The Rudd Prime Ministership

Nicholas Stuart is the author of three books about Australian politics, most recently Rudd’s Way: November 2007 – June 2010. Stuart is currently a columnist with The Canberra Times and has had a long and eclectic career as a journalist. He reported for the Radio Current Affairs programs AM and PM, as well as for the ABC environmental program “A Question of Survival”. He was also based in Bangkok for a time as ABC’s Indochina Correspondent, and covered the aftermath of the Tiananmen protests. Nicholas Stuart addressed The Sydney Institute on August 11, 2010 to discuss the Kevin Rudd phenomenon in the aftermath of his loss of the Labor leadership.

THE RUDD PRIME MINISTERSHIP

NICHOLAS STUART

I would agree with everything David said, apart from one thing. I suspect that that Quarterly Essay he wrote, which wasn’t intended to bring Kevin Rudd down. But, in fact, it did.

I’d been working on my book on Kevin Rudd, a bit like a thick broad sword, slagging away at the enemy, and having a go, trying to find the faults with Rudd’s government. David Marr’s little essay was a fantastic, rapier-like thrust that went straight to the heart, touched exactly the quick and, as a result of that, returned Rudd’s humanity to the man. And, suddenly, the minute you started seeing Rudd as a person, rather than as a prime minister, his flaws became highlighted. I would argue that this gave heart to the New South Wales right and others. They found the will to take Rudd on. Finally you had someone who was an esteemed and very astute observer of both politics and human nature, and definitely someone with left wing credentials, who had said, “This man is not what he claims to be.” That was enough to prise the door open and thrust Kevin Rudd out into the cold. His opponents seized it with glee. Otherwise, I completely agree with everything David said.

My book was coming for a long time. I had spoken to a lot of people and heard that something was happening around the Rudd leadership. There was a possibility of a move to be made on Kevin Rudd. So I realised the key moment. You don’t need to be particularly astute to understand this. If you look back at when Kevin Rudd took over, it was the last day of the parliamentary winter session. The first day before the winter break had to be the time that the assassins would strike if they were going to strike. And there was the Penrith by-election on the Saturday beforehand when Labor got the worst result in Penrith it had ever received in a New South Wales election. The lowest primary result ever. Meanwhile, David Marr had set the scene with his Quarterly Essay. So it could all be blamed on Kevin Rudd.

I was worried, because I had my book. I phoned everyone who spoke in the caucus meeting, with the exception obviously of the then Prime Minister. I spoke to all the backbenchers. By the Tuesday afternoon I was certain that there was no move on. Rudd would remain Prime Minister till the end of the sitting, another 48 hours. As a result, he would take the country to the election. So I was just about ready to go with my book. I tidied up a few little bits.

The next day, at about 3.30pm that Wednesday, I filed it all to Henry Rosenbloom, my publisher at Scribe. I sat back and actually opened the champagne early. It was very good… until seven o’clock. Then came the reports and half an hour later I was back at Parliament House trying to work out what was going on and whether or not the book would stand, and how much rewriting would have to be done. Then I realised that, just as David Marr had given an excuse to the plotters, I had given what effectively worked as a cogent explanation of their reasons for dispatching Rudd. As a result of that, I realised the book had an extra chapter, quickly written and added on the end. Henry said there’s no time for an index. Henry is a wise publisher. He knew there would only be three weeks of sales for this book.

As David Marr has said, it was Kevin Rudd’s government right from the beginning, right from that very first moment. There were a succession of events that reinforced this. In areas like foreign affairs and defence, it had been known for a long time that Rudd was a policy wonk. Stephen Smith had little autonomy in his department. Smith denies this. He has told me that he has achieved everything he wanted to, and that he did not have to run a lot of things past Kevin, although occasionally ambassadors and others would be vetoed by Rudd.

Equally, former Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon insisted that he had total and complete control of the Defence White Paper. This does not entirely accord with another story I heard from an extremely reputable source, which suggests that the person who wrote the White Paper had a chat to Rudd early on. Kevin Rudd basically suggested he listen to the PM’s speech in Townsville at the RSL. This became a blueprint for a White Paper, and the White Paper that eventually happened was exactly the speech in Townsville.

Rudd initially did this sort of thing by remote control. He did delegate, and the government was beginning to work. The first difficulty crept in, however, with the global financial crisis. This required instant decisions by a very small group of people, effectively three – Ken Henry, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan, virtually a gang of two running the country. Then, gradually, Gillard forced herself in. Finally Lindsay Tanner, who had a bit of a past with Julia Gillard, made it a gang of three and a half, rather than perhaps a gang of four as some people might have been saying.

Kevin Rudd, the man, was very much at the centre of this. He became Kevin Rudd the PM, like an empty vessel that we poured our hopes and desires into. By his rhetoric, he demonstrated conclusively that he understood what we wanted and he was trying to fulfil our desires. That is, I suspect, why the polls remained so high for so long. Because he really, and did and does, or did, empathise with us. He quite genuinely wanted to assist getting Australia to the place that he was talking about.

But, as power became increasingly centralised in the office of the Prime Minister, it meant that Cabinet government effectively stopped working. You can’t centralise everything in one person, or in the office of one person. That meant you had a leader who insisted he was just doing things appropriately. But his office wasn’t working. He wasn’t contacting other people, even members of caucus. He did not invite members of caucus around. The story that provoked the challenge by Julia Gillard was that Alastair Jordan, Kevin Rudd’s Chief of Staff, had gone around speaking to Labor politicians about whether they supported Kevin Rudd or not. That is not the sort of thing any politician, particularly a prime minister, can outsource. You need to do that yourself.

With Rudd, we finally had an individual just waiting to fall; it was a matter of time before that fall came. The original intention, I believe, was not to put Julia Gillard in the job. There was a longer term agenda, run by the New South Wales right, to put in someone else. But they were jittery because of the bad polling, that has left us in the current situation.

What can we learn from this? The key thing is that we shouldn’t buy in to the celebrity culture of politics. The media desperately try to elevate celebrities. We think that it is about individuals who grow into the job, that they are unique, or somehow different. As a result of that a person is the Prime Minister. Eventually, prime ministers seem to believe that propaganda. But it isn’t true; they are all just individuals. Kevin Rudd believed the propaganda faster than a lot of other people. As a result, his problems were magnified. The minute Rudd slipped in the polls there were colleagues ready to push him off the stage. The problem is not necessarily for Kevin Rudd; the problem is for Australia. Because we are going further and further down that path, and it is a bad place we should not want to go.