It took time, but Beazley rout was fatal blow

Kim Beazley

THE leadership debate suffocating the government - Julia Gillard versus a possible return to Kevin Rudd - forgets one important thing.

Both leaders are equally to blame for the mess in which Labor finds itself. By uniting to roll Kim Beazley as Labor leader on December 4, 2006, the pair sealed Labor's fate, even if it took years for that reality to manifest itself.

This should be the narrative Labor sets up once the Rudd and Gillard experiments are out of the way and Labor reloads from opposition for another tilt at power. It should point the blame for the two-term mess on both leaders so that it doesn't infect the party brand in the long term.

Unfortunately, Beazley is no longer in the parliament to come back and save the government from itself. As ambassador to Washington, he is instead enjoying life after the rough and tumble of parliamentary politics.

A former minister in Bob Hawke and Paul Keating's governments, Beazley was a seasoned operator. He had his problems cutting through with the electorate, to be sure. We shouldn't romanticise his negatives. But he was a person of policy substance. John Howard thought that he had Beazley's measure politically. Saddled with selling Work Choices, I am not so certain.

Winning an election is one thing: with all his bells and whistles, Rudd was superficially very good at that in 2007: using Twitter, appearing on Rove Live, doing the rounds on FM radio.

But governing effectively is an entirely different matter from managing the 24-hour news cycle. Had Beazley got the chance to run a government, the method by which he would have done so would have been a far cry from Rudd or Gillard's efforts.

Beazley saw firsthand how Hawke ran his cabinet. That exposure would have been invaluable in a new prime minister. Just as Howard's previous ministerial experience grounded his government early on, while new ministers were finding their feet, Beazley's leadership would have given an inexperienced Labor front bench time to grow into their jobs.

For a start, the few "adults" left after the wilderness years of opposition - former ministers - could have been on the front line. The remainder would have been in a position to learn from them.

Leaders set the tone for the team that operates underneath them. The tone Rudd set was a frenetic pace, all the while achieving very little. Gillard sets a tone of political incompetence, all the while pursuing policies nobody believes she is passionate about.

No wonder: you can't talk Rudd out of an emissions trading scheme and rule out a carbon tax only to claim after the election that it is a vital reform you are committed to.

When Gillard was rushed into the leadership halfway through last year she had not thought seriously enough about how she wanted to define her time as Prime Minister. Rudd had, but he simply didn't possess the core competency or maturity around him to make a success of it.

Just consider how differently Beazley would have managed issues such as the Henry tax review or the stimulus rollout. His West Australian pedigree certainly would have prevented the fumbling of the mining super-profits tax. He wouldn't have agreed to a $42 billion National Broadband Network based only on a brief plane conversation with the Communications Minister.

Importantly, if Beazley had hit tough times in the polls, his colleagues would have had the intestinal fortitude to stand by him as prime minister, which they lacked when he was opposition leader. (Labor was ahead on the two-party-preferred vote when they removed Beazley, by the way.) Experience would have counted in spades. When Rudd's popularity faded, panic set in because he has never been a loved Labor leader. Popularity was all that he had, and he lost it.

On the day Beazley was rolled in 2006, the opening line of an opinion article I wrote was: "Kevin Rudd should not have challenged Kim Beazley for the Labor leadership." Too right. The final sentence read: "By forcing a challenge, Rudd and Gillard landed the fatal blow, no matter what happens in today's vote."

At the time, I held the view that the fatal blow would be immediate, which was wrong. Instead, after more than a decade of conservative rule, Rudd and Gillard presented as an attractive and fresh alternative in the permanent campaign environment from opposition. It took time for the fatal damage the pair would inflict on the Labor brand to fully present itself. It is now there for all to see. The Rudd and Gillard experiments have failed miserably.

Which prompts the question: what would another change of leadership between this pair actually achieve? More dysfunction, more amateur decision-making, more poor political judgments.

It seems unlikely that sticking with Gillard will see anything other than an electoral rout for Labor at the next election. A return to Rudd might save the furniture, so to speak. If the polls are to be believed, there is even an outside chance he could manufacture a narrow victory against an opposition that, let's face it, isn't inspiring anyone.

But the election would need to quickly follow any coup because history tells us Rudd can't govern well for long, even if he was able to hold together the independents. And it wouldn't take the public long to be reminded why they turned off him in the first place.

But here is the biggest reason not to favour a return to Rudd if winning under his leadership is the objective: who wants three years of Rudd as PM, even if he were to turn around Labor's fortunes? Many of his colleagues who are unconvinced he has changed his ways feel that way.

But those who are eyeing a return to Rudd aren't doing so to save the government. They are thinking about it as a way to save their seats: honourable electoral defeat rather than annihilation.

That's some dilemma. Remove Gillard for Rudd and the danger is that Rudd might win, in which case you are stuck with him as PM. Keep Gillard and an electoral rout is guaranteed.

As one senior Labor figure joked to me: "We couldn't roll Kevin straight after he won us an election, could we? How bad would that look!"

The theatre of the absurd.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.