Why Labor's hollow men and women must topple

Bill Leak

JULIA Gillard's terminal government will go down in history as an ill-conceived, shambolic and dysfunctional administration. All that remains to be known is when it draws its last breath and whether Gillard, or another martyr, will be at the helm. And after the Prime Minister's snitchy, reactive and belated response to the Slipper and Thomson issues yesterday, her only chance of leading her party to the next election is if it is forced immediately.

Remember just two months ago 31 members of caucus voted to topple Gillard; if the other 71 saw her performance yesterday, those numbers should almost be reversed. In a tortured exchange, perhaps no vignette better demonstrated her lack of gravitas than her reference to belief in "Labor things".

For the sake of the Labor Party we need to examine how it all went so horribly wrong. The following potted history of the Rudd-Gillard years brings us to an inescapable conclusion about the core of the problem.

Under Kevin Rudd, Labor came to power with enormous goodwill. The public had nothing to fear from a man who clothed himself as John Howard-lite, promising to be an economic conservative, wind back the excesses of Work Choices and save the planet from dangerous climate change.

His first fundamental error came in response to the global financial crisis. Certainly the stimulus response was panicked and overblown, leading to later difficulties with revelations of waste and conflict between fiscal and monetary policy.

But the main problem with the GFC response was that it prompted Rudd to disown his mantle as an economic conservative. He penned a treatise for The Monthly magazine. "Not for the first time in history, the international challenge for social democrats is to save capitalism from itself," he wrote.

And with a few keystrokes the economic continuum that Australians had voted for was gone. They elected an economic conservative but he morphed into a big-government, big-spending interventionist. Of course, as he proceeded to throw money around, and our economy dodged recession, his popularity initially increased. But on the crucial ground of economic management, Rudd showed the public that he had no core values; he was changeable.

Late in 2009, after deliberately dragging out negotiations on his carbon pollution reduction scheme to create maximum mayhem for the opposition, Rudd faced the disappointment of the impasse at Copenhagen. He returned in a funk. Yet in early 2010, Rudd's CPRS gave him a compelling double-dissolution trigger. The public was still onside for climate action. The drought had not broken. Tony Abbott was still finding his feet as the leader of a battered and bruised party. But Rudd baulked.

There is every likelihood that if he had called the election at that time, he would still be prime minister today. But after failing to grasp the chance to put his cause celebre to the people, he made an even more substantial mistake. In April, he dropped the CPRS.

The man who had described climate change as the greatest environmental, economic and moral challenge of our time now didn't consider it worth the bother. Rudd now stood for nothing.

Just as he dropped the CPRS, you could feel the public immediately give up on him. Labor attempted to find a cause and regain some support by grasping at an ill-considered mining tax. The government butchered a plausible reform process in favour of a cheap resort to the politics of envy; and it only compounded its woes.

Then in a fit of panic, inexperience and, it must be said, disloyalty, the party assassinated its leader. The opportunism that Rudd had come to personify now drove his party. It wasn't respectful of its leader or, importantly, the mandate he embodied.

Gillard took over, promising to stop the boats, fix the mining tax and not introduce a carbon tax. She rushed to the polls, lost Labor's majority and somehow convinced former conservative independents to install her government.

For a decade, Labor had railed against the previous government's border protection policies - the Pacific solution. Under Rudd it ended offshore processing and temporary protection visas. This weakening led to a dramatic increase in the number of boats. Even then, the government rejected a causal link between the influx and its softer regime. Push factors were at play, they argued, not pull.

But then Gillard proposed the East Timor solution. While she completely botched the diplomacy, the important point was that she had recanted on overseas processing. Suddenly Labor was admitting that pull factors were part of the equation and overseas processing was necessary for a solution. Later this mutated into the Malaysia solution which also was mishandled. The party that opposed overseas processing, and denied its own role in attracting asylum-seekers, now owns the problem and wants the sort of solution it stridently opposed.

Then Gillard announced a carbon tax. Labor came to power largely on the back of the climate change issue. It abandoned its preferred solution, then promised to await international action and community consensus, ruling out a carbon tax along the way. Now Gillard, clearly driven by a crucial deal with the Greens, broke faith with the public in a monumental way. My view is that she was finished then and there.

For the electorate to re-elect Labor after the broken promise on the carbon tax would be for voters to say - do to us what you will; we are dupes.

All the antics since then have simply compounded the misjudgments - perhaps epitomised by recruiting Peter Slipper and standing by him until even he was embarrassed into stepping aside, or similarly defending Craig Thomson, despite all the evidence, until even he could not put up with the charade any longer.

Everything has been a partisan opportunity or a political fix. Precious little has seemed to lift its gaze above the introspection of a self-obsessed government fighting for survival.

Look at what the major missteps have in common - they highlight that Labor has revealed a hollow core. No policy is non-negotiable, no promise beyond breaking, no leader deserving of faith. No cause or value is consistent.

And so last week when Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten was asked whether Slipper could return to the Speaker's chair without the sexual harassment allegations cleared, he could not answer. Shorten could not draw on shared values, core positions or even common sense for a response. The only response would be a political line that the Prime Minister had settled on. Except he didn't know what it was, or what values it was based on.

"I haven't seen what she said," he admitted in a pathetic comedy routine. "But let me say I support what it is that she's said."

Many people have been wondering what the contemporary Labor Party stands for. Sadly, it seems Shorten told us.

Labor is doomed. The longer it stays in power, the worse the denouement could be.

One way to at least seek some forgiveness, as I first suggested almost a year ago, would be to apologise and reinstall Rudd.