Fear and loathing inside Labor House of Horrors

AT the halfway mark in this election campaign, we are due to meet the real Julia Gillard.

The men who wield power to decide the ALP leadership are not looking so clever or confident now. Their Mark Latham experiment blew up. Their Kevin Rudd show fizzed out well before its time. And now Gillard, who is meant to redeem the political nous of these ALP powerbrokers, is not looking like the clear election-winning strategy they anticipated.

In fact, the clever men of Labor should have foreseen Labor's campaign mess. Even a cursory examination of Latham and Rudd suggests the two men are more alike than either would care to admit. And now, fuelled by similar sentiments, both men seem set on the same course to rip apart their party.

If bitter spirits are now haunting Labor, the ALP has itself to blame. Cultivating a culture of hatred may produce formidable warriors, but when circumstances sour, those warriors can turn into nasty rats in the ranks.

Few could miss the irony of two ghosts of Labor's past effectively joining forces as unlikely brothers-in-arms to wreck Gillard's election. These two men have much more in common than deep-seated loathing towards one another.

Both men cultivated an image as someone a little different, Latham as better than your whitebread politician, Rudd as a Labor rarity unbeholden to the factions.

Both are boys done good from tough working-class backgrounds, Rudd from Nambour in Queensland, Latham from Green Valley, western Sydney.

Unlike Gillard, who has never really put her ideas to paper, both men presented as thoughtful men of ideas.

Both ran as aspirational conservatives presenting Howard-lite credentials to voters.

And both betrayed those credentials, Latham revealing himself as an old-fashioned class warrior while the once fiscally conservative Rudd morphed into an unreconstructed big government Keynesian.

Both were fervent attention-seekers, milking the media in different ways, Latham with his headline-grabbing diatribes, Rudd with his unceasing pursuit of soft media.

Both were abandoned by the media when they became tiresome. And both were brutally dumped by their party.

Sure, there are differences. Latham's crudity was a public extravaganza while Rudd's foul mouth was a private affair. Latham and his boorish chip on his shoulder left politics in a juvenile huff, convening a press conference in an Ingleburn paddock. Rudd left with more grace.

But the humiliation at the hands of their own party was the same. And the hatred, bitterness and revenge within Latham and Rudd has similarly come back to haunt Labor.

Labor has never been able to manage Latham. His invective-laden insights had enough merit to hurt Labor, whether it was exposing the Left's vacuous claims to social justice or exposing the Right's obsession with personal aggrandisement at the price of sound policy development.

Or, after losing the 1998 GST election, exposing the deeper problem of Labor in opposition as a party of "scab-lifters", bereft of ideas, simply feeding off the discomfort of governments engaged in economic and social change.

And now that Latham has returned to the spotlight on Sky TV, Labor is trying the same silent treatment that didn't work when he published The Latham Diaries. It won't work now either.

The real damage of Latham's intervention is twofold.

First, he is reminding us that everyone in Labor knew the real Rudd. Latham has described Rudd leaking to Laurie Oakes as resembling one of the laws of nature. Like the pitter-patter on the roof at night, you don't need to see the rain to know what's happening.

Rudd leaked against his own party when in opposition and it's reasonable to ask whether Pitter-Patter Kevin is doing it again against Gillard, undermining her by suggesting the new PM did not support paternity leave or a hike in the pension, and sent a minion to cabinet meetings of the national security committee.

Stupidly, some within Labor cannot resist the same temptation, privately dumping on Rudd.

This is not a clever political strategy. After all, Australians are entitled to ask, if you knew about the man, why put him forward as Labor's choice for prime minister? If Rudd conned voters, Labor was equally complicit in the fraud.

Latham's second bomb is even bigger.

While many voters will have forgotten his earlier invective, much of it aimed inside the Canberra beltway, he has blown a valuable whistle on a poisonous factional world, where factions divide like cells as "tin-pot" union officials clamour for their own clique, hating one another more than they hate their conservative opponents, producing a party so committed to power for power's sake, risk-averse just in case reforms set off bad poll results, where the "leadership of Australia's oldest political party has become a transit lounge, controlled by poll and media-obsessed apparatchiks".

Ironically, Gillard also remonstrated against factionalism as "out of control and destructive" in an address to the Sydney Institute in March 2006.

Yet that toxic culture, which promoted Gillard as PM, has also driven the campaign strategy, concocting poor poll-driven policy on the run about immigration and climate change.

Unwittingly, the intervention of Latham and Rudd as two poltergeists full of revenge trying to hold Gillard back from election victory is living proof of the venom that infects the ALP culture.

The Liberals, not always a happy bunch of campers, cannot match Labor's level of internal loathing.

Malcolm Fraser is too much the old toff leader from 27 years ago to cause any damage and John Hewson, who lost the unlosable election, has a reliable tendency to mangle his messages.

You'd think that after the Latham debacle, Labor's sharp minds would have worked hard to carefully manage a humiliated Rudd. Instead, loathing defined their response.

Gillard and her factional backers refused Rudd a cabinet post. When it was clear, despite empty public utterances to the contrary, they didn't want him back in cabinet after the election either, Labor had set itself on an early path to internal destruction.

Rudd is now playing with their heads with his wickedly kind offer to campaign across Australia, reminding voters of his brutal and perhaps futile execution.

And there's that other headache for Labor: the seating arrangements at the upcoming ALP campaign launch. Do they seat the warring Bob Hawke and Paul Keating next to each other? And does Rudd sit next to Gillard?

Although Latham won't show up, it still promises to be a cracker of a night.

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