Labor After the 2013 Election

They were the smart “new” Australian Labor Party. In the 2007 election, led by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, they made the country look fresh and optimistic again. But under the sunny exterior lurked woes. In September 2013, Labor’s pains saw the Tony Abbott-led Liberal/National parties’ Coalition return to government in Canberra. Chris Uhlmann is an ABC journalist and a former presenter of ABC TV’s 7.30 who is currently producing a TV series on the Rudd/Gillard Government. On Tuesday 29 October 2013, Chris Uhlmann joined Aaron Patrick, Australian Financial Review’s Deputy News Editor and author of Downfall: How the Labor Party Ripped Itself Apart, to address The Sydney Institute on how and why the Labor Party under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard lost its way. Chris Uhlmann’s speech has been prepared from a transcript.

LABOR AFTER THE 2013 ELECTION

CHRIS UHLMANN

I’m delighted to be here. After the Labor Party’s recent election of Bill Shorten as federal leader, I ran into one of the leading figures on the Labor right – I won’t say from which state. I asked what the feeling was on the right re supporting Bill. This person said, “Well, half of us are voting for him because we want him to succeed, the other half are willing him to fail.”

On one front, nothing has changed. The next rank is preparing for regime change.  But there are positive signs. The new system of pre-selecting a leader went better than most of the naysayers said it would, and with some fine-tuning it’s an innovation that is here to stay.

Then again, the division of jobs in shadow cabinet shows that, at least there, the factions have the first and last say on what goes on. I don’t think there’s any sign yet that Labor has answered, or attempted to answer, the two fundamental questions about the last six years – what went wrong and how can they ensure that that never happens again?

Perhaps this wilful blindness is because to do all that means that Labor members have to face some shocking political facts, a shocking political failure. To re-emphasise what Aaron has just said, cast your mind back to the Coalition launch in 2007. There, Campbell Newman, the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, welcomed the crowd. After that federal election, he was the leading Liberal figure in Australia.

There were Labor governments from coast to coast. Kevin Rudd was one of the most popular new leaders in post war federal history. Now, just six years on, there are only two Labor state governments left, and the party has been all but wiped off the electoral map in Queensland and NSW. By the end of next year, it’s a fair bet that South Australia and Tasmania will have fallen – so Katie Gallagher, in the bastion of the ACT, will be the Campbell Newman for Labor.

That is a bewildering turnaround in a very short period of time. Achieving that is not simply bad luck or bad media, it is bad culture, bad management and bad government.

One theory doing the rounds in Labor is that, federally, it was a good government but it just failed to get its politics right, or it failed to get its message right. Maybe the answer to Labor’s problems over the last years is so painful that true believers just can’t face it. It reminds me of when I studied the Gospel of Mark in 1980. The Gospel of Mark was undergoing something of a resurgence at that stage. In the past, it was considered to be a very rough document. The Greek in it was bad, the Christ figure is always on the road to the cross, he’s a grim, grim figure and every time he tells his disciples to follow him it means he is going to die, and they are too. But they don’t get it.

The Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan developed a term for this. He called it scotosis.  Scotosis is an unwillingness to learn through painful insight, a kind of intellectual blindness. At this stage, I think the Labor Party is suffering scotosis. It has an intellectual blindness as to what happened in the past. Maybe Labor needs to learn to re-learn what it learned after 1975.

After 1975, in the early 1980s, I interviewed Bob McMullan who was for some period of time the federal secretary of the Labor Party.  After 1975, the party recognised that it had to do a number of things; it had to get the economics of government right. The party did and does have great ideas. It had to work out how it could take great ideas and turn them from policy into practice to get the government right. Part of Rudd/Gillard Labor’s problem was that, despite 11 years in the wilderness, it had not properly learnt how to govern.

We’ve been working on a documentary covering the last six years of Labor in power. One of the researchers tells me that from the end of 2006 to the election of 2007, Kevin Rudd made 600 commitments. Think about that. Anyone looking from this distance would conclude that no government could begin to tick off that kind of agenda. Just think of the scale of some of the pronouncements that were made. To revolutionise education, to recast industrial relations, to fix the hospital system or to take it over, to fix the federation and end the blame game, to spend 4.7 billion dollars building a national broadband network, to fix climate change with the carbon price, to narrow the gap on indigenous disadvantage, to fix the cost of living through fuel watch and grocery choice and a petrol commissioner (what happened to him?).  To reduce the regulatory burdens on business, to make Australia the financial services hub of Asia. I could go on, and there were a great many more.

Any government would struggle to deliver that kind of agenda across three terms, let alone one. To quote Sir Michel Barber, misquoting Harold Wilson, in his book Instruction to Deliver: “A week might be a long time in politics but four years is a very short time, and three years is even shorter”. In Instruction to Deliver, when outlining how governments should go about delivering its agenda, Barber reduced it to five words; ambition, focus, clarity, urgency and irreversibility.  Let’s focus on the first three.

The Rudd Government certainly had ambition but it was incapable of focusing on anything for any length of time. Even its friends would suggest it had little clarity of purpose. I think Phillip Coorey in the Sydney Morning Herald was the first person to offer a fitting image of the Rudd Government when he said that Kevin Rudd was like the worst kind of home handyman. He’d take the door off on the first day and think “I’m going to paint that door” and then he’d leave that and cut a skylight in the ceiling but not put in any glass. Then he’d take the windows off to paint them.  By the end of a month, the house was a wreck, nothing was actually finished.

During the Rudd Government, one of the things that began to strike me was that, quite often, an announcement was actually seen as some kind of delivery. Once it was said it was seen to have been done. Then they moved on to the next thing. The Gillard Government has a better record on delivery to defend – the National Disability Scheme and education reform are not yet delivered let alone even properly funded.  That will be the work of other governments.

I can add my own observation on how you can govern. You can break a lot of promises in politics. People can, have and do all the time. But you can’t abandon principles, especially when you count politics in moral terms. When Kevin Rudd said that climate change was the greatest moral and economic challenge of our time he did two things. He turned all his opponents not just into bad politicians but bad people. To argue against Kevin Rudd in that circumstance was morally wrong and he laid a landmine for himself, which barred any passage to retreat. Any return from where he’d been on climate change was a sign of absolute moral cowardice. He suffered his catastrophic loss of face with the Australian public when he abandoned that idea. He so alienated his own colleagues that, on the night of the 23 June 2010, when the opportunity came to grab the knife there were too many hands on it. In the end, there was no ballot.

I can make another observation about the 23June 2010. A lot has been said about the NSW disease, about the futility of a constant change in leaders. Of course, that’s true. But it was the Victorians that led the charge. You have to look at the culture in Victoria that has grown up over time. There, the right is shattered so alliances have been endlessly formed, broken and reformed between parts of the right and some of the left. This sees small bands aligned briefly for their own benefit and no one commands any great numbers. That’s something to be aware of in Labor’s collapse at the moment. Look at who supported who in the leadership changes – you had the right supporting a left woman largely. The left was supporting a right man.

The idea that in leadership challenges in Australia in federal politics in the Labor Party that the factions hold some kind of tremendous sway is not true. In fact, there are tiny little generals, some of them commanding one or two numbers and everyone trying to pretend that they have more followers than they actually do. And no one trusts anyone else, no one was actually sure if they could trust the numbers on their list.

The Gillard Government was built on the rubble of the Rudd years and it inherited an impossible agenda and it was born with a birth defect and that was the sin of the murder of the prime minister in the middle of the night for reasons that were never explained.  It was the original sin of Julia Gillard’s sub-government and something that was never expunged because she couldn’t be confirmed by the 2010 election, which would have taken her away but of course she wasn’t.

So although Gillard formed a perfectly legitimate government, she was dogged with questions of legitimacy and trust from the beginning and then she compounded them.  Her initial instincts were good to settle this ridiculous agenda that she had inherited and to try and get some work done. But, then again, there was the immediate misstep of the carbon tax which was used relentlessly by the Coalition, some might say unfairly, but it’s politics, to paint the government and the prime minister in particular as someone who couldn’t be trusted.

That was compounded in the long run by the massive strategic mistake of promising a surplus on a particular date.  Again, the government promising something that it wouldn’t deliver. For a government that was said to be unable to communicate its message, it certainly got through the message that there was going to be a budget surplus this financial year. When that didn’t happen, again, it was a blow to the credibility and the trust that people place in government.

Every currency is built on trust.  You take trust out of currency and you have nothing and that is certainly true of politics where trust is the only currency and the Gillard government ran out of that currency very early in its life.  The thing I started thinking about even a year into the term was this was a government that had grown old before its time and it was, in essence, just marking down time in the end to its own oblivion.

I think the Labor Party now has to ask itself some very candid questions for the good of the Labor Party and certainly for the good of country. Because, no matter what people say about it and the way they may criticise it, the Labor Party has been one of the great innovating institutions of Australian politics. It has a long and strong history in front of it, it just needs to learn the lessons of its past and face up to them.  It has to recast its culture, it has to recast its relationship with unions, it has to focus on signature policies to rebuild trust with the community and work on delivering its transition to government and then to actually deliver.

In the Gospel of Mark there are two endings. The first one, the shorter gospel actually – and that was the way the author originally intended to end – went like this.  The original has a young man at Christ’s tomb telling Mary and other women followers that Jesus has risen from the dead and that they should spread the word.  The women were frightened out of their wits and said nothing to a soul since they were afraid. Subsequently, the writers of the Gospel of Mark thought “that’s a pretty bad ending to a gospel” and he wrote one that he thought was better.  I hope that there are people inside the Labor Party of goodwill that can act like that second century “Mark”.