broadly supportive.
They tried to present it as painless by ta;king about the 5% overall reduction rather than the 20% to 25% per capita cuts it entailed. This let the Greens get away with saying that it did nothing and get away with this. It also helped the line about the cost and complexity of the scheme for such minor gains.
Rudd stopped selling it and delighted in using it as a wedge to destroy the opposition. This vacuum then got filled by sceptics and opponents, gradually fracturing the support base, particularly in the coalition.
The ETS backflip (and I keep reading that Swan and Gillard urged it on Rudd - how ironic) created huge doubts about Rudd (and Labor) even among people who didn't support it as it showed that pretty much any policy position is expendable.
Now we see that even Prime Ministers can be jettisoned if they become inconvenient.
Rudd started killing the ETS before Garnaut actually released his report, he then went on to beat the corpse for many months in the hope that the libs would be forced to pass something that clearly would do nothing to act on reducing Australia's emissions for the next 10 years and make us pay the worst offending coporates billions for the privelege of business largely as usual. He refused at any point to negotiate properly with the Greens leading Ross Garnaut to state that at the end of last year they (the greens) had the only credible position on climate policy, moderate ($20 per tonne interim carbon tax) and practical which still left the way open for a legitimate CPRS while moving the economy in the right direction. Perfect package to take to the next election. After the business community (read largest carbon polluters) forced the libs to abandon even the absolute gift that the CPRS had become (why wouldn't they, they thought they could have 100% victory instead of 99.99 percent, who could blame them). Rudd then presented the fly ridden and credibility bereft carcasse of a policy to the Greens (without negotiaton) and insisted they pass it, thank god they didn't. We woudl have locked in the appearance of action but no real action for 10 or more years and have filled the pockets of our biggest polluters to do so. He then wanted to take it off the table for the election so he dropped it thinking this would rob the Greens of any opportunities to get real action in an election. Gillard for all intents and purposes was right behind this strategy. All the while the greens were inching up in the polls, when the ETS was scotched they soared. Then inexplicably having completely squibbed the fight with industry on Climate he decided to give them both barrels with the mining tax (supported by Gillard), the industry and their pet unions (eg AWU) then showed who runs the country by sacking him and appointing their favoured candidate. Now she faces a greens in the balance senate. So now she's got a chance to do something on climate, will she? Depends what Paul Howes and Twiggy Forrest think probably, the rest of the population can apparently just wait politely. The next month or two will be fascinating.
Sam Bauers @ 29:
False it may be, but it is widely believed within the ALP.
To clarify my own position, here's an amended version of the sentence that so outraged you:
In the cast of the mining tax, it's not so much a lack of communication, it's that there is really no justification or need for it in the first place. There is no way to single out certain industries without appearing to attack those industries, and the fallout was inevitable.
The fact that labor supporters (if not the party themselves) were so gleeful about the possibility of taxing the rich more has poisoned the entire party in the minds of the general public, who are broadly supporting of the mining industry.
As a Labor voter of the left and green persuasion I was disappointed that Labor appeared to have abandoned ETS and is in danger of caving into the miners at the urging of the COALition and had been unable to convince the public that there were less house fires under the Home Insulation Scheme than there had been previously.
Rudd deserves the hostile ABC because he didn't clear out Howard's ABC board appointments and continues to appoint Liberals to areas of sensitive policy.
Timing wise I thought that more people were seeing the protesting billionaire mining magnates for the Rolex Revolutionaries that they are. More people realise that the mining companies have got their own way at the expense of the rest of the community.
I am a Labor supporter who absolutely doesn't want Abbott to become Prime Minister because he will follow the Tory lead in the UK and slash social services and increase support for those with incomes above $150,000. Thus if Gillard has a better chance of winning than Rudd then so be it.
Teachers' unions hate Gillard for her refusal to talk to them before implementing MySchool and other issues.
I am intrigued that a Labor power broker representing Western Sydney named Mark Arbib wants us to get tough on asylum seekers. Arbib sounds like an arab name.
First of all, a balanced, reasonably polite, interesting to read thread - bravo to most of you..
My brief points and interjections to the above
RE the ETS - bottom line, it was a dog of a policy full of money shuffling, loopholes and grey areas. I don't understand why people like yourself Ken, who are using the precautionary principle as a reason to support action do not follow and refer to someone like Bjorn Lomberg, who accepts man made climate change but advocates pragmatic decisions, research, mitigation and cost/benefit ahead of feel-good symbolism.
RE ETS as the lynchpin for Rudd's demise - it was absolutely the straw that broke the cammels back, but was precursed and followed by many other shallow backflips and spins that promised much but delivered little
RE Greens - please read their full policy list on their website before voting for them - as well intentioned their environmental views are, their overall worldview is scary
RE Voter Outrage - My outrage as a voter would be towards the general caucus puppets who voted in union affiliated blocks rather than in the interests of their electorates - one reason I cannot accept the Labor model
RE Mining Tax - It seems to be developed as a bastardised version of a Henry suggestion - tweaked and tainted to get the Government out of debt more than being right for long term considerations. Successful response to the Henry report could have saved Labor - grabbing the report and developing a sound economic vision for Australia could save either Abbot or Gillard
Ken Parish @ #24:
Ken, I think you're being a bit less cynical than you should be because:
[1] The Caucus is not exactly the Ecclesia. You seem to be assuming that there are the factional back-roomers (oligarchs) on the one hand and the Caucus (free representative agents) on the other. In my view, this misrepresents matters because almost every single member of the Caucus owes his or her political life to a faction and thus has fealty to a factional oligarch at any given moment in time. A Caucus vote is almost always merely the manifestation of the ex ante wrangling of the oligarchs of the party.
So, when you say "it was Rudd’s Caucus colleagues who made the decision in every sense" I can agree because that is just another way of saying 'it was the factional leaders who made the decision in every sense'.
As for the assertion that the oligarchs had to wait "until Gillard decided to run", this again assumes that Gillard is a utterly free agent who is somehow above and beyond the factional wrangling rather than being a player in it. (And can it be seriously believed that as ambitious a career politician as Gillard, rising to DPM, would be deliberating, for some extended period of time, over whether to run for PM? Methinks that sort of deliberating occurred (as with all ambitious pollies) years ago.)
The drop in popularity was sudden and swift following Mr Rudd's 'Big Australia' announcement. The reasons why are obvious. Dick Smith's criticisms of growthism and overpopulation resonated with many, many voters.
Flapple,
I'd forgotten about fuelwatch and grocery watch. The Rudd Government was a strange mix of boldness (The size of the fiscal stimulus and the NBN are examples of boldness whether the latter was for good or ill time may tell) and then on things like fuelwatch and grocerywatch, which were good ideas at least in principle, the government didn't persevere, when there was little to lose from persevering and something to gain. Julia did with Schoolwatch, AKA myschool.
Rudd was also strangely lacking in cynicism, by which I mean, that he tried to keep his promises, and seemed early on to put considerable store by that. Yet if you are going to break promises, the time to do so is early in your term - ask Howard or Hawke. Having resisted breaking promises early, he proceeded to ditch them as they came up - like the idea that he'd sort things out for all those insulators, childcare centres and as you say fuel and grocerywatch. Strange.
Then when he did break those promises, other people announced it and Rudd was often nowhere to be seen. Not really a good look. Of course if the media wasn't covering the broken promises that could make sense from a tactical point of view, but the media did cover the stories, and the public got no compelling explanation for why the promises got broken.
I think that the debacle leading to change in ALP leadership is not all that new. The same thing occurred in Germany and other nations wherein people chose a Social democracy. R.H. Tawney explained this way, "... [T]he man who employs, governs, to the extent of the number of men employed. he has jurisdiction over them. He occupies what is really a public office. he has power, not of pit and gallows... but of overtime and short time, full bellies and empty bellies, health and sickness..." And Australia with its rich/ capital intensive /high monopoly financed /mineral resources, owned by few will fight for every cent it can extract in surplus. Unfortunately the ALP has no stomach to fight these forces and is as weak as ...!
A lot of people were quick to predict the demise of Labor for ditching Rudd in favour of Gillard. I think most of these people were speaking out of raw emotion and a bit of shock. According to the latest herald/Nielsen poll results, Labor would have won an extra 11 seats if the poll was held today. This size of this margin probably won't last, but it's an election winning turn around however you cut it.
I'm a bit bemused that people think that a bunch of egocentric politicians who are big on self belief can be led around like a prize bull by a couple of number crunchers in the party. The caucus acted out of self interest as much as the national interest. You can't serve the national interest effectively from opposition. It's a fair argument that politicians have good political instincts. It's no cake walk to get through an election campaign or two without tripping up for starters. The writing was on the wall. Forget the nameless faceless power brokers argument. It's simplistic at best and at it's worst it fosters ignorance of the political process.
There's a lot complete mis-understanding of why Rudd was dumped going on here. Put simply, Rudd took a lot of power out of the state Labor machines and appropriated it for himself and his office. He did this because he knows intimately how they work and he has total contempt for them (and his staffers had all read Don Watson's book, suffering the illusion that everything happens in the leaders office). And Russ's popularity was a great big stick to bang the State machine men over the head with. And they hated it, and loathed him with a passion. Sure his cabinet had misgivings, but they were pretty much frozen out of what started to happen about a year ago, with persistent white-anting and backgroundings going on to News, Fairfax, and ABC journalists. Politics and media are intimately connected and it's dead simple, with coordination and subtlety, to stuff anyone if they are on your team. We started getting endless stories about broken promises, verbatim Liberal party talking points (but they often didn't originate with the Libs) and so forth. Fairly routine, but with a positive feedback mechanism built in with polling adding spice to the narrative (note, this never happened to Howard because we was conspicuously absent on strong arming the state branches, who also lacked the patronage networks that ALP has that make them strong). the Big miners knew about the RSPT last Sept (maybe form Treasury, maybe not) so they were ready with their bats too. Rudd could have stopped it by calling an early poll and that was his great mistake, and he did that because a DD would have weakened his long term Senate position and because his contempt for the Labor machine men blinded him to how far they were prepared to go.
Gillard understands the machine culture and will be a much more supple exploiter of it, the best since Hawke. Anyone who thinks this will hurt the ALP electorally is nuts.
What policy did the Rudd government come up with that wasn't a bastardised version of some other policy?
Agreed - the mining tax is completely unjustified. Why doesn't the government just pick off all the super successful industries, and impose ridiculous and unfair taxes on them. Never mind the fact that they are really just taxing Australian shareholders, many of which are invested into these "blue chip" shares via their superannuation funds. Never mind the fact that imposing such taxes creates a disincentive to invest in Australia.
Here is an interesting article (and a short excerpt) if anyone cares to have a read:
Resources tax a sneaky impost on super funds
anon said:
It's not a tax. It's better thought of as a price for gaining access to a scarce resource.
Does a mining company have to pay to gain access to, say, coal, which it does not own? Yes. The government owns access to minerals under the ground. As such, the government, like any owner, gets to decide that price.
The only question is how much the government will charge. The proposal is that instead of charging a price based on physical quantity mined (as it currently is), it charge a 'price' based on a percentage of returns from the final sales in the market.
Another (theoretically more efficient) approach would be for mining companies to engage in a bidding process for access to mineral deposits. I doubt mining companies would be happy with that either, given that they have been paying such low access prices for so long. Their preferred option, of course, would be to pay nothing at all for access to resources that they don't own. I'm sure they would also prefer to pay nothing more access to labour as well.
As to the 'fairness' of prices charged, that is ambiguous in the extreme. I think most people would agree however, that paying nothing for something that one didn't own be probably not be 'fair'.
But don't mining companies already pay state government levies (royalties) for that very reason? And there is no plan to axe the levy in place of a RSPT (as far as I understand - unless they've already chopped and changed it like every other bit of tax legislation they propose - and if they do cut the state levies, wouldnt that hurt the state government's funding? don't they rely heavily on these levies to provide services in those states where the major industry is mining?). I think of the RSPT as this: You own an investment property and pay land tax to the state government, and then you pay income tax on your profit from rental property to the ATO, and then you pay an additional tax on top, just for the hell of it. If this were the case, would you be inclined to reconsider your investment in properties? Maybe you would start investing in shares instead for the tax concessions? But certainly not mining shares.
That might be a good idea in theory, except that it would be a huge gamble, seeing as a huge proportion of the money invested by mining companies goes into exploration, and they might never end up extracting anything from that site - which I suppose would be a reason why mining execs would never go for it. Maybe the government can set up its own mining organisation to do the exploration for the mining company? The only question is, where would they get the money to do that... Hmmmm banks are pretty profitable, maybe they could impose a BSPT on them?
(1) As I said, they do pay. Quite substantially actually.
(2) A lot of Australians pay nothing for something all the time - Roads, health, education, infrastructure. Our country is just crawling with free riders!! (and more are coming every week by Boat i might add). Of course, taxes pay for these public resources, but a lot of Australians don't pay any tax at all, and yet, they still have access to the same goods as those who do pay tax. Is that fair?
Not at all: the auction finds the highest price that anyone is willing to pay for a volumetric rate of minerals extracted out of a particular piece of land. Once that price is determined, it works exactly the same as the existing royalty system (for a fixed time period, say 10 years). After the time has expired it goes open to new bidders and I think it is fair to give the incumbent miner a small advantage such that new bidders must beat the incumbent by 10% or there abouts. If a given plot of land turns out to have very little worth extracting then the miners pack up and go home, and no royalty gets paid.
Anyhow, it's much less of a gamble to take an existing (known working) system and tweak a price, than start on a whole new system.
The only tangible problem with the existing royalty system that anyone can point to, is that mineral prices rose faster than government royalty rates, and there is no particular reason to presume this was not just some fluke fluctuation. After all, if mineral prices fall tomorrow will anyone be rushing around with sympathy handouts to give the miners a fair go? I doubt it!
This business about volumetric tax being theoretically inefficient is decidedly unproven, and the constant assumption that the Federal Government is better at management than the states is based on the similarly unproven idea that we would be better off without state governments.
You've got the wrong narrative on Rudd. The coup was not a political one - it was personal.
This is a man with literally NO friends. All of those I know personally who worked for him can't stand him - he was the epitome of the arrogant bully as a boss, of the kind that ruins so many workplaces. Most of his ministry had long been dreaming of the day he goes (he treated them like shit too). When the polls turned down - though in truth they never got particularly bad - they all took their opportunity.
Contrast this with Beazley - he commanded genuine personal loyalty and respect that sustained him far past his political use-by date. Rudd was discarded far short of his use-by date. His executors (and we) may pay a heavy price for indulging their personal, if understandable, dislike of the man. I reckon Abbott is at good odds to be the next PM.
Except that as has been explained by people with a fucking clue time and time again, this system would destroy the exploration market.
What exactly would be the point of speculative exploration if you then had to go and buy those mineral royalties in an auction with competitors, who had spend $0 finding them?
It makes no sense. The system works fine as it is. The mining tax is nothing but a cash grab from Labor to pay for their budget deficit, end of story.
Flapple nails it with- "For me it all started right at the beginning with Fuelwatch and grocerywatch, two issues he campaigned hard on (fuel and grocery prices for working families) which he did nothing to address."
And that's because he could never deliver(well not unless he went down the lunar price control path)and so set himself(and Labor) up to fail by playing to the gallery. Bolty rounds up some of that critique with Crean, Ferguson and George here-
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/is_rudd_gone/
Now while the Govt could engage in some symbolism, a la saying sorry and holding a warm, fuzzy gabfest, policy promises undelivered eventually add up and as Ferguson notes 'outcomes' as distinct from seeing to be 'active' will win out in the long haul. That was always Rudd's downfall. Play to the gallery, don't worry about the details and set himself up to fail time and time again. Free pink batts for allcomers, school halls with plaques for ministers to open whether the school needed them or not and computers for every kid but no IT backup to hang it all together. Just keep chucking the surplus at everything including $900 and $950 tranches( my year off uni daughter got both) All the while believing that if you wore your heart on your sleeve with boat people, somehow they'd stop coming and burning and drowning. Fat chance.
You're wrong Yobbo that most people believe AGW is a crock, despite Climategate, etc. They still want the 'gummint to do sumpink' about it but here's the rub. Rudd like so many lefty warmenistas conflated ETS opposition with holocaust deniers when a global ETS was always an administrative fairytale, which Cope finally put to bed. However Rudd sold it as the great moral imperative and when forced to accept the bleeding obvious had egg all over his face and hence the usual backdown. Ken Parish is wrong that an ETS just fails because of poor salesmanship. The majority were prepared to go along with it until you mentioned jacking up their power bills and petrol, etc. Then the big tax grab begins to bite while its advocates have to explain the free handouts to Big Carbon which quickly rankles the 'working families' Rudd swore to protect from the Evil Empire. The GFC credit creation debacle simply added to Copenghagen's coup de grace in that regard.
As Jennie George points out you can't loudly decry political advertising in Opposition and then engage in the biggest taxpayer funded spin ever in Govt. What on earth are those health revolution ads all about we may well ask? They alone demonstrate perfectly Rudd's spin over outcomes when a Howard Govt was at least 'explaining' a rolled out policy in Workchoices. The contrast was obvious. Now although a carefully discussed, planned and explained mining tax would have gone down well with the punters (all those fat cats earning billions and the subtle politics of envy), in the end it was largely seen as a panicky, quick fix, deficit tax grab and rightly so. No 'lecturing' ads could cut through a Govt mould anymore that was cast all the way back with Fuelwatch and Grocerywatch. Gillard's job now is to break that mould and pronto. It's a tough gig.
DD,
I'm interested that you're the one person who thinks that Gillard is unelectable now. I think it was a very difficult judgement for caucus to make whether to go with Rudd or Gillard (in the circumstances I'm talking about - in the abstract Gillard is a much better politician, but these were very difficult circumstances).
I've taken your hypothesis that Gillard is unelectable as largely refuted by recent polls. You presumably think they'll come back when the Opposition gets stuck into Julia (as Julie Bishop has warned the coalition to do all year.)
Anyway, as an agnostic on this point of whether the coup was justified from the ALP's point of view or not, I take the polls as fairly good evidence that their judgement was correct.
Here's an extract of some recent polling - if it comes out in comments, and if not, it's the last table in the blog post I've just linked to.
In your opinion, which one of the two leaders, Julia Gilard or Tony Abbott, is best described by each of the following words or phrases?
Please explain why I'm wrong.
Ok it didn't come out. It's here.
Rafe @ comment 42, so you'll be voting Green at the elections will you?
Apparently there are two people on this list called Rafe:)
I think it was an over-reaction because the leakage of support was almost entirely to the Greens and not to the Coalition, so when we get into election mode and the media get back to their core business of bagging the opposition then the ALP was always going to be a sure thing. With some cosmetic adjustments under new management it will be even surer.
The biggest casualty of the Rudd and Obama administrations will be Keynesian economic management (sorry, off topic, please to do respond).
"I reckon Abbott is at good odds to be the next PM"
You could a few bucks on that -- seems like a sure winner -- if you win, you'll make some money and be happy, and if you lose, you'll be happy that Abbott didn't get in anyway.
My take is Gillard led Labor will get over the line or govern with help of the Greens. In any case Green preferences will leak back for those disenchanted with no ETS because they have nowhere else to go. Two of the Gang of Four largely responsible for Dudd Labor to date have gone. Normally Swan and Gillard would wear that opprobrium too, but for that to happen too many voters would have to admit to themselves that they were schmoozed by Rudd in much the same way as the ALP and his colleagues were. It means admitting you're a lousy judge of ability to govern and hence it's much easier to swing behind the new broom in Gillard and blame Rudd for it all.
If that's not enough reason there's another fundamental shortcoming with right of centre politics. They're weak on environmental policy and until they get that right, the usual rhetoric even coupled with little or ineffectual real action from the left of centre side of politics will win the day. Well at least until the punters get heartily fed up with interfering junk policy and platitudes they will. That's an Abbott led Coalition problem now. The right need a coherent, irrefutable market green approach to political economy and until they get that, they'll remain in Opposition more often than not. The not will largely be when the the left greens in power have inevitably pissed too much hard-earned up against the wall and in Oz Labor's case they've got quite a bit to go because of where they started from.
I don't see how this is any better than the current system. Also, wouldn't the previous mining company, after having extracted from the site for 10 years, have to be compensated for the cost of finding a mineral-rich site to begin with?
I pretty much agree with everything you said, observa. And if Libs don't win the election, it isnt because they trust Gillard's government or like Gillard; its because many Australians just do not want to see a hard line Catholic who some people (approx 16,000+) feel he is a "racist, homophobic, bible bashing sexist!" [ Facebook: friends don't let friends vote for Tony Abbott ]
I think I'll wait to actually hear what his party has to offer before deciding how I feel about him, but I think I'll be playing fullback for the Roosters before I vote for Julia Gillard.
Nicholas Gruen at 54. No, is the answer to your question regarding my take on the ALP at 42. The addage, "the party is greater than the individual" has to be sustained, otherwise the reasons for its existence... and so on. My quote from R.H.Tawney in the context of international capital finance (globalization) vs the Australian peoples "well being - freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech" is at the heart of my comments here. I attended, as an observer for one day, the conference in Kopenhaven, Denmark in 2009. It confirmed to me how the gross national product really does measure everything except that which makes life worthwhile. That is why unilateral free trade, must be eventually abolished and Multi-lateral free trade must be firmly put in place. The science informing Climate Change and the social science informing global poverty have to be solved immediately and urgently and so on. If I'm correct with my history, and please correct me if I'm not; I recall that Julia Gillard was at one time an adviser/researcher to John Brumby when he served as a member of the House of Representatives. Her seat of Lawler was also held by our much loved Australian Barry Jones. PM Gillard therefore comes frm an ALP culture completely different from the ALP culture in say Queensland. "There is also something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation" (quote by Al Gore from Herman Daly) and "nature does not do bailouts" (quote by Al Gore from Jonathan Lash) as Tony Abbott and some of his "dullard" supporters would have us all believe. My final words in 42 are really a challenge to the body politic,the ALP. In order to defeat self interest (monopoly capital)the ALP must again reform its fundamental policies, its reason for existing in the 21st Century. It must educate those millions of Australians with only their labour to sell, that their one vote is as equal as the one vote cherished by people like Palmer et al. The Mining Billionaires and Liberal/National Party stooges eta al, have, in the words of Tobacco interests, marketed, quote "doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact.' " Allowing the fossil industry, with the sworn, teary eyed commitment of Mr Tony Abbott, as reported, quoting internal fossil fuel sources, "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact." These were the sentiments gained by myself after leaving Denmark in 2009. In my opinion, PM Rudd could never negotiate from a position of national strength, because half the Australian population voted with Tony Abbott, declaring the science informing Climate Change as "CRAP." This position from a leader of extreme right intellectually religiously "bankrupted" conservatism is astounding. Why? Because Australians have been leaders in funding, with their hard earned taxes, Earth's natural climate change in the Southern Hemisphere including Antarctica. And religiously bankrupt, because of his failure of understanding very very ancient events as told in "biblical" dream time stories. The ancient story of Noah was to do with climate change and some archeologists have provided information which indicates huge flooding in the aftermath of the last great ice age period about ten thousand years ago. In any event, the fact that we have a candidate for Prime Minister telling us that science is crap,in my opinion makes him a laughing stock and unelectable for any serious public office representing all of us.
I don't see there's all that much wrong with the current system other than the setting of royalty rates being a bit slow to adapt to mineral prices.
When you say "have to be compensated" are you talking about some sort of legal basis? If the company takes on a lease with knowledge that lease terms are renegotiated by open auction after 10 years then that's a contract just like any other -- explain the basis for any compensation.
Perhaps you mean "have to be compensated" in terms of a suitable incentive to encourage exploration... I personally think that 10 years of profits plus a small incumbent advantage at the next round of negotiations would be incentive, they are bidding for this after all and will factor such things into their bid. The "10 years" figure could be fine tuned as a compromise between exploration incentive and the potential shifting mineral prices resulting royalties being lower than optimal.
I'm not suggesting that the terms of existing leases be changed, on the basis that whatever contractual arrangements are in place should be followed (otherwise it would open a legal basis for compensation). I'm talking about new leases here. Business requires a predictable framework to make plans, otherwise no one can think long term all.
Thanks Rafe,
Methinks you're a different Rafe to the one I thought I was addressing. Rafe
Rafe 42 and 59, meet Rafe (Champion) 54.
"I recall that Julia Gillard was at one time an adviser/researcher to John Brumby when he served as a member of the House of Representatives."
Chief of Staff for Brumby when he was Victorian Opposition leader - networked at the heart of the Vic ALP and excellent training for running a tight office.
Yes, Brumby was never a Federal MP (I'm pretty sure). He was Chief of Staff to Minister Alan Griffiths of brief sandwich shop fame - I forget the details I'm afraid, and went back to Victoria to become a State MP. Julia then caught up with him in Vic.
Yes, that is what I meant.
"Yes, Brumby was never a Federal MP (I’m pretty sure)"
MHR for Bendigo 1983-90.
Don't vote folks, it's a massive scam. A hidden oligarchy runs the world including Australia. Our parliament -It's like a horse race where one trainer owns every horse running. We can only back the horses that they field. You are fooled to believe that you have a choice. No, cause it's Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum every time, and we are the dummies to believe that represents a choice! I believe if voting changed anything they would make it illegal! And every politician can be pulled like the strings on a puppet. What we have here is complete corporate feudalism. The Commonwealth of Australia is a dirty rotten lie, the privately owned mining industry is all the proof you need to see the truth of that. So I suggest you all wake up now or alternatively you will spend the rest of your miserable voting life banging your deluded heads against that media created wall of democratic illusion.
Looking at the bigger picture here from an overall Australian perspective, it was most likely we'd experience a period of political turmoil after more than a decade of stable Howard Govt rule. With it's demise we lost an awful lot of ministerial experience and with so few left on the Labor side with experience from the Hawke/Keating era, the number of L-Platers in Canberra was always going to be problematic. Just as Coalition members had to adapt to the unfamiliar territory of Opposition, ALP members are having trouble adapting to Govt- ie outcomes count and that's a long hard patient slog. You can get away with all sorts airy fairy promises on the cross-benches, a la the Greens, but the buck stops the moment you have to make real decisions, a la the Dems.
Yes Nabs - of course. I remember that now. The reason I thought what I did was that Brumby was Chief of Staff to Griffiths when I was in Treasurer Dawkins office and I was out of the building for most of the time he was there (though I vaguely recall visiting Bendigo with Button ~ 1983.) Anyway I had him as a staffer till going back to Victoria. Wrong. (Bites thumb).
You can't understand the demise of Rudd without recognising that the decision to dump him was both personal and political.
Starting with the personal, Rudd never had much of a support base within the party and the caucus and didn't do much to cultivate one. His claim to the leadership was premised on a) his self-proclaimed superior skills; b) the public profile he had built through Sunrise; and c) being one of the few high profile members of the right prepared to oppose Beazley and so being able to benefit from the support of the Gillard faction. Within the caucus he had a reputation for arrogance and undermining his colleagues. Nobody, besides perhaps himself and Alistair Jordan, expected him to be quite such a popular opposition leader.
Rather than work on his personal weaknesses and put more effort into consulting his caucus colleagues, Rudd's messianic tendencies worsened as leader. As both opposition leader and PM he ran roughshod over even quite senior frontbenchers and the Premiers. Almost all policy was run out of his office and he made it clear that he was rarely interested in feedback from outside his inner circle. His personal office was chaotic, overworked and poorly managed. His chief of staff had poor management skills and managed Kevin more than the office. The policy process was too often driven by the media cycle, and follow through on policy was haphazard.
All of this made him even more unpopular within segments of the party. Indeed, for a while there was an inverse relationship between his public standing and his standing within the public. Rudd saw his personal popularity as a vindication of his approach to the party and convinced himself that his lack of deeper internal support wasn't a problem.
None of this mattered that much to his leadership while his political popularity held up. Sure, it led to bad governance at times, undermined morale, and meant that a lot of people were storing up grudges, but nobody was going to touch such a popular PM.
But over time, it became more and more difficult to quarantine Rudd's public standing from the chaos within. Poor processes led to policy errors. Excess focus on the short-term political and media cycle undermined good policy development and implementation. Rudd underestimated how much of his public standing hinged on perceptions of his integrity and trust that the things he said mattered to him actually did. The indefinite deferral of the ETS, perceptions of bad management of the BER and insulation programme, and then the debacle of the RSPT left previous supporters questioning what Rudd actually stood for and whether he was competent enough to implement it. Each bad decision or bad explanation fed the same narrative, which the media was more than happy to exploit.
Rudd was probably still favourite to win the election, though this will be debated for years. What is less contestable is that a perception had developed that he might lose and that, together with the amazingly weak support for his leadership within the caucus, provided the opportunity for certain factional leaders to dump him in favour of Gillard.
The way it happened was ugly and in some ways sad. Rudd has genuine talents that we ultimately saw only glimpses of. He could have been so much more if he had had more faith in his own policy convictions, been more disciplined in the management of his own workload and running of his office, and realised that he was first among equals, not the party's dictator.
Gillard is no brighter than Rudd. Indeed, possibly less so. But she is naturally more humble and more inclusive. She has much deeper internal support. Being naturally calmer, she is more likely to create an environment in which personal staff and the public service can work more effectively. She is more likely to build political coalitions for ALP policies and, being a better communicator, prosecute the case for them well.
In my view, her elevation to the leadership will enhance Labor's short and long-term election prospects.
Fantastic summary Outsider. The narrative that it was wholly personal or mere opportunistic factional manouevring misses the very real and widespread fear by ALP Caucus members and apparatchiks alike that the danger of losing the election was indeed a real and imminent one.
Expert analysts like Possum Comitatus wrongly discount the influence of both internal and publicly available marginal seat polling, not to mention the much more pessimistic 2PP picture in resource states with a disproportionate number of marginals, in dismissing the reality of fears of an election loss. They also wrongly discount the fact that, even though McMullan's assertions that an incumbent government had never lost with a two party preferred vote like that of Labor in Rudd's last days may have some force, many feared that Rudd's flawed personality and rhetorical and organisational skills would prevent him from sustaining an electoral recovery that should have been there for the taking, given what a genuinely good underlying success story the current government has to tell.
To me, there are very real parallels with Keating's overthrow of Hawke in 1991. There too there were obvious deeply personal factors, but arguably the biggest factor was that Caucus and apparatchiks alike perceived that Hawke was failing to cut through with the public and expose Hewson and the GST and that this, together with "the recession we had to have", had created a real danger that an effective Labor government would lose to a Coalition led by a lightweight buffoon. Moreover, just as there is an irony in Rudd being replaced by a member of the Gang of Four who not only endorsed the decisions for which he was pilloried but was apparently the prime urger of dumping the ETS, so too was there irony in the fact that Hawke's replacement was the man who more than anyone else was responsible for the recession we had to have and for the ALP's difficulties in effectively opposing Hewson's GST (Keating having previously loudly championed it).
Few people nowadays dismiss Keating's ascendancy as mere personal or factional manoeuvring, in that his subsequent winning of the "sweetest victory of all" created the historical justification for the move on Hawke, even though as with Rudd now you could make a plausible case in 1991 that Labor could still have won the next election under Hawke's leadership even with Keating sniping from the backbench.
Nicholas at 67, yes I looked him up on the web and John Brumby was MHR fro Bendigo from 1983 to 1990. I've always liked John Brumby's style of presentation and I thought he was pretty tough with PM Rudd, when negotiating Health/Hospital outcomes on behalf of his Victorian constituents. As any Premier should be and as we have seen with the WA Premier. Premier Brumby also played his policies concerning water distribution in the Goulbourn/Murray/Darling River issue to the wire. Why? In my opinion, he rightly reflected his concerns about water distribution, representing Victorian interests in the interests of the nation. From my understanding of history, the Victorian boundary as (1854) agreed on between the Colonial state of NSW meant that the water in the Murray belonged to NSW. Who can recall the history of the construction of the Snowy Mountain Scheme with initial total opposition from Menzies and his political party.I have to disagree with Ken Parish at 69 because in my opinion there are no parallels between Hawke and Keating. PM Rudd did not renominate for the position of PM following the Caucus "Spill."
The irony of Keating taking over after having been the responsible minister for the 'recession we had to have' is not unusual historically. The daddy of them all - which also worked out for those who elevated him - is Churchill. Having organised the disastrous expedition to Narvik, which put pressure on the Chamberlain Govt and led to guess who becoming PM - Churchill.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this so far. I learned a lot.
I'm still a bit unclear on why they had to effectively dump the ETS, and how Gillard could benefit from being associated with the move. But the answer seems to lie in Ken's point about the failure to explain the ETS to the public. If they had done this, then it would have been possible to campaign on it the 2010 election, and maybe get the needed Senate numbers. They also banked too much on Copenhagen producing an agreement that vindicated Rudd's attempt to display of global leadership. Due to the combination of these two factors the public was already turned off.
The explanation from David Marr, echoed by Labor Outsider above, makes plenty of sense. But it doesn't quite establish that the coup was tactically shrewd ex ante. Given what we know about the internal stresses in tne government, Rudd seems in hidsight a pretty poor PM. But how many of us were thinking in these terms a week ago? If the disaffected had only kept quiet until after the election, most people would have continued in the inpression that Rudd was still a captain confidently in command of his ship and that leadership speculation was a beat-up. Now they know the truth, but have the contrary impression -- that the disciplined and functional government has been an illusion from the start. I assume that's what DD was saying -- but Nicholas is surely right that the opinion polls on vindicate the move ex post.
The mining profits tax is a good idea, but has proven vulnerable to the most concerted corporate propaganda campaign since 1947, when Chifley tried to nationalise the banks. It would have been better to introduce it at a lower rate, and as part of a more comprehensive tax overhaul, to avoid perecptions that its motivation was 'political'. The rate could have ben ramped up gradually so as to render implausible the miners' predictions of catastrophe.
In response to Rick at #9, by smooth talker I don't just mean fluent. There was a sanctimonious and even evangelical tone to his talk that brooked no contradiction, with bureacratic jargon and motherhood phrases substituting for biblical references. Gillard sounds more humble -- like somehow who is acting on the basis of the best information. I entirely share your opinion about Abbott's umming and aahing, wherein vacuosness poses as informality and thoughtfulllness -- he is even more irritating.
Yes, good overview @68 LO. To which I'd add that Gillard is also noted for running a tight, well organised personal office where decisions are quickly and clearly made.
And unlike Rudd, she has that often overlooked and very important quality for a pollie - a good self-deprecating sense of humour.
James Farrell pleads for enlightenment:
The only credible people who can answer this question, outside the actual plotters, are the people who actually predicted the imminent replacement of Rudd by Gillard. Confirmed predictions are the gold standard of social science.
So far as I am aware there are two persons, Julie Bishop, who is obviously a smart cookie. And Harry Clarke, who I admire for being a straight-shootin' economist and a keen golfer.
A few weeks back Bishop warned an LP meeting that an ALP leadership change was on the cards. I cannot find the link to that article in which she was quoted as making that call. But here she is a month or so ago bucketing Gillard, in most unsisterly terms, as a potential candidate for PM. So the possibility was obviously uppermost in her mind.
Harry Clarke has been ferociously laying into Rudd for quite some time. And here he is on 14 JUN 10 unambiguously predicting Rudd's imminent demise:
It's worth quoting HC's reasoning about both Rudd's firing and Gillard's hiring in detail. The line about Taner is also prescient:
Awesome good call HC.
The short answer from both of these oracles is that Rudd had dug himself a hole with RSPT from which there was no clambering out of without further loss of face and therefore votes. So rather than draw out the agony the ALP machine operators decided to act with merciful swiftness.
Right out of the Machiavellian maestro's playbook.
Unfortunately for my (spotty, but not too shabby) record as a psepho oracle, I came close to predicting Rudd was on the way out. But I backed off from the brink of making a hard and fast call.
As far back as 04 MAY 08 I argued that Rudd had inherent flaws as a leader, because he had no stomach for a fight:
On 07 JUN 10 I had another go at Rudd, in the light of Marr's book:
I came close to predicting Rudd's demise on 14 JUN 10, arguing that Rudd's angry outbursts were a sign that he was frustrated at his inability to deliver as a leader on political goals:
But nevertheless as late as 23 JUN 10 I still thought the ALP would comfortably win the next election with Rudd at the helm, due to the inherent weaknesses, both ideological and psephological, of the L/NP.
So I did not predict a leadership change prior to the election. So no bragging rights for me.
Damn.