Inside the Rudd administration

NICHOLAS Stuart has an amazing ability to deliver completed manuscripts about contemporary events in lightning-quick time.

NICHOLAS Stuart has an amazing ability to deliver completed manuscripts about contemporary events in lightning-quick time.

His biography of Kevin Rudd, Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography, came out soon after Rudd was elected Labor leader. His post-mortem on the 2007 election campaign, What Goes Up, was the first to hit the shelves.

Now he has delivered the first comprehensive assessment of the Rudd administration, Rudd's Way. This book looks at Rudd's leadership style, his policies and approach to politics and the way he related to his colleagues. It also examines the opponents Rudd vanquished and was ultimately vanquished by, on both sides of the parliamentary chamber.

Had this book been released a few years after Rudd had been deposed, it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny as well as it does now. Most of the sources are off the record and, therefore, quotes are unattributed. This limits the reader's ability to judge the merits of some of the assessments.

There is no index and no bibliography. To lack these facilitating elements limits a book's long-term worth. These are failings, to be sure, yet Stuart has succeeded in delivering the most important aspect of his book: a quality assessment of the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of the Rudd government.

Stuart, a former ABC journalist and a columnist for The Canberra Times, had been writing this manuscript for some time, but the terms of reference changed when Rudd was suddenly deposed. Luckily for the author, one can tell from the wider narrative that Stuart's original assessment of Rudd married nicely with what ultimately happened to him.

This is a compliment to Stuart, in terms of the accuracy of what he was being told by his off-the-record sources. The deep concerns in the Labor ranks about Rudd's autocratic style were strong enough to mean the leader ultimately had to go even before he got to fight his first election defence. That's a far cry from how Rudd thought his career as prime minister would go, as the book makes clear.

Rudd's Way is structured chronologically with so-called interludes placed between chapters to help break up the narrative with assessments of important events and players over the past three years. The interludes look at key figures such as Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. The chapters also present themes such as climate change and the apology to indigenous Australians.

Something the book doesn't do adequately, given the way contemporary events moved, is to assess Julia Gillard. Rather short attempts at this are made throughout, but you get the impression they were leftover assessments, made on the assumption her time for leadership was still some way off. But in the context of the wider way this book has adapted to changing circumstances, this is a minor complaint.

When political texts have their purpose shifted by events, readers can usually see the clunkiness in the narrative. On this score, Stuart has done well to maintain the flow of his book. Indeed, this is the book's triumph.

The author engages with the key aspects of Rudd's prime ministership through to his ultimate downfall. He explores Rudd's early approach of using his popularity to assert his authority over the Labor Party in government, his desire to micro-manage every issue and his increasingly closed-off approach to cabinet and colleagues.

Reading Rudd's Way will be an enjoyable experience for anyone consumed by the Shakespearean tragedy that Rudd's time in power became. The book claims to capture "in gripping detail" the background to the events that played a role in the unravelling of Rudd. I think it does that, but at times the author's writing style gives the impression he is trying a bit too hard to make the story exciting. It is a form of embellishment that isn't needed, because the events speak for themselves.

Readers looking to this book for insights and revelations will be disappointed. There really isn't anything especially newsworthy or new, other than a complete tale of the Rudd government. This, in fairness to Stuart, is in part a feature of the modern media -- most of what happens gets out into the press well before books come out detailing what happened behind the scenes.

But the events Stuart does background are clearly built on the back of good access to the players involved in proceedings. I have read Stuart's other two books on Rudd and I can vouch for this one being the best of the three.

It may not be the kind of book you would pull off your shelf to re-read years from now, but it is a good read. When you read about the totality of Rudd's years in office, you get a true sense of how much the former prime minister tried to do, how far he fell short of expectations, and just why, by the end, his colleagues felt he had to go.

Peter Van Onselen is contributing editor at The Australian and an associate professor of politics and government at Edith Cowan University. He is a co-author of John Winston Howard: The Biography and Howard's End: The Unravelling of a Government, both published by Melbourne University Press.