Get act together or lose power

Opinion 100925

THE PM has to rein in the Left and show she has hit her stride in her new role.

JULIA Gillard is at serious risk of choking on her own performance. The recently elected Prime Minister has started poorly and shows no signs of improving.

The danger for Labor is that if it doesn't lift its performance, and fast, it won't be long before voters start to view it as little different from ageing state Labor governments, high on mismanagement and low on competence.

The difference for federal Labor is that it is in the meaty part of the electoral cycle, the early period of a second term. It should be good times.

Labor can't seem to work out whether it should be grateful for its victory at the recent election or rub it in conservative noses. This dilemma has left the government lurching between timidity and wild ideological celebrations that could push the party too much towards the Australian Greens.

There is just a hint of 1993 about the Labor agenda at the moment, or at least its perceived agenda. When Paul Keating managed to upset John Hewson to secure "the sweetest victory of them all", Labor's final term of the Hawke-Keating era shifted to an agenda built on social and cultural reform rather than the highly successful economic reforms of the 1980s.

Labor whooped it up on an agenda of indigenous rights and republicanism, among many other such issues. Sectional interests such as the arts community hailed Keating a hero and he thrived on the adulation.

While I happen to agree with much of the agenda Keating pursued, mainstream Australia did not. Having given Labor one last chance, it was aghast that the boy from Bankstown used the opportunity to pander to inner-city elites instead of working-class Australians.

Reforms to important areas such as superannuation were lost in the spectre of Labor's cultural revolution. Keatingism thrived on the false underpinnings of its 1993 victory. It wasn't a win for the true believers, it was victory born out of fear of what Labor's opponents proposed (ironically, a GST John Howard would go on to win an election fighting for just a few years later).

Gillard's victory was similar to Keating's 1993 win, only less convincing. Voters weren't quite sure Tony Abbott and his team were ready to govern. The result was no endorsement of modern Labor; it was built on doubts as to whether the Coalition or Abbott were ready to return to power.

Gillard risks a backlash in outer metropolitan electorates at the next poll similar to that which Keating endured in 1996 if she panders to the Left. But she can't sell out core principles either because that raises the question: why have a Labor administration at all?

It really is a catch-22. Throw in Kevin Rudd lurking around as if he is still prime minister and you almost feel sorry for the predicament in which Gillard finds herself. Although it beats the alternative that she almost had to face up to, a humiliating defeat after just eight weeks as Prime Minister.

Labor, as part of its minority government status, is required to do a certain amount of pandering to the Greens (weekly meetings during parliamentary sittings, fortnightly otherwise, and presumably some legislative give), but it can't be seen to do too much of it lest the opposition convince voters in key seats that Labor is whooping it up again.

Electorates such as Lindsay, Banks, Greenway and Robertson - all in NSW - won't reward their sitting Labor MPs if the Labor-Greens alliance is more than a slogan. To return to government, the Coalition doesn't even need to worry about its liberal wing (sigh) because that element of the conservatives' seat distribution is at a low-water mark despite the main parties' level pegging on seat numbers.

Progressive states such as Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania could hardly penalise the Coalition any more than they have, yet Abbott is still on the cusp of becoming prime minister.

You get the sense that Labor's hardheads know this, and that helps explain the immediate push back Greens senator Scott Ludlam received from Resources Minister Martin Ferguson when he suggested an end to uranium mining. But this brings me back to Gillard's poor start as Prime Minister. If her performance doesn't lift, no amount of distancing the government from the Greens will save the Labor government.

From citizens assemblies to a botched East Timor solution for asylum-seekers to a de facto prime minister on the world stage, Gillard has had her fair share of problems since taking charge. Suggesting election promises won't necessarily be honoured now that minority governance is the new mantra may have been a statement of the obvious last weekend, but politically it was a stupid observation for Gillard to make.

Throw in the embarrassing announcement of a new ministry that didn't include an education minister and needed to be adjusted with no fewer than 10 post-announcement changes, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Gillard was the opposition health spokeswoman behind the ill-fated Medicare Gold policy in 2004 (when she said Mark Latham would make an excellent prime minister).

As deputy prime minister, Gillard impressed the most conservative commentators, repairing her reputation. She was the minister who abolished Work Choices and implemented the Fair Work Act. She oversaw the education revolution and, despite problems with the Building the Education Revolution rollout, managed to sidestep much of the blame for it.

Radio shock jock Alan Jones used to praise Gillard when she came on his program when she was Rudd's deputy. But even the real Julia Gillard hasn't yet found her feet as Prime Minister.

It is hard to pinpoint what is causing Gillard to perform as poorly as she is as Prime Minister. It could be the faster pace of the leadership compared with the junior positions she held previously. It could be the people with whom she has surrounded herself are not up to the task. Or it could be simply that because she is new to the job she is finding her feet, the problem being that the learning curve has overlapped with an unforgiving campaign and tight post-campaign environment.

Opposition is a long slog and the Liberals know that if Abbott can't penetrate the government, thereby forcing an early election or a switch of support by the rural independents in the first six months, the odds are that he will be ground down and the government will pull away.

But that will happen only if Labor gets its act together and Gillard settles into her new role. There are no signs of that at the moment.