Factions, patronage and survival

Julia Gillard at her first prime ministerial press conference. Picture: Ray Strange

THIS week's coup deposing Kevin Rudd shows the true state of modern Labor.

THE coup that installed Julia Gillard was driven neither by policy nor ideology; it is about image, party management and election survival, and constitutes a new method of Labor rule.

Gillard's vision for Australia is little different from that of Kevin Rudd. But Labor's spinning wheels will work to conceal such embarrassing truth. Indeed, Gillard endorsed every significant decision made by Rudd during his brief period in office.

Gillard's media conferences as Prime Minister are devoid of any new direction or vision for Australia or Labor; her pledge, instead, is "to get the government back on track". That's it.

This is the reason Rudd was eliminated; it is the mission expected of Gillard by the party. It affirms the transformation of modern Labor.

Gillard will become the fourth Labor leader in four elections: Kim Beazley in 2001, Mark Latham in 2004, Kevin Rudd in 2007 and now Gillard this year. The party, as Latham says, subcontracts the leadership to the best salesman with the freshest image.

This reveals a party governed not by ideas but powerful interests that span networks of factional, trade union, family and special interest group connections that thrive on the patronage, finances and appointments that only incumbency can deliver.

It raises a fundamental issue: is this method and structure of Labor self-aggrandisement consistent with Australia's national interest? Put another way, is the power structure that king-made Gillard also the power structure that works for Australia's policy needs in today's globalised world? The test case of NSW shows the answer is no.

This is why Gillard's enduring task as Prime Minister will be to prove she can transcend the factional and union spearheads that crippled Rudd and compelled her to act.

Under questioning, Gillard refuses to address how she became leader. She asserts, instead, her independence and reformist credentials.

It is the absence of any rationale for Rudd's execution outside sheer Labor self-interest that is so obvious. The winners struggle to explain themselves to the public. "I asked my colleagues to make a leadership change," Gillard said. Her reason? Because a good government was "losing its way".

Her next sentence went to the real motive: she refused to "sit idly by" and watch Tony Abbott become prime minister.

On ABC radio new Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan said he decided "we needed a decisive change". Asked why, he said the problem was "that Kevin had lost support" and people "could not dare to contemplate" an Abbott government.

On Lateline, Health Minister Nicola Roxon said Rudd was still a Labor hero but the government was no longer getting traction for its achievements, such as paid parental leave. It had to ensure "the most effective defence against Mr Abbott".

The driving motive was to protect Labor's power structure through incumbency.

Gillard's message is that she will break from Rudd's style of government. The emphasis will be teamwork; ministers will have more autonomy; she will run a proper cabinet system; she will respect the views of ministers; her approach is to ensure people find "their ideas appreciated, their labours understood".

Everybody knows the code; these are sharp signals that separate her from Rudd. She is talking to both government and party. Gillard's pledge is to engage more than Rudd and manage better than Rudd.

It is music to Labor's ears. The party chiefs Rudd offended will now be given due respect. The public servants will find government better organised. Stakeholders will discover a new Prime Minister more prepared to listen. Gillard won't say this but her task is to redesign the government's operating style.

Under Gillard, however, the story will be policy continuity and orthodoxy. She told US President Barack Obama yesterday she would maintain the Afghanistan commitment. Her themes are safeguarding health and education from Abbott's threatened spending assault. It is Labor's purist oxthodoxy and basic to the former Rudd-Gillard team.

Gillard boasts of her reformism yet most of such reforms uphold, rather than challenge, Labor tradition. She abolished Work Choices and partially re-regulated the labour market; she championed a centralised national school curriculum; she pioneered the MySchool website against the teacher unions with support from most Labor MPs; she oversaw the Building the Education Revolution; her new message is to sharpen the attack on Abbott over his alleged revival of Work Choices, the perfect recipe to please the party and the unions.

This coup is about policy corrections, not new policy directions. Gillard was intimately involved in all Rudd's successes and failures.

Her true mission as Prime Minister will be to make Labor orthodoxy more saleable. It is about smarter politics. Ironically, that means not just correcting for Rudd's mistakes but also for Gillard's past mistakes, such as her backing the deferral of the emissions trading scheme, which was Rudd's worst mistake.

Labor is wedged on the three policy issues that will test Gillard: resources tax, climate change and boatpeople. Knowing she must drain the heat from the resource tax brawl, Gillard began with a tactical win: getting the miners to suspend their anti-government advertising campaign.

She talks of consensus but that is unlikely. Her task will be to offer sufficient concessions to end the mining war yet avoid any impression of retreat under pressure.

Her message on the ETS is equivocal: the need to rebuild consensus, champion the idea of a carbon price and resurrect Labor's credentials. Yet Gillard knows if she pushes too far, Abbott gains traction on his grassroots "great big new tax" scare.

On boatpeople, Gillard's rhetoric plays to both sides: she grasps the concerns of Australians worried about boat arrivals yet she will not indulge Abbott in a contest over tougher policy (a contest Abbott would win anyway).

Labor right-wingers want action, but if Gillard does toughen on boat arrivals she alienates her progressive voting base on the Left, a vital source of support.

By most calculations Gillard's elevation should strengthen Labor at the election. As a new Prime Minister she brings fresh authority to Labor governance. As the first female PM, her story is an impressive narrative and her personal qualities a political bonus.

She needs to manage Rudd's future, however, and the gap created by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner's imminent departure.

The Gillard ascendancy testifies to modern Labor's mantra: don't stick with a leader on the slide. This culture is based on the technologically driven nature of modern politics, where three years in office better equates with nine years from previous eras.

The Liberal Party has changed leader three times this term, from Brendan Nelson to Malcolm Turnbull to Tony Abbott, and now Labor has had two prime ministers. Once a party slumps in the polls the leadership factor is pivotal. Real-time politics means switching leaders becomes a better "fix" than fixing the problem.

Yet the latest Labor research was unforgiving: the problem was Rudd.

Factional and party brokers could not stomach Rudd's defiance of their authority. As a successful prime minister, his inexcusable failure was not to entrench a power base within the party.

If it was good enough for Bob Hawke then why not Rudd? Even worse, Rudd failed to treat ministers and caucus members with respect. He did not sufficiently honour collective decision-making, which meant when policies failed Rudd was usually blamed.

Conscious that he was flying above the factions, Rudd never contemplated the consequences when he crash-landed.

Last Wednesday night before the ballot, his party enemies were dancing on his political grave. He did not deserve this fate yet his failures precipitated it. He was unable to muster sufficient support to stand against Gillard in a ballot. Rudd's story is mired in tragedy.

What happened is that the powerbrokers went out ahead and, in effect, crippled his leadership.

The situation was created where Gillard's only tenable position was to challenge Rudd and accept responsibility for the coup.

She understands the burden she carries: an Abbott election victory would devastate Labor and constitute in a few months the eclipse of both Rudd and Gillard and the hopes their partnership invested in the 2007 triumph over John Howard.

For Labor, anything but election victory is intolerable because victory is its only rationale.

At week's end, Gillard's political judgment seems supreme.

In 2006 she curbed her ambition; in 2010 she released her ambition.

On the first occasion she played deputy to Rudd but delivered the votes that made him leader, thereby engineering Howard's loss.

This week, when the party lost its faith in Rudd, she moved from ally to executioner and now carries Labor's torch.

Gillard faces two great challenges: to win this year's election, a hard call, and to begin to reform the Labor Party, an even harder call because its crying necessity is still denied.

Despite Gillard's lustre, the public senses the sickness in the Labor machine.