SYDNEY, Australia—Julia Gillard has it, while Kevin Rudd didn’t. So say the pundits in analysing the historic move by Australia’s Labor Party in removing Kevin Rudd as their leader and, accordingly, as prime minister of Australia.
The nation has been in shock since the announcement of Kevin Rudd’s demise on Thursday June 24, with the media finger pointing, accusing and fear-mongering about the unions taking over.
Political analysts, however, are clear—Kevin Rudd had slipped so badly in the polls that Labor was fighting for its survival.
“We know that Labor was going to lose the election unequivocally in both the reported opinion polls and in their own internal party polls, which showed that they were headed, not just for defeat, but a for a resounding defeat,” said Dr Haydon Manning, Associate Professor in the School of Political studies at Flinders University in South Australia. “Their only alternative was to go to the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.”
Commenting on the swiftness of the move and the fact that it had happened before Kevin Rudd had completed his first 3-year term as Prime Minister, Dr Manning said that when a leader slips badly in the polls, “they are in grave trouble”.
“It is just the nature of domestic politics,” he told The Epoch Times.
It is also the nature of leadership. Much analysis has gone into Kevin Rudd’s style of leadership and it appears that it was this that let him down.
Mr Rudd did not understand how to run a government or indeed, how to work collaboratively with his colleagues, says Dr Manning.
“He had no idea. People were suspicious of that very early in his prime ministership and, of course, it took time for that suspicion to grow into raw fear about losing the election.”
Ben Eltham, political analyst for New Matilda, says Mr Rudd did not make the effort to cultivate back benchers and office bearers, leaving him without a support base when he most needed it.
“He has been disorganised, rude and at times peremptory—not a recipe for personal support,” Mr Eltham wrote.
Dr Norman Abjorensen, lecturer in politics at ANU, was more specific.
“Rudd’s absorption in micromanagement verged on the obsessive. He could master detail, as a former bureaucrat should, but where was the big stuff? … Where was the generalship we look for in a leader, the vision splendid?” he wrote on his blog.
It is true that during his leadership, Mr Rudd’s Government apologised to the Stolen Generation, evaded the global recession, dismantled Work Choices and reformed the health system. And indeed, as fate would have it, Kevin Rudd exhibited the statesman-like qualities in his parting speech that had been so lacking.
Humble and gracious in defeat, his speech was heart-wrenchingly moving, passionate and articulate, but only on his last day as prime minister did theAustralian people get a chance to see the very human side of Kevin Rudd.
Julia Gillard
“I’d also hope I could say for myself that I have the ability to lift the eyes from what is urgent today to worrying about what is going to be important tomorrow.”
Those that know her well say she will make an excellent leader exhibiting all the skills that Mr Rudd lacked in bringing a team together. Gone will be the “command and control” of Kevin Rudd’s leadership, says Christine Wallace, writer and author of a forthcoming unauthorised biography of Ms Gillard.
“She’s good at sensing the mood of the room, drawing people together, knocking heads together when she needs to,” she told ABC radio.
It was that sense that drove her to take the lead from Mr Rudd. “A good government had lost its way,” Ms Gillard said. It was time to act. From the very first day, she laid out her style of leadership, saying she would be working for the Australian people, that she was not frightened of hard work, but that she would be doing it collaboratively.
“I believe my track record as a Member of Parliament bears this out ... I believe in consultation, I believe in getting the best,” she told the pack of reporters as she stepped up as the new prime minister.
Accordingly, she addressed the Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT) that had been so damaging for the Government in recent weeks, saying: “To reach a consensus, we need to more than consult; we need to negotiate.”
She has shown she can act quickly and decisively to address issues that are unravelling, dealing with criticism over wastage in the school building programme by appointing a body to investigate and to hear complaints.
As Australia’s first female prime minister and the first female leader of the Australian Labor Party, Julia Gillard will be freer to define her own terms. However, she has spent three years as deputy to Kevin Rudd and has been party to many of the unpopular decisions that the Rudd Government made, including the damaging move to scrap, for the parliamentary term, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). She has not, however, shied away from her role, conceding that she had argued for the ETS to be scrapped.
“I was concerned that if you were going to do something as big to your economy as put a price on carbon, with the economic transformation that implies, with changing the way in which we live, you need a lasting and deep community consensus to do it,” she told the Nine Network. “I believe there will be ways in which we live that are different. But that’s something [in which] the community has to have a part in the decision, a part in the conversation and we have got to drive the consensus for change.”
She has flagged that she will focus on boosting renewables, in the meantime, particularly solar and wind.
Many have said that she is warm and engaging, and she acknowledges herself that she has “never been a particularly stressed personality”, but she is also not afraid of a fight. She told Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that it was “game on” and she was serious, taking the points off both Opposition Deputy Julie Bishop and the wily Mr Abbot in their attacks on her in her first parliamentary session as PM.
Understandably, her greatest supporters are her family, but if their aspirations are filled, then we can all hope to be better off under her leadership.
“Julia’s unique, hard-working, driven by noble ideals, wants to do good things for the country and [I am] hoping that we’ll go to a very close, hard-fought election as a united Labor Party led by the first-ever female prime minister,” her father John Gillard told the ABC, adding: “I hope it will be a clean election. I hope that it will be fought on issues that confront the country, that it will not be a race to the bottom of the barrel.”
The earliest possible date for the next Federal election is August 7 2010 and the latest is April 16 2011.
