Today marks the first anniversary of the 24 hours that led to the deposition of Kevin Rudd. Yesterday Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane and senior journalist Paul Barry plotted out how Rudd unwittingly trashed his own power base with such astonishing swiftness that when his public popularity collapsed, so too did his prime ministership … Today Keane and Barry contrast Prime Minister Gillard’s success in Parliament with her possibly fatal failure to communicate.
For all that Julia Gillard is now synonymous with dire polling for Labor, her prime ministership began auspiciously. Under Kevin Rudd, Labor’s primary vote as measured by Essential Research had dropped as low as 35%, but had recovered to 38% by the time he was removed. Gillard, with an impressive opening press conference and the fanfare of Australia’s first female Prime Minister, pushed it above 40% for the first time since early May. When she called the election on July 17, Labor’s vote sat at 41% and Labor held a more-than-comfortable 55-45 2PP lead. The decision to dump Rudd for his deputy looked vindicated.
But Labor’s lead barely lasted a week into the campaign and then evaporated.
Go forward several months: at the end of 2010 and over the summer, Labor’s vote stabilised in the high 30s. In February, Labor’s vote began to rise again, and briefly hit 40%, giving Labor its first 2PP lead in months. Then, Gillard announced her intention to pursue a carbon price. Labor’s vote has been heading south ever since. Currently it is on 32%.
Labor’s vote under Gillard is fragile at best, and now plainly at an unsustainable level. At 32%, Labor’s main competition is from the Greens, not the Liberals.
Much has been made of voter resentment towards Gillard about the circumstances in which she obtained the job. But as her initial polling indicates, this isn’t necessarily the basis for voter animosity. In any event, having political blood on your hands is the defining characteristic of most political leaderships. After all, Tony Abbott blew up Malcolm Turnbull to take control of the Liberal Party, Kevin Rudd and Gillard did the same to Kim Beazley. For that matter, Paul Keating knocked off Bob Hawke, who had himself pushed out Bill Hayden. And while John Howard’s direct route to the prime ministership involved no knifing, he had devoted much of the 1980s to wrecking the Liberal Party in his own contest with Andrew Peacock. Rare are the leaders who ascend without wielding the knife or benefiting from those who do.
Gillard’s problem, however, is that unlike other leaders, she has not given voters anything more to see in her than the knife she wielded against Rudd.
Like Rudd, Gillard has only been in Parliament since 1998. Like Rudd, she came to the prime ministership relatively unknown compared to their recent predecessors. Who Gillard is, what she believes in, where she wants to take Australia, are a mystery to many voters. Her priority should have been to send a clear and consistent message about who she was — indeed, she explicitly stated, in a notable speech in Adelaide late last year, that she needed to explain her vision for Australia, how it translated into an agenda for the government, and how that agenda was going to be implemented.
To remedy voters’ confusion about what their Prime Minister stood for and wanted, Gillard from the outset tried to emphasise a sub-Thatcherite focus on work, building on the single best-established aspect of her political persona — her interest in education — to establish the theme of her prime ministership. She elaborated this into an obligation to make the most of educational opportunities, by rising early and working hard, preferably via some form of manual labour — famously contrasting the brickie and the socialite in a speech that could have been condensed into the famous graffiti “Work. Consume. Be Silent”.
But for every step Gillard took to try to create a strong persona for voters, to remedy the lack of long exposure in public life, she seemed to undermine herself. The disastrous “real Julia” moment in the election campaign — an effort to reboot a campaign that had run smoothly for a week and then been derailed by the leaks and by her own disastrous climate policy — instantly raised the problem of just who voters had been getting beforehand.
Worse still was her commitment to a carbon price. It was not merely the perception that Gillard had reneged on her election commitment not to introduce a carbon price, it was how it confused the message about what Gillard’s vision and agenda were. As the person who most strongly urged Kevin Rudd to walk away from his CPRS, as the leader who spoke of the need for “citizens’ assemblies” to establish a consensus about climate change, did Gillard actually believe in taking action on climate change? Or was she simply doing it as a condition of Green support for her minority government?
The result is a Prime Minister whose knifing of her predecessor remains the standout characteristic with which voters associate her. Voters continue to raise the issue, MPs say, even a year on from the events of late June 2010. And the perceptions established during the election campaign — of the cynical reliance on focus groups, of a campaign and policy orchestrated by incompetent party officials — remain fixed in voters’ minds.
The irony is that Rudd’s CPRS is now the basis for the deal Labor is now trying to reach with the Greens and the independents in its vehicle for climate change, the Multi-Party Climate Change committee (an initiative not of Labor but of Christine Milne). But then in some important ways, little has changed under Julia Gillard’s prime ministership. She retains the power, secured by Rudd and reluctantly endorsed by caucus after the 2007 election, of directly appointing her frontbench. And there are persistent complaints that the lack of consultation with cabinet and with caucus that marked the Rudd era continues.
After making a point of saying she would restore a full cabinet process following Rudd’s reliance on the Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee, Gillard launched policies such as the citizens’ assembly (which Labor backbenchers themselves criticised during the campaign) during the election campaign without cabinet agreement — indeed, apparently with some ministers unaware that the idea was under consideration.
And while the citizens’ assembly debacle could have been excused as part of the demands of modern election campaigns, the lack of consultation continues, angering MPs. “Where was the consultation on the Malaysian solution?” one complained. “When did caucus get to discuss it?”
The tight control of the Rudd era remains in place, too, albeit without the relentless focus on a single message that made Rudd question times exercises in count-the-clichés. A key difference, however, is that while Rudd’s office had a communications strategy, albeit a poor one, Gillard’s office appears to have no strategy of any kind. There is little or no co-ordination or planning around the key elements in the government’s agenda, no plan for where the government wanted to be and what it wanted to say at each one of them. The result is an unconvincing ad hockery that constantly surprises and annoys the government’s partners on the crossbenches.
The success of the Gillard government has been in Parliament, where it has continued to reel off win after win in passing legislation, defying conservative predictions that minority government would prove unworkable. Under Rudd, Gillard proved an effective negotiator with the Senate crossbenches, delivering major industrial relations reform against the desperate efforts of the opposition. She demonstrated her capacity to negotiate again after the election, out-manouevring Tony Abbott to secure the support of Andrew Wilkie and two conservative regional independents. Under her, Labor more effectively negotiates than it did under Kevin Rudd.
But while Gillard’s negotiation skills survived the transition to the prime ministership, her once-formidable communication skills did not. Having demonstrate a capacity for cut-through lines as deputy prime minister, Gillard turned into a Rudd-like reciter of talking point as leader, albeit without either her predecessor’s verbosity or verbal idiosyncrasies.
This sums up the government’s famous inability to communicate perfectly. Talking points and their monotonous recitation are now a permanent part of politics, but they have to stop at the door of the Prime Minister’s office. More than anyone else, more than a Deputy Prime Minister or a Leader of the Opposition, as national leader the Prime Minister has a special, direct relationship with Australians and a duty, as well as a political need, to communicate directly, personally and effectively with them. John Howard mastered the art of staying on-message while talking naturally to voters (a talent Lindsay Tanner used to regularly demonstrate). Gillard, like Rudd, resists moving away from her talking points, and a leader confined to rehearsed lines is no leader at all.
Occasionally, when angered, the old Gillard emerges, and the contrast is remarkable — the wit, the cut-through, the blunt and effective delivery all return, only to be smothered moments later as she gets back on message.
The consequence is not so much that voters have switched off to Gillard, but rather that there is nothing to hear even if they are listening.
Barring a fundamental reappraisal of how the Prime Minister talks to Australians and how her government co-ordinates its reform agenda, Gillard’s prime ministership will remain a political failure. She has given Australians too many conflicting signals about her vision and political persona; in the absence of a clear understanding of just who she is and what she stands for, all voters really know about her is that she knifed Kevin Rudd to get the top job and the government is run by spinmasters and focus groups. That is not a sufficient basis for attracting their support and there will be no Labor recovery.
But like Rudd’s, Gillard’s prime ministership reflects Labor itself. This is a party unable to explain what it believes in and what it is doing, unsure of its core values, a party centralised and micromanaged without the benefits of either, a party in which managerialism and belief fight a daily battle with the odds always favouring the former. For all the flaws of Rudd and Gillard, these are Labor’s problems. The party can try to change its face, but the one looking back in the mirror will always be its own.
*This essay is a taste of what’s to come as part of the top-secret project from Paul Barry that Crikey subscribers will soon have access to …
I don’t believe everyone in the Labor Party are visionless hacks, although there are clearly a few of them. But you would think after what has happened in the past year, not only federally but in NSW, that the wisdom of listening to focus group-driven whatever-it-takes spinners would be questioned a little more closely.
Their communication strategy is all over the place. But it would help also if they decided what they want to communicate and who they communicate it through.
The message has to be that Australia faces some major global challenges. If we don’t start acting on those now, our kids and their kids will pay. Labor has a record of taking hard decisions that have long-term benefits. Opening ourselves to the world under Hawke and Keating paved the way for the prosperity we now enjoy. We survived the financial crisis because we were decisive. Now we faces challenges over climate change and the global economy. We either do something about those ourselves or change will be forced on us.
Gillard doesn’t have to be liked. She has to be respected. Respect will be earned by kicking a few legislative goals and she’s starting to do those. The NBN deal is one, the changes to superannuation and financial advice are another, the carbon tax is the hardest, but a deal will be made and when the Greens take control of the Senate, life will be easier. The refugees issue is impossible for any politician, so she should just do what’s right.
Once the reforms are in place, they need to get people actually asking themselves what the Coalition actually represents other than scratching the nation’s nasty itch. Put the spotlight on the likes of Eric Abetz and Sophie Mirabella and the goon who miaowed at Penny Wong and ask people do they really want politicians like that running the country.
As for the media, I’d put a ban on talking to Alan Jones and all the other loathsome shockjocks. Why legitimise them? You’re not going to get a fair hearing and they’ll misrepresent everything you say anyway. The trick is to say less and let actions do your talking for you. What they do say has to be relatively simple and direct. And don’t trust News Ltd. They’ll shaft you whatever happens. So talk over their heads.
But none of this will mean anything unless they can decide internally what they stand for. It clearly can’t be socialising the means of production or standing up for workers’ rights (when only a quarter of the private sector workforce belongs to a union). I’d get them to read the editorial in The Economist last week. It’s about asking the population ‘what is prosperity for?’ I’d get them to point out the disconnect between extreme market liberalism and the fair go in terms that people understand. Mum and Dad aren’t at home with the kids because they’re both working late to pay off the mortgage. Throw away the bloody alarm clock analogy and tell people to work less and spend more time with their kids.
Finally, just level with the Australian people. Politics is about choices. You could do a Tony Abbott and pretend you can have it all. But you can’t. You could give the bosses what they want (third world wages and no action on climate change), but you won’t. You make difficult choices, you get on with governing and you ask the people to judge you on your actions, not on how well you are at managing the media cycle.
Oh, and stop hiring former journalists as communications advsiers. They’re lost in the noise and can’t see past tomorrow’s paper.
Gillard’s problem, however, is that unlike other leaders, she has not given voters anything more to see in her than the knife she wielded against Rudd.’
I must be on a different planet than you.
I see a PM who, day after predictable day, stands up and faces the most contemptable , cowardly and savage attacks. Both by media and the opposition. Then manages to get legislation passed in both houses.
Julia Gillards earlobes may be long, her voice may be Aussie strine and the handbag lost, But she’ll do me mate. She’ll do me.
I be interested to know why a strong, capable woman who can hold her own scares the living daylights out of most male
journalists and all of the opposition politicians.
Such shortsightedness is unbecoming, Bernard. This reeks of commentary from a perspective too close to the grindstone.
There haven’t been the scandals to plague this government, like there were with NSW government which led them out to the darkest depths of polling numbers.
This was oh so foreseeable from the moment the multi-party committee was announced. What’s not foreseeable is that this polling is terminal: the outcome from the committee, once announced in completion and passed through the chambers, will revive her figures in a way that even John Howard, the modern personification of Lazarus, will have to bow to.
“Talking to voters..” Bah! Chasing after John Howard’s support base – Alan Jones’ listeners – is an exercise in futility for any Labor figure.
I tend to agree with DECONST. The authors are being shortsighted. The changing Senate composition on July 1 will completely change the dynamics for the Gillard Government and this article does not touch on this. The parliament (both houses) will finally reflect the 2PP vote from the 2010 election. A lot more will be achieved including the big ticket items such as the price on carbon, the mining tax etc. It has been the hitherto political inertia (even if only by perception) that have caused the punters to be “over” the current political situation reflected in the low poll numbers of both leaders and the government. Once we start seeing the long awaited outcomes, the polls for the government will quickly bounce upwards into the 40s (50s 2PP). The situation is far from fatal.
‘Gillard’s problem, however, is that unlike other leaders, she has not given voters anything more to see in her than the knife she wielded against Rudd.’
This sums it up for me. As for Gillard’s negotiating skills, one of her first efforts as PM allowed Australia to be stitched up by the big mining companies in an abysmal watered-down agreement. Rudd may have been a jerk in some people’s eyes (including his colleagues’) but he was OUR jerk, we elected him.