No quick fix for Labor after the war

WHILE ministers have replaced their vitriol with a script on unity, putting Labor back together again will be no easy task.

120227 cabinet

AT 10am today Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former prime minister Kevin Rudd will square off for the leadership of the Labor Party and, indeed, the country.

Immediately after the result is known the big unanswered question will be: can Labor unite behind the successful candidate?

Already the narrative (or is that spin?) has shifted to one of unity, with a litany of prominent members of the government pre-emptively calling for unity after today's ballot.

"We will unite tomorrow and we will get our shoulders to the wheel delivering Labor's programs and plans," Gillard said yesterday. "It's time for us to unite rather than divide," said Rudd the day before.

However, there has been much said and written since Rudd announced his plans to resign as foreign minister last Monday, in the dead of night Washington time, much of it by senior ministers, which will make unity very difficult.

The vitriol started on the night of Rudd's announcement, with Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan declaring Rudd had never truly held "Labor values" and his government was "dysfunctional".

Far from retreating from those observations, he appeared on the Ten Network's Meet the Press program yesterday and said: "I stand by every word."

He, too, was toeing the unity line though. "I do sense a steely determination across all of the people involved here to have this vote tomorrow to put it to bed once and for all," he said.

Other ministers who teed off on Rudd personally in the past week included Stephen Conroy, Nicola Roxon, Simon Crean, Tony Burke and Gillard herself.

Veto Rudd was the message to wavering caucus members, and it appears to have worked.

In the unlikely event that Rudd returns to the prime ministership, however, the chances of Labor unity are zero. Senior ministers would move to the backbench, the latest addition to that list being Schools Education Minister Peter Garrett, who told Australian Agenda on Sky News yesterday he would refuse to serve as a minister in a Rudd government.

Some Gillard supporters would act to undermine Rudd as payback for what they believe he has been doing to her. And there's a distinct possibility the Labor Party would split, as it did half a century ago.

If Gillard is victorious, as expected, there are still no guarantees that unity will follow. It is far more difficult for an incumbent to strike unity in the wake of a leadership showdown than it is for a challenger, even if the victory is sizeable.

In 2003 Mark Latham defeated Kim Beazley by the narrowest of margins to unexpectedly become Labor opposition leader. The party united behind Latham. In 2006 when Rudd ousted Beazley with Gillard as his running mate the result was not decisive (49 votes to 39), but unity quickly followed.

In 2009 Tony Abbott challenged and defeated Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal leadership by a solitary vote and despite an expectation that Liberals would remain divided it didn't take long for them to unite behind the new leader.

On each of these occasions, despite the closeness of the results, the political parties united behind the winner. But the winner each time was the challenger, not the incumbent. When an incumbent holds on following a challenge, even a doomed one, the difficulty in building unity in the aftermath is the fact that a challenge is usually only mounted in the first place because a leader has systemic problems.

In Gillard's case there are many problems; even her supporters realise that. Record low opinion polls, for the party primary vote and her personal ratings. A challenger popular in the electorate if not inside the partyroom. A litany of poor judgment calls. Nervous MPs in marginal seats. A Left faction concerned about policy aspects of Labor's agenda, not least asylum-seekers.

And courtesy of this past week, a number of disagreements and policy controversies that have been publicly aired, including claims that Gillard demanded Rudd drop the ETS when he was leader. That arguably damages her credibility selling the carbon tax.

The closest historical example to what is happening now within Labor happened in June 1991 when Paul Keating challenged Labor's longest-serving prime minister, Bob Hawke. He lost on the first ballot 44 votes to 66 but came back to win a second ballot six months later 56 votes to 51. This was despite Keating pledging that he had used his "one shot" and would not be challenging Hawke again.

Rudd has made a similar pledge. "If Julia is returned on Monday then she will have my unequivocal support between now and the next election," he told Nine's Laurie Oakes yesterday.

Gillard supporters claim the difference between now and the 1991 showdown is that Keating was a more formidable figure than Rudd, as well as a creature of the Labor movement. This allowed him to move to the backbench and continue to gather support, successfully striking a second time.

In that instance, much of the support simply came to him. With the country deep in recession and unemployment rising, the loss of Keating from the Treasury portfolio was significant.

Few regard the loss of Rudd from foreign affairs as similarly weighty.

Also, Keating got closer to Hawke on the first vote than Rudd is expected to do today. Gillard supporters argue that is further evidence Rudd's challenge is less likely to build momentum for a second go than Keating's did.

However, if Rudd's challenge nets him 35 or more votes out of a caucus of 102 his case for a second strike at a timing of his own choosing will be substantial, at least in Rudd's mind.

Even if Rudd's campaign fails miserably, and he nets only about 25 votes, that's still a quarter of the Labor caucus prepared to vote against its leader.

Labor MPs hopeful of unity in the aftermath of today's vote may try to take comfort from the tradition in the US where robust primaries are fought out over a period of months but once the contest is over the parties unite around the nominee for the presidential election. It happened when Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and despite the current bloody contest for the Republican presidential nominee it is likely to happen for the conservatives this time around, too.

But the US culture of open debate around primary time has precedents for unity afterwards. Unity in the wake of an incumbent being unsuccessfully challenged in this country does not.

A significant factor working against unity after today's ballot could be the nature of Rudd himself. If his detractors such as Swan and Crean are right, and Rudd is only interested in personal advantage and has been backgrounding against the PM, what evidence is there to suggest he would change his approach after today? In a minority parliament little could be done to stop him.

Rudd's political legacy is built on the failure of the Gillard government, all the more so after last week's suggestions that his government was a dysfunctional disaster.

If Rudd can't wrestle back the Labor leadership, he needs Gillard to lose the next election to highlight that the decision to change leaders when he was removed in June 2010 was the wrong one.

That means a Rudd who is (as characterised by his opponents) self-serving would need to continue undermining Gillard to ensure she has no chance of mounting a political recovery.

Even if Rudd backers such as Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen quickly fall back in behind Gillard, Rudd himself may go on undermining his leader.

Rudd would not even need to do so by backgrounding journalists, as he has been accused of doing until now.

If he uses his new-found freedom on the backbench to write and say what he thinks in a way that he has been unable to as a minister, that could undermine Gillard.

No doubt the media would eagerly report such diverging views. Long-form writing for the likes of The Monthly -- which Rudd used effectively to mount his case for elevation to the opposition leadership against Beazley -- may occur again.

Plus, there have been Rudd backers prepared to suggest today's challenge should not be the end of leadership talk, even if Rudd loses. Prominent left-wing Labor powerbroker Doug Cameron has suggested as much, as have many others on background.

One of the reasons many Rudd backers privately do not view today's challenge as the end of the matter is because of the timing of the ballot. Gillard called it quickly after Rudd resigned as foreign minister, catching him on the hop as he flew back into the country.

By the time Rudd started hitting the phones most caucus votes appeared to have been locked in against him, and he was denied the opportunity to approach the independents during this parliamentary week to mount a case that he could sustain government in the current minority parliament.

Cameron is one Labor figure who has openly criticised the decision to call the ballot so early in the week.

Also, the issues Rudd is campaigning on -- party reform, for example -- are unlikely to go away just because he loses a ballot. If the perception among Rudd backers is that the so-called faceless men thwarted his bid for a return, this will do nothing to quash their calls for change. Especially if today's ballot is not a secret one.

Even Albanese has called for a genuinely secret ballot so that the partyroom can get an accurate indication of where Rudd's numbers are at.

The bitterness leading up to today's showdown has at least partly been replaced by calls for unity once it is all over. But the ambitions of Rudd -- both for promotion and retribution -- are likely to mean that it is not over, no matter how he fares. And in the 24-hour news cycle, the level of animosity within Labor has been put on show for voters to see. This is likely to make Labor suffer further damage in the polls in the months to come, which will in turn make unity even harder to sustain. It is a vicious cycle.

The counter view is that the toughness Gillard has displayed this week in standing up to Rudd will win her applause and help lift Labor's standing.

For her supporters this may just be wishful thinking. Dispirited Labor MPs supporting Gillard late last week took to emailing and text-messaging jokes to one another to lift their collective spirits.

But there is nothing funny about the situation Labor finds itself in. Even a strong win today for Gillard is unlikely to be the end of the matter.