Sacking Rudd was the ALP's big mistake

Eric Lobbecke

LINDSAY Tanner has identified the removal of Kevin Rudd in June 2010 not just as the pivotal blunder made by Labor but as a turning point for Australia in its drift from reform-based effective governance.

In his interview this week with The Australian and his Inside the Gang of Four essay, Tanner's worry is that Labor's and Australia's political culture is changing in perverse and dangerous ways.

The backdrop to Tanner's alarm can be quantified: in the 11 years since the 2001 election there have been eight changes of opposition leader with the list reading Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, Mark Latham, Beazley again, Kevin Rudd, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. It is proof of the tyranny of short-term, poll-driven politics.

Asked about the consequences of Rudd's removal, Tanner says: "My concern is not the short-term interest of the Labor Party. It is the long-term consequence for Australia. We have lived for years with a situation where opposition leaders are removed off the back of bad polling results. But we now seem to have moved to an even worse situation where a prime minister can be removed off the back of bad polling. We have entered a zone where, it seems, all bets are off -- any leader can be arbitrarily removed. This is a great worry for how Australia is governed."

Julia Gillard is further proof of such instability. Her fate seems to hinge on the fortnightly and monthly opinion polls and they are reported on the basis they will determine her fate.

The supreme tactic of either side is to destroy the leader opposing them. Abbott is remarkable only because of his elemental grasp of this truth. The tactic became part of Labor's culture during the Howard era when astute ALP premiers Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Steve Bracks and Peter Beattie created havoc among their opponents.

Rudd brought this tactic to his prime ministership. Nelson was more undone by activities on his own side but Rudd turned the Godwin Grech incident into the destruction of Turnbull's leadership. Labor made Turnbull unelectable and the collapse in his ratings was akin to a cliff fall.

Abbott is depicted by the media as being super-negative but this, again, misses the bigger story by ignoring the new rules of the game: if the Opposition Leader cannot establish a polling lead over Labor then he loses his job. Yes, it's that simple. How does he establish such a lead and save his job? By going negative. It's equally simple.

Abbott, in the first part of this term, destroyed Gillard on the issue of trust and Gillard, in the second part of this term, seeks to destroy Abbott on grounds of character. It is a universal story -- the power of the negative is recruited to destroy leaders.

Barack Obama set the scene for his likely re-election two months ago when his team branded Mitt Romney as a tax-dodging, jobs outsourcer, thereby destroying his brand even before Romney began his campaign.

The effect of such negative campaigning is obvious: it purchases forgiveness for a bad record that would normally result in defeat.

Tanner says while many factors drove Rudd's removal there is no doubt that "panic was a significant factor". How could an entire party panic? Only because it was wired to opinion polls like an electric current. Tanner's judgment is that Rudd would have been re-elected in 2010 as a majority PM. "I note that John Howard is of that view," he says. "I agree with Howard's assessment. Had Labor kept its nerve we would have won the election."

Tanner does not seek to whitewash Rudd. He concedes Rudd's "slightly manic habits", bad decision-making with ministers and public servants kept waiting for hours and a central focus on the "Gang of Four" (Rudd, Gillard, Wayne Swan and Tanner). For Tanner, this does not constitute a dysfunctional government.

He savages the collective assaults on Rudd by senior ministers, led by Swan, at the time of the Rudd challenge to Gillard in February this year.

This exposed the fatal trap Labor made for itself: the executioners had to destroy Rudd's legacy to justify their action yet they simultaneously ruined the Gillard government's standing.

Interviewed by the author, Tanner says: "You can't have it both ways. You can't claim for Labor the good achievements such as managing the global financial crisis but then turn around and say: 'Of course, the government was a shambles.'

"I believe the criticisms made about Rudd last February will be used by a future Liberal leader to argue against the election of another Labor government. You can almost see the ads now."

Tanner's bottom line is that Rudd's flaws did not justify his removal. He says "the Labor Party is likely to live with the consequences of the 2010 challenge for a long time". From this analysis he thinks Rudd "will be given more credit by history than by contemporary commentators".

The tragedy Tanner sketches is that Rudd's "most significant achievement" was the successful management of the GFC ("the biggest global crisis in 70 years") yet in the end people "seemed to assume it was all plain sailing and therefore gave little credit to the government that achieved it".

One of Tanner's themes is the vast difference between opposition and government. He thinks this is chronically underestimated. He argues that criticism of Rudd must be seen against the reality of a new government whose senior figures had no ministerial experience. It takes time "to shed the habits and behaviours" of opposition. Yet at the precise time Labor should have been settling into office it was hit by the GFC that accentuated Rudd's manic habits and, as a result, his "central mistake" was his failure to change gear once the crisis had passed.

Tanner believes Rudd's main policy blunder was what he brands the 2010 "loss of nerve" on climate change. "I think that loss of nerve had a profound impact on the government and undermined respect for the government in the wider community," he says. "It was our most serious policy midstep."

He takes this argument to the next lethal stage: it was "the key figures who advised Kevin to back off" who were the "most prominent in removing him", a lunge at Gillard in an interview notable for avoiding any direct personality attacks.

Tanner's argument about short-termism is persuasive. This problem just finds new manifestations -- witness the "announcement benefit" of vast new schemes without any agreement on their funding or timetable. If Labor loses the next election Tanner's analysis of recent years will become conventional wisdom.