Saturday's WA senate election was a disaster for the ALP.
Spin it anyway you want but 21% of the vote, just five points ahead of the Greens, looks to me like a threshold event.
Everyone knows that the ALP senate tickets are full of union and party hacks.
Most of the time the voters don't get to see the poor quality of the ALP's upper house representation.
The Obeid episode in NSW has changed that.
So has the Joe Bullock fiasco in WA.
It is hard to even imagine why Bullock is a member of the ALP, let alone topping its Senate ticket.
Six decades after the split that kept labor out of office nationally, sectarianism is alive and well in some pockets of the labor movement.
Specifically, the moribund Shop, Distributive and Allied industries union (the SDA).
The SDA has one mission in politics and that is to pursue the Catholic Church's unhealthy obsession with sex.
Everyone with any brains inside or close to the ALP knows that the blue collar ownership of the party has outlived its usefulness.
That ownership, which sees affiliated union officials divvy up federal and state upper house spots among themselves, is a dangerous joke.
It fostered corruption in NSW.
Now, it has contributed to a bad result in WA.
The ALP has had lots of reports (and books and papers) all pointing to the need to make the party more representative of its voter base.
People like John Faulkner have tried and despaired.
People like Sam Dastyari have championed reform, and then plucked an unrepresentative plum for themselves.
Paul Howes has recently recanted his long adherence to the mythology that the ALP is best left in the hands of a few officials from some blue collar unions.
The new selection processes for the federal leadership were a plus for the party.
And the recent community pre-selections in NSW seem to have gone well.
Now Shorten has backed extending these processes to state leadership ballots.
Shorten has also proposed abolishing the requirement that ALP members be members of a union.
That potentially opens up the party to the 80% of the population currently excluded.
But it doesn't really.
Not until those members are given the right to pre-select upper house candidates.
Up until then it is a pointless charade.
Upper house pre-selections are the rubicon.
I suspect if Shorten is to make it to the Lodge he, like many before him, must first take on his own party.
History is moving towards the creation of a new centre left party in Australia.
Either by the re-invention of the ALP as a party supportive of unions but not owned by them.
Or to the replacement of the ALP by a new party, possibly centred around the Greens.
In organisational terms, the ALP has always been closer to the British Labour Party (BLP) than just about any other national political party.
Both are 'labour' parties in the formal sense, meaning that they were established by trade unions and unions are privileged internally over other groups and individual branch members (through formal affiliation).
The 'labour' model of party-unions links is very different from that which is found in the US Democrats.
In recent decades, leaders of the ALP and BLP have seen party reform (usually meaning reducing the influence of unions) as part of their strategy to lead their parties back into government.
The reason is obvious. Social, economic and technological changes have reduced significantly the political relevance of unions.
No aspiring PM can afford to be seen to be beholden to unions and union bosses.
Rudd's proposal to give branch members a say in electing the parliamentary leader aims at two purposes: it reduces the influence of caucus factional leaders and it reduces the influence of union bosses (because it does not give unions a privileged position in the voting).
In addition, Rudd has made some sensible but not particularly important reforms to clean up the embarrassing NSW branch.
Yet, these changes are well behind the ambitions of Britain's Opposition Leader, Ed Miliband.
Miliband proposes (see here and here) that non-party members should be able to vote in party elections, and that its three million union political levy payers can only be involved in the party if they choose to.
These proposals would take the BLP away from the 'labour' model and move it much closer to the US Democratic party model.
Miliband wants the BLP to be (again?) relevant to the lives of ordinary working people.
Australia has this problem too. Rapid declines in party membership and union densities (proportion of workforce that is unionised) have given union bosses, MPs and factional operatives more power than ever before.
Labour parties have lost the sense of being a movement.
Miliband wants some of that movement energy and enthusiasm back.
Part of this I think is a realisation (partly flowing from Obama's success) that good campaigns actually need people not just focus groups and good advertising,
Some union leaders in both countries will resist the diminution of their own power, smarter ones will recognise that being in government is worth it.
Already, I think we can see that Rudd's reforms so far are a step in a longer process.
Despite the title, the book suggests that the author would have been surprised (not to mention disappointed and outraged) by the recent Rudd resurrection.
Walsh's argument is essentially that Rudd failed miserably in his (first) term as prime minister and is so hated by a large majority of his caucus colleagues that any idea of a successful comeback is purely a media myth (fed by a small core of Ruddsters).
Walsh's book is written with passion and purpose.
Her anger with Rudd, his caucus supporters and media "enablers" is sustained and undisguised, at times it borders on the hysterical.
The book is in the form of a diary over the period of Gillard's term as prime minister (2010 - 2013) and it retains a strong sense of immedicacy and veracity.
While Walsh clearly dislikes Rudd intensely, and is dismissive of his first prime ministership, her real targets are those (all too numerous) journalists and commentators who enabled Rudd to pursue his long-term strategy of exploiting Gillard's mistakes, including through his 'fake it till you make it' and 'momentum' tactics (the idea promoted repeatedly and relentlessly that things are swinging Rudd's way in caucus).
Walsh is thorough in recounting all the wrong pronouncements made by journalists and commentators over the past three years. It's very entertaining.
One problem with Walsh's thesis about caucus plotters and media enablers is that it downplays the mistakes made by Gillard and her government.
Related to this problem is the convolutions Walsh has to engage into to try and argue that opinion polls don't, or shouldn't, matter. They're annoying, but in a democracy public opinion is always going to matter.
A Rudd supporter would find this denial of the importance of polls deeply ironic, given the much professed claim of Gillard's supporters that Rudd was in freefall in the polls when he was deposed in June 2010.
A second problem is that she is not convincing on the idea that this was all somehow unusual or unprecedented.
There is little analysis in the book on the exceptional nature of the past three years.
It is, of course, exceptional in the sense that no first-term PM has been deposed by his own party and (eventually) returned to the Lodge by the same party room.
But we have always had leadership contests and they have often been bitter, prolonged and destructive.
It maybe that the Rudd-Gillard battle was more bitter and destructive - but the evidence is just not there in this book.
These leadership contests have all been played out through the media, via backgrounding by caucus supporters and the proponents themselves.
Similarly, Gillard was unfairly pursued over the AWU matter but so was Keating over that piggery.
But the bigger point here is that Gillard and her government (particularly Swan and Conroy) gave Rudd and his loyal band of plotters (mostly second raters who wouldn't get within cooee of a half decent ministry) far too much material to work with.
Walsh, for instance, doesn't give enough attention to the media reform, mining tax and surplus fiascos that damaged Gillard.
Moreover, Gillard was never good enough to overcome the perception that she was disloyal and stabbed Rudd in the back, her claims that she was a reluctant draftee don't strike most people as credible.
This perception was probably inevitable given her role as Rudd's loyal deputy. It matters how you get the job.
Gillard is a politician, she has long been regarded as an ambitious and ruthless. She did deals to get pre-selected and deals to become deputy leader - just like everyone else does. She organised the numbers to take the deputy position off Jenny Macklin back in 2010.
The efforts by Walsh and other Gillard fans to gloss over this reality just doesn't wash.
The deals that Gillard did to stay PM after the 2010 election only added, dramatically, to the negative public perceptions of her and consequently to her political problems.
The carbon tax deal with the Greens and some independents saw her break an election promise and directly began her slide in the polls in 2011, a slide she never really recovered from.
Walsh tries to absolve Gillard on this carbon tax lie point, but not credibly in my view. If it wasn't a lie, it was bloody awful politics and very poorly handled.
Similarly, Gillard's 'pragmatic' ditching of her agreement with Andrew Wilkie on pokies reform played into negative public perceptions of Gillard.
In addition, the Gillard Government, like most governments, could not resist the damage that time and public disappointments do.
Walsh is much more interesting on the media side of the argument.
Mostly, we know what she recounts so vividly. The cosy relationships between journalists and politicians, the obsession with leadership issues, the failure to present realistic assessments of Rudd's support and so on.
It all paints a very bad portrait of the state of political reporting in this country.
If you despair of that reporting, Walsh's book will give you plenty of ammunition and confirm your worst fears.
Walsh writes from the perspective of a long-term Canberra Press Gallery journalist dismayed by the performance of many of her colleagues in the national capital and elswhere.
She is not afraid to name the bad performers and the bad performances and repeatedly hits the target.
The question that is more interesting is why has commentary deteriorated so much?
If it has. I'm not particularly convinced.
Again, Walsh's account is short on analysis.
I would have liked to see her go more into an examination of the impact of 24 hour TV news channels, the ubiquity of media advisers and the permanent campaigning approach, and the adoption of Fox style business models by commercial radio stations.
Walsh is a bit confusing on this stuff.
She condemns the political commentators who never visit Canberra, or fly in and fly out, and then suggests the abolition of the Canberra Press Gallery.
She is also unnecessarily dismissive of so-called amateur commentators (people like me I guess) but then points out the times when social media and bloggers provided an important corrective to the herd mentality of the press gallery (eg the treatment of Gillard's misogyny speech).
Paradoxically, Walsh herself writes like one of these amateurs, her book reads like an extended blog rant - passsioned, colourful, funny etc with a clear point of view.
Paradoxically, also, that is the real strength of this enjoyable book.
Rudd's resurrection is a desperate last throw of the dice for a party struggling for relevance in the second decade of the 21st century.
The last prime minister to make a successful comeback was Menzies in 1949, he went onto to be Australia's longest-serving national leader.
When Menzies lost office the first time in 1941, the venerable Alan Reid, perhaps the most important important Canberra Gallery journalist ever, wrote a column declaring that Menzies' career was over.
Not a few times in the 17 years Menzies spent as PM after defeating Chifley at the national election in 1949, he delighted in reminding Reid of that column.
Anything is possible.
Only two other prime ministers have made it back to office (Deakin and Fisher).
Unlike Menzies, Rudd did not return to office by way of a general election.
Rudd promises party reform, Menzies created the modern Liberal Party as the platform for his return to power.
In this sense, Rudd's return has been too easy, too quick.
I think he should have waited until after the election, just as I thought Gillard should have waited too.
Winning an election from Opposition confers a lot of legitimacy on Australian PMs, a legitimacy that can't be gained any other way.
Rudd's resurrection by way of a party room vote is a unique event in Australian politics.
The fact that the federal ALP has now lost its last two leaders through party room coups is hardly a good look.
It suggests a party that is struggling to hold together.
Also extraordinary have been the retirements of senior caucus figures over the past few months, mostly prompted by leadership disputes one way or another - Chris Evans (Senate Leader), Nicola Roxon (Attorney-Genaral), Martin Ferguson (Resources), Simon Crean (former leader and Cabinet Minister), Greg Combet (Climate Change), Peter Garrett (school education), Craig Emerson (Trade), Stephen Smith (Defence) and Julia Gillard (PM).
This list included two former ACTU leaders and a former ACTU secretary.
As a reuslt of the Rudd resurrection, two of the Gillard governments most senior figures now sit on the back bench, not retiring but not serving in the Ministry either - Wayne Swan (Deputy PM and Treasurer) and Stephen Conroy (Senate Leader).
No matter what you think of the people on this list, it is difficult to imagine that this number of senior people can depart in such a short time without weakening the Government's front bench.
It is also difficult to believe that the party can just put behind it the trauma that it has endured and work together for the common good.
There is a lot that is personal in these struggles that will not easily go away.
Rudd asks for a 'kinder, gentler' approach, but much of the ALP believes that he was methodical and vicious in his efforts to undermine Gillard, Australia's first female politician.
Perhaps the more important question, however, is the extent to which a leader, or a change of leadership, makes to a party's electoral fortunes.
Gillard got a bounce when she took over from Rudd which was similar to the bounce Rudd got this week.
By election day several months later, Gillard's bounce had all but disappeared.
Maybe that was at least partially due to Rudd's (or his supporters) destructive leaking.
But in NSW at the last state election, Kristina Keneally took over from Nathan Rees and ran a much admired campaign as that state's first female premier.
Nevertheless, the ALP's election vote was not much different to the poll results that Nathan Rees was getting before he was dumped.
On the other hand, Bob Hawke was said to have added about 2 percentage points to the vote the ALP got in 1983.
It is also probably true, that Hawke would have been beaten by Hewson in 1993 - but who knows.
A second consideration is the real nature of the ALP's problems.
Is it leaderhip? Is it policy? Is it the brand?
Gillard came to office promising to fix the policy areas that had troubled her predecessor's administration; particularly the mining tax, asylum seekers and carbon pricing.
Rudd returns to office facing big challenges in these areas.
What can he really do, especially in the few weeks left until the campaign starts?
Plus, Rudd has to try and get a finalisation of Gillard's school reform project.
He has to do all this with not much room to move in budgetary terms.
The brand question has two dimensions.
First, there is the public perception of the party especially in NSW where the ICAC matters, and the HSU (and Craig Thomson) keep on hurting the party.
But it also goes to organisational problems - unions and factions - and the sense that the party is run by self-perpetuating elites.
How the ALP handles upcoming preselections for the aforementioned retirees will be important.
If the ALP leaders just impose candidates in a handful of safe electorates now left vacant the perception of a party without members and run by a few dozen union officials and MPs will be re-enforced.
Moreover there is brand Rudd, roundedly trashed by 'colleagues' during various episodes of leadership tension in recent years.
Rudd, and everyone else on the government 'team', now says he is a changed man. We'll see.
On the plus side for the Government, and perhaps their best hope, is the Opposition leader.
Abbott is unpopular, he did not handle Rudd very well last time, and he has so far been able to avoid much close scrutiny.
If Rudd and the ALP can minimise their own mistakes, and play down the festering tensions and resentments, and focus on Abbott's all too obvious flaws - well who knows what might happen.
But it's a long shot.
In the end, the most likely result is that the ALP will do slightly better under Rudd than it might have done under Gillard.
That won't be enough to stop the party from facing some very dark days over the next few years.
The union movement has a problem. It prefers Gillard because she is close to the union movement (largely because she needs a support base in the ALP) and Rudd really doesn't like unions very much. On the other hand, an Abbott Government with control of the Senate (a distinct possibility on present public and priivate polling) would be seen as an existential threat for the union movement by the ACTU.
Do they stick with Gillard, or try and save themselves by switching to Rudd and saving a few seats and a few precious Senate positions?
This emphasises again that for non-affiliated unions there is a viable alternative to the ALP on the left.
Presumably, the NTEU hopes that the money will help the Greens retain a strong position in the Senate and be able to block some of the bolder deregulation of higher education that Abbott and Pyne appear likely to pursue.
The prospect of a government run by a bunch of right-wing former student politicians is very bad news for the NTEU.
- In the Australian, Troy Bramston has a piece pointing out that the union affiliation to the ALP has been a 50 year problem that Whitlam himself tried to do something about back in the 1960s.
Bramston makes some good points but falls for the sleight of hand that suggests that union affiliation is somehow consistent with the vision of the ALP as a genuine 21st century centre-left party.
In my view, the ALP can remain close to unions (and other community-based organisations) without being owned by them.
Privileging unions through affiliation can only happen at the expense of non-affiliated unions, other community organisations, and individual branch members.
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.
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
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