It was telling on Tuesday when she(Gillard) said: ''I am the best person to lead the Labor Party.''
That is a party run by factions, apparatchiks and unions irrelevant to most people.
Notwithstanding her talents, Gillard capitalised on those party insiders to oust Rudd from the top job. Most voters have not forgiven her. They don't trust her.
Yet she still believes she is the best person to lead the party.
So, too, do the faceless men who helped get her there, as do those within Labor who have disproportionate power thanks to the party's rigged structure.
But voters do not like the party. And they do not think Gillard is the best person to lead their country.
Never has the gap been so wide between what Labor is and what the nation wants it to be. How does Australia reconcile this?
Rudd as Labor leader would be competitive with Tony Abbott; he may even save Gonski.
Crucially, Rudd would also have a popular mandate to fight the unions, apparatchiks and factions.
That's why they do not want him back.
The sad truth is Rudd is the best chance to fix Labor for democracy's sake.
If Gillard does not step down, the party will not change for yonks.
Right now the dominant males (they are always male) are busy preparing for a severe electoral winter - in this case, a winter substantially of their own making.
And none more so than the ''faceless men'' from the 2010 palace coup: Bill Shorten, the Workplace Relations Minister; Don Farrell, a South Australian senator largely unseen despite his public capacities as Science and Research Minister; and David Feeney, a Victorian Right figure of limited profile.
The interviews for my doctoral thesis on the changing relationship between unions and the ALP were conducted during the days when Rudd was riding high as PM, even then there was evidence of a schism that goes to the heart of the ALP - as well as to Rudd's sense of himself as a political leader.
Whatever his strengths and weaknesses, Rudd has always been a big problem for the ALP because he has very little feel and sympathy for the old blue-collar union machine.
Here are some key quotes:
I don’t think Rudd likes us (unions). With the exception of a couple
of state unions in NSW, just about every single union was opposed to him
becoming leader. When he was shadow foreign affairs minister he was all over
us. It was a bit sickly to be honest. He turned up everywhere. Everywhere you
went oh there’s Kevin Rudd. Every function, Kevin Rudd would be there. But he’s not from us, clearly not of our culture. - Senior current affiliated union official.
In a perfect world Kevin
would like to be leader of a party that doesn’t have unions. Kevin’s primary
motivation is Kevin and we work for Kevin. It’s in Kevin’s interest to have us
and it’s in Kevin’s interest to have a close relationship with us. But I think
philosophically, if he does have some ideology, and I’m not sure that he does,
but if he actually does believe in things I don’t think his belief would be
with us. - Senior current affiliated union official.
The other thing that was notable was that
there were two parallel campaigns run in the last federal election (2007), the
unions ran the negative campaign on IR but Rudd did not buy into that campaign
at all. Rudd tried to set himself above and beyond that and spent a lot of time
hitting union leaders over the head to show that he wasn’t a captive of the
union movement. - Current peak union official.
Rudd’s been
nervous about being seen to be too close to unions. I know that there are some people (from the union movement)
who have said to Kevin at various times it’s OK to use the U-word sometimes,
it’s not a bad thing. And I think
he has been advised that way, I don’t think it is something that he arrived at
naturally or deliberately. More recently, people have said to him it’s OK to publicly
say that it is good to be in a union. That’s not going to lead to the re-establishment of the
Berlin wall. – Current affiliated union official.
Some of the key players don’t have a lot of
union history … the prime minister (Rudd) doesn’t understand the union culture
and doesn’t understand the labor culture and the union culture within the labor
movement. That’s part of the
issue. You could argue that that
has been the case from time to time over the last 100 years. – Current peak
union official.
I get a sense that the prime minister (Rudd)
would see the ACTU no differently to say the AIG or the BCA as another group that he has to interface with and listen to and respond to but
they’re not central to the project as they were a decade or two ago. – Current
federal MP.
Asked if she blamed Mr Rudd for derailing her election campaign, Mr Gillard said: ''The 2010 election was sabotaged … we were in a winning position in that campaign until the sabotage that knocked that campaign very, very solidly.''
(Swan) said the Labor Party had given Mr Rudd every opportunity, but he wasted them with his "dysfunctional decision making and his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people including our caucus colleagues".
Mr Swan said Mr Rudd had placed his own interests ahead of those of the broader labour movement "and that needs to stop".
"The Labor Party is not about a person, it's about a purpose. That's something Prime Minister Gillard has always known in her heart but something Kevin Rudd has never understood," Mr Swan said.
"He was the Party's biggest beneficiary then its biggest critic; but never a loyal or selfless example of its values and objectives.
"For the interests of the labour movement and of working people, there is too much at stake in our economy and in the political debate for the interests of the labour movement and working people to be damaged by somebody who does not hold any Labor values."
“For somebody to be engaged in destabilising and giving Tony Abbott a chance to win the last election is an absolute disgrace,” Senator Conroy told the Nine Network.
He said Mr Rudd had “contempt for the cabinet, contempt for cabinet members, contempt for the caucus, contempt for the parliament”.
“And ultimately what brought him down a year or two ago was the Australian public realised he had contempt for them as well,” Senator Conroy said.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said Mr Rudd has been exposed as a "complete and utter fraud".
"He has been pretending that he supported the pre-commitment technology, pretending he supported reform in this area. But his key numbers man just happened to have two meetings and tell Clubs Australia that he would kill it," he said.
"The constant undermining, the constant leaking, the constant publication of lists claiming to be Rudd supporters has damaged the Government," he said.
"No question at all. It’s no surprise to see this sort of damage being done by the Rudd camp because this is exactly what happened during the last election.
"Everybody remembers the sabotage that went on in the first two weeks of the last election campaign.
Environment Minister Tony Burke said Mr Rudd had been undermining the government for more than a year, but the government had made the mistake of not explaining his failings as prime minister.
“It became chaotic, the chaos, the undermining, the temperament that started to develop, the micro-management where no one other than the prime minister could make a decision,” he told the Seven Network
Human Services Minister Brendan O'Connor said during her time as Labor leader, Ms Gillard had had “to fight on two fronts - to combat Tony Abbott and, unfortunately, also internally Kevin Rudd and a number of people supporting him”.
He said said there had been “unbelievable” leaks during the 2010 election campaign against Ms Gillard and hence the Labor party.
“That is unprecedented in Labor's history, that we would have leaks coming out of cabinet to target the then-prime minister during an election campaign, to aid and abet Tony Abbott to win the 2010 election,” Mr O'Connor told Sky News.
“That destabilisation, that treachery has gone on now for varying degrees for the last 18 months.”
The last federal ALP leader capable of winning an election AND governing a country was Paul Keating.
Even Keating was a poor second to Bob Hawke who was (IMO) the best PM since the second world war.
Hawke was a genuine policy innovator and a brilliant campaigner - it's a rare combination in politics.
After 1996, Beazley and Crean basically wasted the ALP's time for a decade.
Beazley and Crean rejected the Hawke and Keating legacy because they didn't understand it.
They were two of the least impressive Cabinet ministers during the Hawke-Keating era.
They turned away from the Hawke-Keating direction for a modern ALP without coming up with anything to replace it.
To get out of the Beazley-Crean deadend, the ALP opted for Latham.
Latham was supposedly the new man, the new direction.
From Sydney's western suburbs with an alleged connection to the region's 'aspirational' voters, he was in-touch with the party's evolving base.
So it was hoped.
Latham took the ALP backwards at the 2004 election.
Howard blew him out of the water with the line 'who do you trust on interest rates' - goodbye aspirationals.
(BTW some people in the ALP still think Latham was actually in with a chance of winning that election).
The ALP's massive defeat in 2004 (it delivered control of the Senate to the LNP for the first time since the 1970s) showed that Howard's Liberals understood the ALP heartland better than Labor's isolated leadership elite.
After Latham underwent his post-election meltdown, the federal ALP caucus went back to the safe hands of Beazley.
Beazley offered a version of old-style labourism.
But two years later, with the election looming the party lost confidence in Beazley's ability to actually win an election.
Despite a decade of frantic self-promotion, Rudd had only single-digit support, or a little more, in caucus.
Rudd is a major league narcisisst in an occupation that attracts a lot of them.
His efforts to appeal to the public over the heads of his colleagues did not endear him to them.
Gillard, a left-winger despite her views, didn't have quite enough support to win the leadership.
GIllard did have substantial union support (anachronistically important in the ALP) and Rudd had virtually none.
So an inherently unstable 'team' of Rudd and Gillard was formed.
Adding to this instability, Rudd locked himself into keeping Swan on as Treasurer, following a few media questions in the run-up to the 2007 election.
This is probably one of the worst political decisions Rudd ever made.
Swan's performance as Treasurer has dragged down both the Rudd and Gillard governments.
Swan has little to show in the sense of reform achievements and his political incompetence and inability to shape agendas and win public debates has been a real (and continuing) drag on the ALP.
Things seemed OK in the heady atmosphere of a big election win and a long-desired return to the Treasury benches.
But the hatreds were still there.
Swan and Rudd have loathed each other for many years.
Gillard's ambitions only grew.
Rudd proved to be hopeless at running a government.
The PM's office and the Cabinet were badly dysfunctional.
Rudd was still not liked in the caucus, in fact his disdain for many of his colleagues (and their union patrons) only heightened their sense of being excluded from 'their' government.
Perhaps inevitably, the hatred, the instability and the incompetence proved explosive - to the detriment of Rudd and the ALP.
Despite her ambition, Gillard has been a lacklustre PM.
She has had some policy wins, but many disasters as well.
She has not 'solved' the asylum seeker issue.
Her carbon tax betrayal has blighted her prime ministership, as has the (backroom) way she became PM.
The next leader after Rudd and Gillard depart will probably be Bill Shorten.
Shorten's performance has so far been modest at best.
The bigger issue is why there aren't more potential leaders in the federal caucus.
After the election, the ALP will have to think about getting a much better talent pool in the federal caucus.
Otherwise the long term leadership problem will just go on.
Ultimately, as Mark Kenny said on ABC Insiders yesterday, unions will determine whether Gillard stays or goes.
Well, partly right, because it is union bosses, not union members, that make these decisions.
Many members of the ALP federal caucus owe their pre-selections to the support of individual unions, particularly the right-wing unions - the AWU and the SDA. Other significant unions include the CFMEU, AMWU, TWU and NUW.
So far Shorten and the AWU seem to be holding firm, and there is little or no media coverage of what the SDA or other unions are doing. Union leaders, who helped bring down Mr Rudd and have supported Ms Gillard's leadership, are also conceding her hold on the top job is over. But the Prime Minister is denying claims from within Labor that cabinet minister Bill Shorten - the former Australian Workers Union national secretary and key member of the Victorian Right - has withdrawn his pivotal support. - The Australian
"We support the Prime Minister," said Mr Howes, the AWU national secretary who in February told Ms Gillard that the union "has got ya back". - news.com.au
Paul Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, to which Mr Shorten and Treasurer Wayne Swan are allied, is also backing Ms Gillard. - AFR
Rudd loyalists believe that if Mr Shorten switched allegiances, along with his Australian Workers Union faction, it would be enough to force Ms Gillard to step down. He influences five or six votes in the 71-strong caucus, which is roughly split on the leadership issue. - West Australian
I have worked in politics, public policy and strategic communications for over 30 years. I was recently awarded a doctorate in Australian politics at the University of Sydney. My thesis was on the (changing) relationship between the ALP and unions. I have been blogging since November 2003 and over the past decade I have written many articles on politics, public relations and social media for newspapers, magazines and websites. I love literature particularly John McGahern and James Joyce.
The header photo is of the Clarence River taken before dawn at Ulmarra in 2012.
