The Rudd Prime Ministership

David Marr is an Australian journalist, author, and political and social commentator. His areas of expertise include the law, Australian politics, censorship, the media and the arts. He writes for The Sydney Morning Herald and appears as a semi-regular panelist on the ABC television programs, Q & A and Insiders. Marr’s In Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd, for Quarterly Essay 38, Marr exposed many of the personal flaws in Kevin Rudd’s ego just weeks before his downfall as Labor PM. David Marr addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 10 August to review some of the fallout from his essay.

THE RUDD PRIME MINISTERSHIP

DAVID MARR

I don’t haunt the Patrick White world but I was invited to give this year’s Menzies Lecture to a Patrick White conference at the University of London. It was a chance to talk about White’s life-long affection for that city, something I’d been mulling over for years. The morning news broke that he had won the Nobel Prize – with Australia at last trying to claim him as absolutely its own – he shocked everyone by declaring he was “a Londoner at heart.” It was very Australian. So I was in London crossing Russell Square about midday on the 23 June when my phone burped and delivered a message from my friend Fran Kelly: “Wow, just as well your essay sold well early!”

Was I being sued, I wondered? Had the Quarterly Essay been withdrawn from the shops? I quickly texted back: “What’s happened?” A few minutes later, with me loitering outside the Senate House, came the reply: “Nothing yet. Julia still in Rudd’s office. Sky quotes the Right has shifted against KR. He’s stuffed.” At which point I thought of page 5 of my essay where I state emphatically: “There was speculation that he was in a very delicate position, essentially friendless in the party, and ripe for decapitation by Julia Gillard even before the looming elections. This is rubbish.” I have held those sentences up ever since to defend myself against those who claim I had blood on my hands. I don’t believe I have. It was certainly not the outcome I wished.

The downfall of Rudd is the most extraordinary political event since 1975. It doesn’t have the interesting constitutional aspects of Whitlam’s downfall, but it is a truly astonishing event. To make sense of it we have to hold onto to the reality of Rudd’s rise to power and of his government. We must not read Rudd through the prism of his fall because from the time he became leader of the opposition in late 2006 until the end of 2009 he was one of the most popular leaders this country has known in the 60 years since polling began. Those polls were a remarkable testament to Rudd’s ability to seize the imagination of this country and give that sense of hope which is essential to bring any party from opposition into government. Politicians raise our hopes, in the end that is why we vote for them. They always disappoint. But the great art of politics is to let supporters down lightly.

Rudd let his supporters down heavily. The reasons for this will be debated for a long time. Nicholas Stuart’s book goes into the detail of the calamities of the Rudd Government with great forensic anger. I might say it’s an anger that I do not entirely share. But I think in a nutshell what happened was this. Rudd arrived with an agenda for transformative change in Australia. His ambitions were huge but he found himself unable to achieve any of them, certainly none of the major ones.

Rudd was up against one of the most difficult-to-deal-with Senates in the history of the federation. To keep the opposition at bay he needed all the votes of a rag tag bunch of cross benchers including Steve Fielding. He is no Brian Harradine. While I didn’t by any means agree with everything Harradine stood for, he was a man open to argument on secular affairs. I watched him, for instance, in the Native Title debate when his vote counted. I watched parliament operate as the textbooks tell us it should operate. There was a man there who needed to be persuaded. If he was persuaded something became law; if he wasn’t persuaded it didn’t become law. The contrast to Fielding’s Family First and the shambles of the last three years is extraordinary. Rudd faced one of the worst blocking Senates. Nothing makes a government look more foolish than the inability to achieve its legislative program. Though some controversial legislation got through in those years, the opposition successfully made Rudd look inept.

Rudd’s opinion polling was already sagging in the middle of 2009. Then came the Godwin Grech affair so superbly handled by Rudd, and so appallingly badly handled by both Malcolm Turnbull and by my personal favourite among all politicians in Australia, Eric Abetz. Rudd’s approval ratings shot up again. Because of the job he had done on Turnbull over “Utegate”, he approached the Copenhagen conference with his hero status renewed.

Copenhagen came, and Copenhagen was a complete disaster. Rudd emerged from that battered, wounded and reduced. But what happened then, in my argument – I think this is where Nicholas and I part company –is that Rudd lost his nerve. More than ever he turned for advice to his inner circle: to Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan and to those ornaments of New South Wales politics Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar. These were the people who persuaded him not to have an early double dissolution election on the issues of health and emissions trading. These were the same people who advised him that getting the budget into surplus quickly was more important than soldiering on with his personal campaign for an ETS. Those two moves destroyed the standing of Rudd with the general public, because they exposed him to the accusation – which I actually think is wrong – that he was insincere in his beliefs.

It is curious, isn’t it, how often those responsible for great political disasters benefit from them. The great example in the last century was Churchill’s rise to power. He persuaded Chamberlain that Norway could be saved by a brilliant, surgical operation that was a complete, bloody, utter catastrophe. Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain. That’s a grand example of a political truth played out on a modest scale in Australia in 2010: the people responsible for demolishing Rudd’s standing with the public are now running the country.

True, they were helped by his strange attitude to power. You didn’t have to be there as I was – at the foot of the stage taking notes – to be puzzled by Rudd’s bizarre performance as he claimed victory in 2007. It has puzzled me for years. Only since his fall do I think I’ve worked it out: Rudd believed he had been given power as a personal possession, something he could exercise it as if it were his own. Having won power by all the traditional methods – courting support in the union movement, in the caucus and with the public – Rudd proceeded to exercise it as if none of that support mattered any more. It was all simply up to him. I am not for a moment accusing him of pursuing megalomaniacal objectives. He wasn’t. But he believed the power was his and his alone to exercise.

Remember interventions: four or five offspring turning up to beg their mother to stop smoking, that kind of thing? Well I have spoken to senior ministers in the last few weeks to ask: “Why sack the man? Why not hold an intervention, lay it on the line and say ‘Unless you restore cabinet government, open your door once again to ministers, behave decently to public servants, treat your backbench with respect, we will take power from you’?” They reply that it was impossible. Rudd would not listen to anyone. You could not get to him. He would not listen. So they executed him instead. Maybe so, but their courage will always be in question.

The execution was carried out in the belief that Julia Gillard was such an astonishing political talent that she would sweep away, by her immediate popularity, any questions about her rise to power. It does not at this point, ten days before the election, seem quite to have worked out that way, and so the story, or perhaps the soap opera of Rudd’s execution, continues to evolve.