He currently lacks the numbers in caucus but Kevin Rudd has displayed remarkable tactical nous in launching two lightning, long-distance attacks on the Julia Gillard camp in the past 24 hours, leaving the stronger, better-organised Labor leadership looking lead-footed and reactive.
Despite claiming the leadership issue had become a soap opera, it was Rudd himself who injected the most melodramatic notes, with a late-night resignation press conference from Washington timed for the Australian evening news bulletins. That was followed this morning by another press conference to outline his policy agenda while, he insisted, a plane sat awaiting him on the tarmac, timed to disrupt Gillard’s morning press conference to declare a leadership spill.
Like his claim to be doing the honourable thing in the face of dishonourable behaviour from “Simon Crean and other faceless men”, it was pure theatre, but very effective.
Both times caught the Prime Minister on the hop — she took nearly three hours to react to Rudd’s resignation last night and then delayed her press conference this morning significantly. Little things, but demonstrative of how Rudd has made the most of his limited advantages — hit-and-run, or hit-and-fly stuff, the tactics you resort to when confronted with superior forces you don’t want to meet in pitched battle. After a day or more of the tide turning against him within the party, it was deft stuff.
But there’s no putting off a pitched battle any more, which is why Rudd’s second press conference was in essence a job application, not merely to his colleagues but to the public, and a belated effort to make Labor’s problems about more than popularity by emphasising his policy differences with the government from which he has just resigned.
Of course, that’s a little hard when the Gillard government has in essence been about implementing the remaining Rudd agenda. Rudd himself had to awkwardly negotiate climate change while listing his policy achievements, mentioning the MRET but pointedly skipping reference to a carbon price (being the thing he said he’d implement but didn’t, whereas Gillard said she wouldn’t implement it and then did). It was also tricky for Rudd to explain quite how he was going to be more committed to manufacturing when for months the government has been rushing headlong towards more industry support.
He invoked the Green Car program and mentioned Kim Carr, now one of his numbers men, who covers manufacturing from outside cabinet after his defenestration by Gillard.
It is, one suspects, unlikely to bring the AWU in behind him.
Ultimately the Rudd pitch is a simple one: Australia, and particularly business, needs certainty, particularly with Europe threatening another financial crisis, he’s got the track record and he can defeat Tony Abbott.
It won’t be enough. He doesn’t have the numbers now, say supporters. But the government’s parlous position complicates this enormously. We’re used to leadership challenges in majority governments. Here, there is no neat resolution, whatever government ministers might say about finalising everything with a leadership ballot. If Rudd declines to challenge, or if he loses and goes to the backbench, he will automatically be a source of instability regardless of what he does.
Even if he accepted Gillard’s challenge of renouncing the leadership if he loses, he will remain what court historians term the reversionary interest, until the party decides Gillard can’t win an election and needs a new leader. If he loses and resigns from parliament, the Coalition would be well-positioned to claim Griffith, putting Abbott within striking distance of power. And if he wins, he’ll have to nut out a deal with the independents or head for the polls.
There are no good outcomes for Labor and this won’t be resolved on Monday. It will simply shift to a new phase. The mess created by Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, Don Farrell, David Feeney and Karl Bitar in June 2010 is so catastrophic it will take some time yet to clean up.
By the way congratulations to Crikey and other media organisations who stated that there was smoke and fire and who covered this leadership issue over the months.
Here on Crikey too many left-leaning cheerleaders in the comments sections complained that Crikey was just following the tabloids and covering speculation with no substance. Ha!
I hope those people who put wishful thinking ahead of what was increasingly becoming apparent to anyone who would read what was being said, have the decency to feel somewhat shame-faced today.
There has been an ongoing campaign by each camp to destabilise and discredit the other; yesterday’s announcement just brought it fully out into the open.
Clearly the allegations Gillard and her supporters have made against
Rudd are true (as usual the comment box software is stuffed)
then they should demonstrate their seriousness by expelling him from
the ALP.
But they won’t do that, will they?
What happens next will be determined by whether Kevin Rudd still wants
to lead the ALP and do what he can to stop the disaster that would be a
Tony Abbott Liberal government, or whether the gutless bullshit being
thrown at him by (of all people) Wayne Swan has led him to the conclusion
that there is no future for him in the Labor Party.
If Rudd sits on the backbench for 6 months waiting for Gillard to become
so clearly unelectable that the Party decides to come back to him, the
problem will be that so many of these sewer rats have attacked him now
he won’t be able to form a cabinet.
If a moronic, gutless, useless non-entity like Wayne Swan thinks he can
get in a few kicks while a colleague is down, that is a pretty clear signal
that there is nothing left for Rudd in the ALP.
It must be a sore temptation for Rudd to tell the factional scum in the ALP
where to go, resign from the Party and then sit on in the back benches as
an Independent and impose his own agenda from the sidelines.
Whatever he does, it is to be hoped that Rudd will find a way to make the
worthless scum who treated him so badly live to regret it.
Rudd might be appealing to voters, but not this one. Those two press conferences showed me a man more devious than any Machiavelli wrote about.
He has single-handedly destroyed this government – and possibly debilitated Federal Labor for years to come – just to satisfy his ego.
“This government” destroyed this government when they decided the factions, rather than the Australian people, could select a leader.
I like the way he is being labeled, attacking by stealth, and Gillard saying she will go on the back bench, and she will not challenge again.
We know how honest she is with her words, and written agreements, as writttten in other comments, the SCUM must be in turmoil.
These are interesting times in politics, I cant ever rember there ever being such a lack of talent, in all parties