Sunday 22nd of December 2024
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the word on lazarus .....

the word on lazarus .....

Kevin Rudd will become the leader, not because he's made a compelling case but because Julia Gillard cannot hold the confidence of her caucus….

One of the most remarkable facts of the collapse of the Gillard government's internal support is that it is happening under its own weight.

Kevin Rudd is not campaigning for the leadership. He certainly wants it. But when he campaigned for the leadership last time, he gave big policy speeches, wrote philosophical essays, set up caucus study groups, lobbied union leaders, duchessed newspaper editors, and had long conversations with many members of the caucus aimed at winning their votes with the prospect of a better electoral future, exciting policy offerings and sometimes the hint of promotion.

This time? Unless it's directly in the line of his work as Foreign Affairs Minister, Rudd has given no speeches, written no essays, set up no study groups, lobbied no union leaders, duchessed no newspaper editors, and held only the most cautious and circumspect conversations with caucus members outside his inner circle.

If Rudd has been campaigning, it has been a silent campaign, leadership positioning by mime. He was doing it yesterday, campaigning for Labor MPs who have asked him to help them in the Queensland election. The MPs invite him and he is mobbed; Julia Gillard is not invited at all. He can't be faulted for helping colleagues who ask. But it frustrates his rivals to the point of apoplexy that he can parade his rock-star ratings, in implicit contrast to Gillard's long wait for an invitation. Rudd's rivals - and there are many - cannot put their finger on any clear-cut act of disloyalty or destabilisation, and it drives them wild.

This quality to Rudd's manoeuvring, obvious yet unimpeachable, real yet elusive, this week led my Herald colleague Phillip Coorey to describe Rudd's technique with the wonderful oxymoron of "grandstanding by stealth".

Yet, despite the insubstantial nature of Rudd's campaigning, the prime ministership is coming to him regardless. The change of leadership is looming not because Rudd has made a compelling case but because Gillard cannot hold the confidence of her caucus.

One consequence is that, so far, it is a change based on popularity, not purpose. Rudd's advocates can point to the fact that the opinion polls, for a year now, consistently show him as preferred Labor leader over Gillard by a factor of two to one. But they cannot point to any of the big areas of Labor's policy strife where Rudd has proposed a better way.

So the private conversations of caucus members go along lines such as this one between two backbenchers this week. A former Gillard supporter, who decided in just the past fortnight that the Prime Minister was unable to reverse Labor's dismal fortunes, told a Gillard loyalist that the leader was damaged beyond repair. He had reluctantly concluded Rudd was the party's only chance.

The loyalist replied that Rudd was an impossible option. He hasn't changed, he will be just as much a bastard as he was last time, he argued. The Rudd convert countered that it was not possible for a human being to go through the awful international and national humiliation that Rudd suffered without learning something.

You might think he's changed, warned the Gillard supporter, but the moment he's won an election he'll go back to his old self.

"So you're conceding that he can win an election for us? That's good enough for me. I would rather an unchanged Kevin Rudd as prime minister than Tony Abbott any day."

These internal Labor conversations are all about the leaders' personality and popularity. They are bereft of policy, purpose or strategy. The entire calculus is based on the electoral survival of frightened MPs. It is extraordinary that Australia's national government is contemplating forcing a change of prime minister based on such a hollow debate.

The success of the Rudd non-campaign is all the more remarkable because, outside Parliament, the main institutions of the Labor movement are urging caucus members to stick with Gillard. None of the unions or the state branches is advocating support for Rudd.

Why? Partly it's the natural state of affairs that the Labor machinery supports the status quo, although there was one notable exception last time when the Australian Workers' Union and most of the NSW Right broke with this rule in the coup against Rudd.

Partly it's because the Gillard government is delivering a steady patronage to the unions. Partly it's because the unions and their factional outgrowths have never considered Rudd one of theirs. And partly it's because, in NSW notably, Labor has learnt the error of its ways. Sussex Street, the central nexus of Labor's Right faction power, has discovered that its practice of ruthlessly beheading leaders as a substitute for fixing anything did not, in the end, fix anything.

The general secretary of NSW Labor, Sam Dastyari, set out his position to the Herald yesterday: "As far as I'm concerned, there isn't a ballot for the leadership and there isn't a need for one. If one were to arise, I would rigidly stick to my view that it is the role of the party machine to support the leader and bring stability to party leadership. That is a case I would make on behalf of party members to all NSW Labor MPs."

The second half of Dastyari's position, put privately to the 20 NSW Labor members of the federal caucus, is that the old days of fear and loathing are gone. "Our MPs and senators are not messenger boys for Sussex Street. What makes head office right about everything? We have to trust the judgment of our MPs. Threatening people's preselections is deplorable."

The days when Graham Richardson was general secretary, threatening and intimidating caucus members to enforce the will of Sussex Street, are long gone. Head office will not threaten them but will appeal to them on the merits of its argument. And Dastyari's argument in favour of Gillard is three-fold. First is that the concept of the disposable leader has failed as an electoral strategy and must end. "We became a caricature of ourselves," Dastyari tells colleagues. Second is that rank-and-file members of the party hate leadership assassinations and crave stability. Third is that the long-term survival of the party is at stake: "We must learn from our mistakes - stop the revolving-door leader. It's slowly killing the party."

Even so, the best estimate is that seven of the 20 NSW Labor MPs are prepared to vote for Rudd at the moment. They want the door to revolve just once more, on the grounds that restoring Rudd would correct a blunder. Removing Rudd was the ultimate proof of the failure of the kill-the-leader solution and restoring him would be the evidence that Labor had learnt its lesson, they argue.

The coup against Rudd in June 2010 was not led by the generals of the caucus but by the lieutenants and sergeant-majors. Mark Arbib, David Feeney, Bill Shorten, Don Farrell were the archetypal faceless men.

The gathering movement against Gillard, by contrast, is powered by the lowly infantry, the foot soldiers of the caucus. The faceless men remain fiercely loyal to Gillard, who has promoted them to the ranks of captain and major, but they have lost much of their power to command their troops.

No one knows the true state of the numbers in the caucus because no one has yet tested them seriously. Gillard loyalists claim an overwhelming majority: "We would kick any Rudd challenge out of the park," one said this week.

But at the moment Rudd's rivals are prepared to give him between 26 and 30 votes. That is in a caucus of 103 votes where almost one-third are members of the Gillard executive, appointed as ministers or parliamentary secretaries, and supposedly locked into positions of loyalty unless freed by a spill motion in the caucus room.

Rudd's supporters claim a minimum of between 30 and 40 votes, with another 10 to 15 undecided. And this has happened in the absence of any real campaigning by their candidate. If they're right, it means Rudd is within striking distance of the leadership without having actively worked for it. The best indicator that they could well be right? Some cabinet ministers have started campaigning against the Foreign Affairs Minister and are canvassing in favour of Gillard.

So the collapse of trust is mutual. The caucus has lost confidence in the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister has lost confidence in her colleagues.

In response to the Herald's reports of how Gillard had rolled her Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, last October over his proposal to send boat people to Nauru, the Prime Minister has banned her cabinet minister from taking notes in cabinet meetings. In response to fears that Rudd might start courting the media, Gillard has banned her ministers from talking to newspaper editors. And increasingly sensing the loss of support for Gillard, some cabinet ministers are trying to win back wavering members by bad-mouthing Rudd to their caucus colleagues.

The situation is dismal. It's quite natural that MPs would want to support the people's preferred prime minister over the factions' candidate; Rudd over Gillard. But it's grim when a popularity contest is the only compelling argument in favour of a forced change of prime minister.

Rudd has it in his power to change this. He could make it a substantive contest about the meaning and purpose of the Labor Party. But that would involve moving from a phoney campaign for the leadership to a real one. Stepping out of the shadows would involve real risk for him. That would make him a target. It would also make him a leader.

Personality Over Substance

 

f@#$%&ing kev07!!!!...

A DAMAGING video of a furious Kevin Rudd swearing and rounding on embassy officials and a Chinese interpreter has been posted on YouTube on the day a Labor MP publicly warned the party would be ''decimated'' if it stuck with Julia Gillard.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/rudd-row-gets-dirty-20120218-1tg9j.html#ixzz1mkWiuq4q

Kev07 should take a cold shower and place his "ambitions" on hold until 2015 and say so publicly... He can't save the whatever of the Labor party, presently a (exacerbated by Rudd) trumped-up whatever crisis — a siege manufactured in the media mostly because the media hates Julia who, as imperfect as she is and is portrayed, gets more than a few reasonable runs on the board.

So in a desire to destroy Julia, the media frothes up Rudd and his own silly devilish envy, envy on par with that of crappy idiotic Tony Abbott‚ who himself can't wait to destroy the NBN, the carbon tax, the mining tax and a few other good things this country — and the world — needs.

Rudd would be foolish to do anything else than give clear indication he's backing off and let Julia carry on, regardless of his desire to show his underpants... But you never with these catholic boys, Kev and Tony... Irksome...


edging closer to the unthinkable .....

For all the forests being destroyed about Labor's federal leadership crisis, one thing we are not seeing from major media outlets or political journalists is a comprehensive endorsement of either Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd as the better option.

I'm happy to come straight out and strongly argue the case for a switch back to Kevin Rudd.

Gillard is untrustworthy, unprincipled and terminal. Both her and Labor find their polling support through the floor and without a change we are now just 18 months away from the unthinkable – Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Gillard has had long enough to prove herself and failed miserably. The trust has gone. She's communicating poorly, making elementary mistakes and people have stopped listening. For me, the pokies betrayal of Andrew Wilkie was the last straw. It was as if she doesn't care about the world record $5 billion a year problem gamblers lose on the pokies.

Even her definitive claim that her office wasn't responsible for the video leak was hard to believe, especially after the Australia Day protest. How would she know?

Similarly, what arrogance to suggest Darren Cheeseman's endorsement of Kevin Rudd is somehow linked to potential job losses at the Point Henry aluminium smelter in his electorate.

What rot. Cheeseman is backing Rudd because he was only elected in 2007 courtesy of Rudd's popularity and his only chance of survival in 2013 is through a return to Kevin Rudd.

Labor's primary vote will rise significantly the moment Rudd is back in The Lodge. The party will be in with a show once again, especially with Conservative governments in the four largest states after Queensland falls next month.

Rudd won a landslide victory in 2007 presenting himself as a conservative to middle Australia and he still rates highly courtesy of not being a member of the cynical ALP factional and union machines.

Fancy having the notorious Graham Richardson gloating on Four Corners about helping bring down Rudd by patching up differences between David Feeney and Mark Arbib.

Gillard's endorsement of the self-obsessed Bill Shorten has been another blot on her copybook. Shorten has been involved in more cynical factional hatchet jobs than anyone with the possible exception of Richardson himself. As an example, check out  yesterday's attack by Shorten's closely aligned factional daleks on Chris Bowen, one of the better talents to emerge out of the NSW Right in recent years.

For instance, how stupid was it of Gillard to yield to the demands of Shorten and Steve Conroy to kick her own long-time backer, Kim Carr, out of Cabinet in December's ill-considered reshuffle. Why gratuitously make enemies like that? Carr is tight with Darren Cheeseman and Rudd's numbers man, Allan Griffin.

Despite what Barrie Cassidy said on 3AW Breakfast yesterday morning, Gillard appears to have lost the support of much of the Victorian Left - her home base. One observer put it down to "historical hatred" given the original preselection battle between Gillard and Lindsay Tanner for the seat of Melbourne. Allan Griffin now leads the old "Tanner left" and Andrew Giles, convenor of Gillard's SL faction in Victoria, is mooted to replace him after he retires in 2013. This starts getting complicated when you consider that Gillard's long term mentor and former live-in partner, Michael O'Connor, is now national secretary of the CFMEU, the largest union bloc vote in the ALP Left.

The factional bosses know that Gillard can't win in 2013, yet handing over to a “third option” is not viable because it would just confirm the NSW disease of revolving leadership doors.

A return to Rudd would be different because it could be portrayed as correcting a mistake. Rudd is a great campaigner and the punters would love to see the cynical faceless men eat dirt.

Rudd's most publicly known attack on the factional bosses when Prime Minister came with this Glenn Milne story in September 2009 about his foul language defending proposed cuts to printing allowances.

Voters had no problem with it yet people like David Feeney, still wallowing on the backbench even under Julia Gillard, clearly took the dressing down badly and were determined to take their revenge.

This is the key to allowing Rudd a second crack at the top job. It must be done with conditions revolving around consultation and inclusiveness. For starters, caucus should reclaim the right to select the Ministry and that means Arbib, Shorten, Feeney and even Gillard, if she wants it, would serve under Rudd.

If Rudd really claims to have changed then various senior ministers should come down on him like a tonne of bricks every time he steps out of line.

An unfair dismissal by the party of workplace fairness

The biggest problem with Rudd's execution was that voters felt he wasn't given the necessary three written warnings demanded under Labor's Fair Work Act.

It was an unfair dismissal in so many ways - and the real reasons were never properly explained, until now.

If Club Fed's industrial relations tribunal – aka the 103 Caucus members – now insist that Rudd be reinstated into his job, the public will appreciate cowboy employers (ie the faceless men) being put in their place.

But Rudd will also know that he is in the Last Chance Saloon having learnt that Prime Ministers have very little power without majority support in Cabinet, Caucus and, to a lesser extent, both houses of Parliament.

As for policies, the first thing Prime Minister Rudd should do is ditch Gillard's mission impossible promise of delivering a budget surplus in 2012-13.

Instead he should proudly say that globally modest budget deficits was a small price to pay for stimulus during the GFC and Australia's national balance sheet can comfortably absorb it.

The two other things he should do is modestly reduce the $23 a tonne fixed price on the carbon tax (assuming the Greens and independents agree) and take a revised version of his original mining tax proposal to the next election.

The histrionics of Clive Palmer, revelations that Fortescue Metals has never paid company tax and Gina's Rinehart's $20 billion fortune and dysfunctional family make such a policy reversal very easy to justify – especially if Rudd admits that deficits remain on the horizon into the future.

Assessing yesterday’s media performance by Gillard

Julia Gillard was smart to ring-fence the education components of yesterday’s press conference to launch David Gonski's review of education funding. She said at the start that she would answer leadership questions after Gonski had left and the gallery, with the polite exception of Ten's Paul Bongiorno, played by these rules of engagement.

After Simon Crean, presumably without the endorsement of Gillard, undertook his own media blitz this morning effectively demanding the PM sack Rudd or call a spill, Gillard appeared weak when she presented her "getting on with the job" line.

However, from a tactical point of view Gillard has done precisely the right thing. She can't sack Rudd for being disloyal when she herself was one of the most disloyal deputy prime ministers in Australian history.

And Rudd has denied Andrew Wilkie's version of events, along with various media reports of private conversations with journalists and editors.

Rudd is perfectly entitled to play the victim here after someone leaked his video tirade. It wouldn't play well to sack a block after a Gillard ally did him over.

One of the most interesting disclosures today came when Bruce Hawker disclosed to Sky News that he was with Kevin Rudd on Saturday night when the video was first loaded up.

As Simon Crean's old press secretary Stephen Spencer asked on Twitter: "Did Bruce ring Sky or did Sky ring Bruce?"

It is worth noting that Hawker is a paid Sky contributor and Rudd has been studiously pushing the Sky interests during the recent Australia Network tender fiascos.

If Hawker is meant to be campaign director for Anna Bligh, what was he doing spending time with Kevin Rudd on Saturday night, the day before the official campaigning period commences? And vice versa. Surely Hawker has nothing to add to Rudd's preparations for the G20 and subsequent discussions about piracy and Syria.

Hawker is effectively acting as Rudd's campaign director - and for that he recently copped this unfair flogging from the Bill Shorten factional daleks.

Maybe Rudd will take the amazing advice proferred by Andrew Bolt yesterday when he wrote that the 5th most important change Rudd could make as Prime Minister would be to: "Scrap the media inquiry called to cow Labor's media critics. Labor should defend free speech, not restrict it. It also wouldn't hurt Rudd to mend fences with News Ltd."

Silly old Bolter still hasn't realised that the Murdochs have lost their ability to hand-pick governments and Prime Ministers.

Maybe Rupert should use next week's launch of the Sunday Sun to declare who the 103 Labor MPs should select in what many experts have declared is an almost certain Caucus showdown, despite the PM's denials yesterday.

Stephen Mayne

what's the difference between R and A?...

Kevin Rudd is a catholic, Abbott is a catholic and both hate Julia... Both are egoistical idiots too.