A land of political brutality

Nick Bryant

A FEW weeks after arriving in Australia in 2006, I met Kevin Rudd in Canberra, where I was chairing a panel discussion.

He was then the shadow foreign affairs spokesman and, from first handshake to parting thanks, I found him to be the most singularly charmless of men: unpleasant, intellectually superior and seemingly devoid of lightness or humour.

New to Australian politics, I rhapsodised afterwards about Rudd's fellow panellist, Lindsay Tanner, the then shadow finance minister, and asked if great things were expected of him. But everyone thought I must have been a complete dunce, since Rudd was so obviously the coming man.

Three months later, when Rudd became the leader of the Labor Party after his predecessor Kim Beazley had mixed up the television presenter Rove McManus with our old friend Karl Rove, I did not even bother breaking off from watching the second Test in Adelaide to file a report back to London.

In late 2006, so complete was John Howard's domination of Australian politics, and so robust the Australian economy, that a fifth term beckoned. Certainly, on the basis of our first meeting, I did not think that Rudd posed a major threat; and, in any case, on that fourth day at the Adelaide Oval England had Australia reeling and looked poised to level the series, 1-1. In the cricket, the turnaround was instantaneous, with Shane Warne performing his usual fifth-day party trick of making England's middle order disappear. In Canberra, Rudd, another kind of spin king, was about to do much the same to Howard.

What made Rudd's rise all the more riveting and relevant to a global audience was the extent to which it showed how the politics of 9/11 had shifted. In the November 2001 federal election, Howard had, of course, benefited enormously from the attacks of September 11. As Australia signed up to the Bush administration's war on terror, he appeared before the electorate as a strong national leader and tapped -- and heightened -- fears about outsiders during the Tampa crisis. It helped, too, that he had been in Washington that morning and seen the smoke billow from the Pentagon.

By 2007, however, the politics of 9/11 had boomeranged, with Howard receiving much the same clobbering as Tony Blair, who was about to leave Downing Street, and George W. Bush, as he limped to the end of his lame-duck second term. Whether it was Iraq, his deputy sheriff tag, David Hicks or his refusal to ratify Kyoto, Howard's closeness to Bush had contaminated his prime ministership.

What made Howard even more vulnerable was that, unlike his great heroine Margaret Thatcher, he had not managed after 10 years in power to tame the labour movement. Now, the unions mobilised against him over unpopular workplace laws that, in the eyes of many, had violated Australia's unwritten fairness doctrine.

On election night in Brisbane, Rudd delivered a typically flat victory address, which nonetheless delighted hundreds of jubilant Labor supporters dressed in their Kevin 07 T-shirts -- all of which offered further proof that the Rudd phenomenon was a personality cult without a personality. As for his political style, it brought to mind what Mark Twain had once said of the music of Richard Wagner: it was much better than it sounded. All those nerdy acronyms, faux larrikinisms and lifeless set-piece speeches, and yet his approval ratings continued to soar.

To the international eye, he came across as highly intelligent, thorough and well briefed but with the personality we associate normally with Nordic prime ministers or EU agriculture commissioners. When we thought of Australian prime ministers, we preferred to imagine them as rougher around the edges, with prodigious drinking capabilities, and a penchant for giving the entire country a day off at times of national celebration. I suppose we expected the prime minister not only to govern Australia but also to personify Australia. Or, put simply, we expected Bob Hawke. However, the prime-ministerial archetype was just as misleading as the national stereotype.

From a purely professional viewpoint, Rudd definitely had his uses. Like Howard, he raised Australia's global profile, though, noticeably, his prolific Kevin 747 travel produced a backlash at home. He also came to enjoy a very close working relationship with Barack Obama, although that probably had the effect of lowering the President's esteem among Australians rather than enhancing their own prime minister's. By elevating the role of the G20, he also went some way to giving Australia's famed diplomatic punch some permanent heft, and it came as little surprise when he was invited to become a friend of the chair ahead of the Copenhagen climate-change summit in 2009.

Before jetting off for Denmark, Rudd granted us a 30-minute interview that was rich in acronyms, big ideas, wonk-speak, a global view, blokeish affectations and various Ruddisms -- he insisted on calling the BBC "the Beeeeeeb", for example, which he delivered in a bizarre, weedy voice. He even offered up a neat reworking of his famed "I'm from Queensland" line from the Labor conference in 2007: "We are from Australia. We are here to help."

In other words, it was Rudd at his best and worst.

Unknowingly at the time, we had interviewed him at his moment of maximum global interest -- in the final days of the BC phase of his prime ministership, or Before Copenhagen -- and within a few short months Kevin 747 would be grounded.

Failure at Copenhagen meant the geopolitics and domestic politics of climate change altered radically, and Rudd responded by downgrading the "greatest moral and economic challenge of our times".

In doing so uncomplainingly, he failed the Great Australian Ticker Test. After all, Australian prime ministers are not expected to be charismatic, telegenic, inspiring or oratorical -- they are memorialised in Canberra with suburbs rather than stone -- but they are expected to have the courage of their convictions. Soon, he was being spoken of in the past tense.

If at times of great national drama book titles could be requisitioned and redeployed, like merchant ships on the eve of war, The Australian Ugliness offered the neatest summation of his brutal demise. With the elevation of the country's first female prime minister, the 40th anniversary of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch became the literary touchstone, but it was Robin Boyd's opus, then celebrating its golden jubilee, that provided a timely epithet, if not an entirely accurate thesis. Ruminating on the schizophrenic streak in the national character, Boyd described his fellow countrymen and women as "cruel but kind".

When applied to Australian politics, however, his analysis was two words too long. Because he resigned on the morning of the leadership spill to save himself the embarrassment of a lopsided defeat, Rudd's removal came to be described as a bloodless coup. But it was bloodless in the same way that waterboarding is bloodless -- a process that simulates drowning, and thus near death, which leaves the body unblemished but the mind riven with scars. When Rudd appeared before the cameras a few hours later, to tearfully bullet-point his legacy, its effects were plain to see.

Afterwards, any audit of Australian politics took on the feel and stench of a triage, a sifting of the wounded and slain. The bush capital had become a killing field. In the space of just 40 months, Australia had got through four Liberal leaders and three from Labor. In NSW, the spiritual home of the Australian political ugliness, there had been four different Labor premiers in the past five years, with just one election. Of Louisiana, it is frequently said that a politician can survive anything apart from being found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. All it took in Australia, as Rudd so viciously learnt, was to wake up on four consecutive Monday mornings with a lacklustre poll.

For a country jadedly stereotyped as chauvinistic, the supreme irony was that much of the watching world interpreted Julia Gillard's rise as a sign of political progress. Those who read the international headlines -- "Strewth, there's a sheila running Oz" was how my former paper, Britain's Daily Mail, described her rise -- would have been unaware of the macho, factional chieftains lurking in the background, or that the backrooms of Australian politics were choked not so much with smoke as with testosterone.

Australia still awaited its true political gender test: the day when its chieftains were women.

Gillard had risen to power in a year cluttered with literary anniversaries. As well as being the 40th anniversary of The Female Eunuch and the 50th of The Australian Ugliness, it was also 60 years since A. A. Phillips first noticed that listeners of an ABC program called Incognito tended to pick the outsider when asked to adjudicate between the performance of a foreigner and a home-grown musician. Nowadays, few vestiges remained of what he dubbed the cultural cringe, and the country could proudly reflect on its global cultural creep, with figures of Australian loveliness such as Cate Blanchett in the fore. Instead, it had been replaced by Australia's political cringe.

Damning proof came from the 2010 election, the most insular, visionless and low-calibre campaign I have ever covered in any mature democracy on any continent. Mired in the marginal constituencies of the suburban fringe, it rarely broadened its gaze.

Struck by this parochialism, visiting British academic Niall Ferguson likened the campaign to Strathclyde local politics, but, if anything, that seemed unkind to Strathclyde.

The boatpeople question once again became the campaign's emblematic issue, and an outsider arriving midway through would have been forgiven for thinking that an armada of asylum-seekers had besieged Australia.

The 2010 election made a mockery of the Australia I had spent the last three years describing: smart, sophisticated, warm, generous-spirited and, above all, consequential.

It was not that Australians had voted for irrelevance and mediocrity. By choosing Gillard and Tony Abbott over Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, the two major parties had made the decision for them.

It brought us back to the point of departure for so much of the discussion on post-war Australia: Donald Horne's scorching polemic. Australia was his Lucky Country anew: blessed by an abundance of resources and cursed by second-rate politicians.

I know I run the risk of speaking with an imperial voice, but for the first time during my tenure in Australia I really felt I was slumming it.

From Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant ($32.95). Copyright Nick Bryant 2011. Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia. All rights reserved.