Rudd versus Gillard: Who is Labor's biggest loser?

IT says something about a political party that it has a leader who is unable to sell a "good news" economic story to voters while, relatively speaking, the rest of the world is going to economic hell in a hand basket.

It says something too that the only real alternative is a friendless former leader so deeply loathed within the party that factional bosses replaced him at the first chance they had.

Welcome to the turmoil within the grand old party of Australian politics. With the new parliamentary year underway and leadership tensions simmering along, the unspoken parlour game for nervous backbenchers and embarrassed factional leaders must surely be determining who is Labor's Biggest Loser.

Forget comparisons between Julia Gillard and Billy McMahon or Gillard and Gough Whitlam. The real contest is between Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

Unlike the TV show where the biggest loser wins for losing the most weight, Labor's biggest loser is the one who has lost Labor the most political gravitas.

It's a tight contest between the current prime minister and the former one. Gillard came to the job with much promise. Whereas Rudd was seen as cold and robotic, Gillard was meant to be warm and engaging. Whereas Rudd's office was seen as chaotic and run by political novices, Gillard's management was meant to be more measured and professional. Whereas the Rudd government was mired in reviews, committees and endless delaying processes and had a definite problem with policy delivery, Gillard was seen as someone who would sort things out and get things done. Where Rudd pursued conviction-less politics, Gillard was meant to inject sincerity back into Labor's brand.

In fact, voters have not warmed to Gillard. Her excitable staffers embarrassed the office of the PM and the nation by leaking details to incite the Australia Day protests. Those ugly scenes went viral around the world. Policy capriciousness under Rudd has continued under Gillard. Think immigration policy. Think the knee-jerk ban on live beef exports. And Gillard's attempt to talk at great length about "values" has not resonated with voters.

It's hard to believe Labor knows what it stands for when its policies shift at the whiff of a bad poll. While a party's values are different from its policies, when the latter are so readily dispensed with, who's to say a party's values are any less disposable.

Shedding crocodile tears for being picked on for being female just won't wash. Criticisms have been deep and broad because the level of incompetence, misjudgments and stuff-ups have been equally deep and wide-ranging.

That said, in this unspoken contest of damaging the Labor brand, Rudd's prime ministership wins hands down. After securing a momentous win for Labor at the 2007 election, hubris and hypocrisy immediately set in. The man who sold himself as a safe version of John Howard before the election turned out to be an old-fashioned big-spending interventionist. The election over, Rudd was more concerned with redistributing wealth than growing the nation's wealth through the hard work of economic reform. The man who scolded opponents for not taking seriously the "greatest moral issue of our time," dumped his climate change policy when the polls started to turn.

Time and again, Rudd's overblown rhetoric led to policy over-reactions and implementation disasters when reality hit. Think pink batts. Think the school buildings program.

Hypocrisy crept into the personal realm too. The man who, years before he became leader, told reporters religion was a private affair for him, ended up wearing religion on his sleeve when it suited the political environment to do so. Who can forget the sanctimony of Rudd's Sunday morning press conferences outside his local church, positioned perfectly for the Sunday evening news bulletin. When Rudd, the awkward political charlatan, switched from his language of "mate, mate" when addressing workers to speaking about "detailed programmatic specificity" when hanging out with his swank European colleagues, he only managed to confound both groups.

The point of identifying Labor's biggest loser is not to poke fun at either Gillard or Rudd, or to rake over the coals of their flawed time in office. The real point is the Labor Party must bear the blame for its past two leaders. Until it recognises where it went wrong, the ALP has no chance of rebuilding itself into the grand old party of Australian politics.

Perhaps the factional bosses can be forgiven for getting Gillard wrong. She has turned out to be a bigger disappointment than most imagined. Notwithstanding the challenges, Gillard has not handled minority government well. Instead of staring down the Greens, she opted to break promises to voters. The manner of her dumping her poker machines promise -- the moment she didn't need Andrew Wilkie's vote anymore -- managed to offend just about everyone with her craven politics of convenience. When she blamed a High Court decision to renege on her commitment to offshore processing, she effectively chose to break a promise to voters rather than negotiate a solution with the opposition.

But the so-called hard heads within Labor don't get off the hook when it comes to installing Rudd as leader. To those who knew him, many of his failings were entirely predictable. As Mark Latham so famously said, the people who liked Rudd the most were those who didn't know him.

And there were plenty in the party who knew him well. They knew Rudd had no real connection to the proud history or beliefs of the ALP. He had formed no close bonds with factions or even with fellow party members.

It says something about a person that after 30 years in a political party, Kevin Rudd was in a faction of one. The ultimate political opportunist, Rudd cruised around like a Liberian-registered ship flying a flag of convenience.

But it says a great deal more that the party threw its support behind a man of such little obvious Labor conviction and a history of troublemaking. The Rudd government didn't lose its way. The Labor Party lost its way, and well before Rudd became leader. When winning became everything, Labor turned to Rudd. Choosing Rudd as leader was a symptom of a deeper existential problem: the party that started out in 1891 imbued with working class values now attracts votes from urban elites who think they understand the working class because they drank VB or Toohey's at university.

That Labor might turn to Rudd now, knowing even more about him after his time as leader, reveals the state of utter desperation with the party and the refusal by Australia's oldest political party to address the harder task of working out what the ALP stands for in modern Australia.