Gillard's struggle to find legitimacy

Six weeks after sort of winning an election, Gillard has finally moved into the Lodge and her fellow assassins are still trying to make the case for why they knifed Rudd. Lenore Taylor's piece on 'the chaotic last days of the Rudd Government' still falls short of providing a convincing case. The problems of the Rudd Government seem to be solely of Kevin's making and embraces the conflicting notions that he couldn't make decisions and that he made too many unpopular decisions (mining tax, ETS, asylum seekers).

The fact that this rationalisation stuff is still being retailed just shows how pervasive Gillard's legitimacy problem is. Add to that the presence of Rudd on the world stage (lol) looking far more prime ministerial than Gillard and you can see that this is a problem that's not going to go away anytime soon. And of course Gillard's election campaign, and the outcome itself, now the subject of much internal hand-wringing and blame-shifting, hardly did anything to confer legitimacy on Gillard's prime ministership.

Gillard is still basing her claim to legitimacy on not being any of the alternatives - Abbott, Rudd or Turnbull - she is yet to establish a positive claim for herself. We've had endless stuff about opportunity, education and hard work. These are banal and hardly controversial, they are an agenda from a few decades ago. The 'real julia' is apparently really, really passionate about this stuff, but it is not clear how all that passion is going to translate into real reform.

If the Gillard Government is doing something big, or plans to do something big, it is keeping it well hidden. I suspect that the real lesson the Gillard Government learnt from Rudd's downfall is that electoral survival is about avoiding controversy, and that means avoiding real reform.

Comments

[Matt]

The lesson wasn't to avoid real reform, but to better sell a narrative and a reason to be in government. Unfortunately I also fear that all the wrong lessons will be taken out of the Government's near death experience.