Shorten pathway to a Gillard future

WHILE the Liberal Party continues to tear itself apart over who should lead it to what is likely to be certain defeat at the federal election due next year, a far more important power struggle is going on within the Labor Party's ranks.

During the new year the ALP Right faction in Victoria split down the middle as the Bill Shorten-led Australian Workers Union entered into an unholy alliance with Kim Carr's Socialist Left. So much for factions being driven by ideological purism. The deal they struck gave the new alliance control over nearly 70 per cent of Labor delegates to preselections (don't forget, unions still dominate the Labor Party), guaranteeing continued representation to sitting MPs who are affiliated with the alliance at a state level.

At the time most reports suggested the deal had state implications only, and that Premier John Brumby had avoided debilitating factional stoushes ahead of what will be the most challenging election in a decade for Victorian Labor. This much is true. But the deal also has profound federal implications. More important, it is a guide to the way the factions and states will line up when Kevin Rudd's honeymoon finally ends and leadership rivals begin to surface.

By splitting from the rest of the Victorian Right, the Shorten sub-faction, if its numbers hold at a federal level, has given Julia Gillard for the first time enough votes in caucus to challenge Rudd if his popularity fades. It has also increased Shorten's worth as a parliamentary heavyweight after what can only be described as a poor end to 2008 following the very public dissolution of his marriage.

If the Labor Right wants to again control the federal numbers in the ALP, it needs to draw Shorten back into the fold.

In the present political climate it is difficult to contemplate the end of Rudd's honeymoon. He became Prime Minister with the highest approval ratings of any Opposition leader in Australian political history. More than 15 months later he continues to enjoy support well in excess of any previous PM. He is also squaring up against an Opposition too busy fighting internal battles to hold his Government to account.

Part of Rudd's success can be attributed to the public's desire to trial an alternative to John Howard. But it is more than that. He has resonated with voters. I have to confess to not understanding exactly how he has achieved such popularity; I find his style contrived and even insincere. But the polls don't lie: Rudd is popular with a majority of voters. However, popularity in politics can fade as easily as it is bestowed. Just ask Mark Latham.

Before Rudd was elected Labor leader, a majority of Australians didn't even know his name. A month later opinion polls had him pressing Howard as the preferred prime minister. Labor hardheads -- by that I mean the factional elders -- have never warmed to Rudd and his leadership style. He is seen as autocratic and exclusionary. But when it comes to the NSW Right, he has become their means of preventing Gillard from becoming Labor's first post-war left-wing prime minister. The NSW Right has formed a praetorian guard around Rudd in the hope his popularity won't fade for at least another electoral cycle. The longer Rudd stays popular, the more likely it becomes that the NSW Right will be able to find an alternative to Gillard in the medium to long term.

Of course, finding an alternative to Gillard won't be easy. She is far and away the best parliamentary performer on the Labor side, and so far she has handled her mega-portfolios with aplomb. In contrast to senior members of the Right, Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith, who have not lit up the parliament, Gillard has become Labor's modern Paul Keating with her wit.

On her performance, Gillard deserves to be Australia's first female prime minister. But it is early days, and remember she is from the Labor Left.

When Rudd became leader in late 2006, he needed Gillard's support to roll Kim Beazley. She had 40 per cent of the party room but without right-wing support had no chance of winning the extra votes she needed on her own. By backing Rudd she guaranteed herself the deputy leadership and, as it turned out, the deputy prime ministership as well.

For most left-wingers in the Labor Party that would have been enough. But the power-sharing arrangements are shifting in Labor. In Western Australia the Left is dominant. It is also ascendant in Queensland and even in Victoria. NSW is the last bastion of the Right, but even there the faction is not travelling as well as it once did.

The personality politics of factional wrangling is one thing, the impact it has on policy outcomes is another matter.

Some of the more ideological members of the Right are concerned Rudd is too swayed by the leftist tendencies of the senior ministers around him. Such references are directed at the likes of Gillard, Lindsay Tanner and, in particular, Carr.

Right-wing MPs worry Rudd's article in The Monthly signals a serious drift away from the principles that shaped his pre-parliamentary career as premier Wayne Goss's hard man in Queensland in the reforming days of the 1990s. If Rudd recognises the threat a Gillard-Shorten alliance poses in the years ahead, he just might rethink the extent to which he has been acquiescing to the Left on policy and realign his approach with his more traditional base, the Right.

Peter van Onselen is an associate professor of politics and government at Edith Cowan University.