Little solace for flawed Rudd

FAR from being a puppet of party apparatchiks, Julia Gillard is the federal government's reluctant heroine.

KEVIN Rudd's lasting legacy to the Labor Party is that he has united its national right faction. A grouping that has been at war for years has come together and helped to install a left-winger in the prime ministership.

That's quite an achievement, something only a person who

has rubbed a large quantum of people up the wrong way could make happen.

This reality from the parliamentary week, perhaps the final one before the election, says so much about Rudd, the way he chose to govern and why his fall from grace has been so hard.

Rudd did not consult, he did not make use of his cabinet and he arrogantly shut out advice from senior party figures who had built knowledge about politics through many decades of engagement in the dark arts.

Rudd liked to style himself as a bureaucrat who was defined by process. It was the lack of proper processes that was his biggest failing, however.

But it wasn't just a dislike of Rudd that made this week's events happen. It was a belief that he had become electoral poison. Much has been said about how quickly the Labor Party acted to knock off Rudd. But the caucus took longer than the voting public did to change its mind about Rudd.

According to the opinion polls, voters decided some time ago that they disliked him; Rudd's net satisfaction rating had been in free fall for months.

Rudd had been refusing to see ALP national secretary Karl Bitar even though doing so would have given him access to the research that could have helped him save his image.

Rudd was no longer freely taking meetings with NSW senator Mark Arbib, the man in the ministry whose numbers gave him the leadership in the first place.

Defence Minister John Faulkner had been shut out a long time ago, even though he had more political experience than anyone else in the caucus.

One senior cabinet member has been telling colleagues that he had not had a phone call from the former prime minister in three years.

Towards the end, even the three members of the gang of four who had worked with Rudd so closely - Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner - started to be shut out of decision-making.

Rudd retreated into his office and listened only to his young, inexperienced advisers, not all of whom were prepared to tell him what he needed to hear.

The ousted prime minister had so many opportunities to change his ways and that was always the preferred option of even the most ruthless of the powerbrokers who plotted his downfall.

There was never going to be a downfall without Gillard's imprimatur. Without her there was no viable candidate to replace Rudd. But she wanted to know for certain that Rudd wouldn't change his ways before changing the prime ministership.

A coup just ahead of an election is risky.

When Rudd wouldn't change, he had to go. It was a vicious and gut-wrenching spectacle to watch.

By that point he was in such denial that he didn't see the execution coming. His hubris in office meant he lost sight of just how weak his support structures inside the Labor Party actually were.

He had no power base other than his popularity, which had faded long ago.

He truly was the emperor with no clothes and he fronted the media for his final press conference as prime minister as a man diminished and shattered by the realisation, not of what had been done to him, but what he had done to himself.

Although I do wonder whether Rudd's awareness was heightened enough to understand his own role in his downfall.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was right when he said in parliament that no Australian prime minister should have to suffer the embarrassment that Rudd had suffered just a few hours earlier. But where Abbott was wrong was in blaming Rudd's colleagues for what happened. The only person who is responsible for the events of the past week is Rudd. Just as provocation is a defence in law, it is a defence in politics too.

The war of words is now under way between the government and the opposition, between conservative commentators and the left-wing intelligentsia. Is Gillard a patsy of the labour movement's so-called "faceless men" who threw their support behind her to allow her to become Prime Minister?

Let's get this sorted out with two simple words: absolutely not.

Abbott said on Perth radio yesterday that Gillard "has harnessed the faceless men to rise to the top".

For a start, in the modern media age the faceless men aren't all that faceless. Bill Shorten, Arbib and David Feeney are all parliamentarians who make regular media appearances and are by definition elected to public office.

The Australian Workers Union's Paul Howes does more media than all three of them and, while he is not elected by the community at large (not yet, anyway), you could never accuse him of being some backroom operator who tries to wield influence out of public view. He has been one of the Labor government's most vocal critics on issues ranging from nuclear power to the treatment of asylum-seekers.

Gillard did not play a lead hand in plotting Rudd's downfall. In fact, she was a very cautious starter for the challenge that ensued.

It was not a matter of her going to the powerbrokers to lobby for backing. They came to her to plead with her to step up and challenge Rudd for the good of the government. They needed her more than she needed them.

The modern media means that we get to watch politics as it is playing out, not only once the events have passed.

It can be a brutal business. It was brutal when Rudd and Gillard decided they had to knife one of Labor's favourite sons, Kim Beazley, a year out from the 2007 election and it is brutal now that Rudd is on the receiving end.

But what makes the tragedy of Rudd all the more dramatic, as if it had been torn from the pages of a bestselling fiction based on human frailty, is that he set himself up as the person who was going to change the way federal politics is conducted.

He had it all planned. He had knocked off a Liberal Party hero, turning himself into a Labor hero in the process.

Prime ministers never seem to depart at a time of their own choosing. That was Howard's failure and Rudd intended to learn from it. He intended to hand over to Australia's first female prime minister at some point in the future, a final symbolic gesture to be applauded by the party faithful.

An orderly transition ensures the preservation of the departing leader's legacy. A hostile takeover means, to justify the shift, that legacy needs to be questioned.

Rudd has become a lesson in how not to act as a prime minister, the exact opposite of what he set out to achieve.

He didn't get to choose the timing of his departure. He didn't even get to finish his first term in office.