Australian politics has entered uncharted waters after yesterday’s brutally efficient leadership coup, but the consensus view is that Julia Gillard is favourite to lead Labor to a victory which might have been beyond Kevin Rudd. One naysayer is Peter Brent of Mumble, a man who has been known to get things right from time to time. Brent’s assessment, published in The Australian yesterday, is that the odds now slightly favour the Coalition, whereas Labor under Rudd would most likely have increased its majority. I think he has it the wrong way around.
Certainly there is a view abroad – Mark Bahnisch of Larvatus Prodeo being one proponent – that changing leaders, particularly when in government, is inherently destabilising and destructive. The New South Wales state government’s game of musical chairs is usually offered as a cautionary tale. However, it is a mistake to compare the federal government with one whose problems are underlying, terminal and, most crucially, age-related. Through Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees and Kristina Keneally, NSW Labor’s primary vote has been super-glued to 30 per cent in the polls, for the simple reason that the leadership hasn’t been the problem.
It was a different story entirely with Kevin Rudd, who led a first-term government with a strong economic record that ought to be well ahead. The main problem lay with a leader whose credibility in the eyes of voters had been irreparably damaged by the celebrated series of policy backdowns followed by the government advertising fiasco. As is now well known, such problems were mirrored within the party. Stunning as events of recent days have been, there has been no mystery about their underlying cause: when Rudd’s poll lead evaporated, so did his authority in the party. All that remained to be answered was whether the party still felt he could struggle through to an election win, allowing the matter to be dealt with less bruisingly after the event.
Key to the decision that he couldn’t was internal polling which reportedly showed Labor headed for a net loss of 18 seats. Purported details of such polling were provided by a party insider to Andrew Bolt, and they tell a believeable story. Included are Labor seats on less than 5 per cent and Coalition seats on less than 1.5 per cent – about 40 all told. The broad picture is of Labor facing swings of 4 per cent in New South Wales and Queensland and as much as 8 per cent in South Australia, but no change in Victoria or Tasmania. In Western Australia, Hasluck would be lost, but no swing can be determined as Brand and Perth weren’t included in the poll. Also said to be a lost cause for Labor was Darwin-based Solomon.
Twenty-one seats in all were identified as Labor losses against three gains, which coming off 88 seats notionally held by Labor would leave them five seats short of a majority. This would involve an overall swing of about 3.5 per cent and a Labor two-party vote of about 49 per cent, slightly below the trend of published polling. Taken together, the evidence pointed to a worrying but by no means irretrievable situation for the government. What proved fatal to Rudd was a lack of confidence, based on recent performance, in his capacity to turn the ship around.
With regard to the likely electoral consequences, Peter van Onselen in The Australian pretty much bangs the nail on the head as far as I’m concerned, as does Niki Savva at The Drum. This from Lenore Taylor the Sydney Morning Herald also caught my eye:
Tony Abbott put a brave face on Labor’s last-ditch leadership change but privately the Coalition was desperately disappointed that it would not face an election against Kevin Rudd.
And it was utterly dismayed the mining industry had – as one source put it – ”succumbed to [Gillard’s] guile” by agreeing to her offer of a negotiating truce in the mining super profits tax war and to take the industry advertisements attacking the government off the air.
The Coalition has gone out on a limb in support of the mining industry and the prospect of a deal between the miners and the government has left it edgy.
Some developments from the upheaval:
• In what would be red-letter news on any other day, Lindsay Tanner made the shock announcement he would quit politics at the next election, making Greens candidate Adam Bandt a short-priced favourite to take his seat of Melbourne. VexNews reports “talk” that Tanner hopes to be succeeded in the seat by academic, commentator and occasional broadcaster Waleed Aly, who would seem just the thing to defuse the threat of the Greens, and Socialist Left warlord Andrew Giles, who wouldn’t.
• Shortly before the spill, VexNews reported that if Rudd went, so might two Queensland marginal seat MPs: Chris Trevor in Flynn and Jon Sullivan in Longman. Trevor said yesterday that Gillard would “always have my full support”, but Emma Chalmers of the Courier-Mail reports from Labor sources that he was contemplating quitting. Chalmers also quotes Sullivan expressing disappointment at the result, but going no further than that.
• According to The Australian’s Jack the Insider, “Liberal Party polling tells (Abbott) that he is starting this contest against Gillard from a long way behind. Kevin Rudd may have had his nose in front but the polling tells Abbott that Gillard would win the next election by the length of the straight.”
And while I’m here, here’s a piece I wrote for Crikey last week on the electoral state-of-play in South Australia. It might be showing its age in some respects.
South Australia was Labor’s forgotten triumph of the 2007 election, replicating on a smaller and less spectacular scale the decisive tectonic shift in Queensland.
The statewide two-party swing to Labor of 6.8% was only slightly below Queensland’s 7.5%, which was borne out in the proportion of seat gains: three out of 11 in South Australia, nine out of 29 in Queensland.
Labor’s resurgence put an end to a slump which dated back to 1987, the last time they had won a majority of the South Australian two-party vote, and 1990, when they last won a majority of seats.
Before that the state had been a source of strength for Labor in the post-war era, notwithstanding that a dubious electoral boundaries regime kept them out of office for much of that time at state level.
This was partly because the state party branch was spared the worst of the 1954-55 split, but also because of the large blue-collar workforce required to service an economy based largely on manufacturing and industry.
The difficulties experienced by these sectors meant the state was hit hard by the economic upheavals of the 1980s, which together with the damage done to Labor by the 1991 State Bank collapse led to a fundamental electoral shift in the Liberals’ favour.
At federal level this was manifested in a series of grim federal election results that reduced Labor to two seats out of 12 in 1996, to which only one seat was added in later terms of the Howard Government.
With one seat having been abolished in 2004, Labor’s doubling of their representation at the 2007 election gave them a bare majority of six seats out of 11, and left the Liberals without a safe seat in Adelaide.
The two Liberal hold-outs in the city were Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt and Andrew Southcott’s seat of Boothby, which cover the traditional party strongholds of the east and inner south.
In a tale that will become increasingly familiar as this series proceeds, speculation about the coming election was long focused on the Liberals’ chances of retaining these existing seats, but such talk faded as the new year began and disappeared with Labor’s poll collapse over the past two months.
Labor’s main strength in South Australia lies in the coastal plain north of the city centre, which makes a safe Labor seat of Port Adelaide and marginals of four others which are leavened with more conservative areas beyond.
The electorate of Adelaide covers inner suburbs both north and south of the city, which are respectively strong and weak for Labor, and the growing inner-city apartment population in between, which has proved highly volatile in its electoral habits of late.
In a rare sighting of the “doctors’ wives” effect, Labor’s Kate Ellis bucked the trend of the 2004 election to win Adelaide from Liberal incumbent Trish Worth, and she emerged from the 2007 election with what seemed like a secure 8.5% margin.
However, the Liberals are talking of internal polling showing them “closing the gap”, after staggering swings were recorded in the electorate at the March state election (at which Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith lost the state seat of Adelaide with a swing of 14.4%).
To the west of Adelaide is coastal Hindmarsh, which combines Labor-voting inner city areas with prosperous and conservative Glenelg in the south. Labor’s Steve Georganas won by the narrowest of margins when popular Liberal member Chris Gallus retired in 2004, before picking up a relatively modest swing in 2007.
North-east of the city centre is Makin, home to newer suburbs in the hills along with the eastern part of Salisbury on the plain. Makin is the only seat in the state which has form as a bellwether, being held by Labor from its creation in 1984 until 1996, Liberal through the Howard years and Labor’s Tony Zappia since 2007.
Further north is Wakefield, which offers even starker contrasts: deep red Elizabeth in the south, rapidly growing Gawler just past the city’s northern limits (where change is favouring Labor, if the state election is anything to go by) and conservative rural and wine-growing areas beyond.
Wakefield was a safe Liberal country seat until it absorbed Elizabeth at the redistribution before the 2004 election. Liberal candidate David Fawcett unexpectedly retained it for the Liberals on that occasion, but his narrow margin was eliminated by Labor’s Nick Champion in 2007 (Fawcett now stands poised to enter the Senate).
The only seat in Adelaide which conforms neatly with the mortgage belt marginal seat stereotype is Kingston, covering the city’s outer southern coastal suburbs. Labor’s Amanda Rishworth recovered this seat for Labor in 2007 after it was lost in 2004, interest rates having had a lot to do with it on each occasion.
The diversity that characterises the other marginals is significant, as it leaves their members as susceptible to rebellions in party heartlands as to the normally more decisive ebb and flow of the mortgage-payer vote.
This is where the mining tax could cause problems for Labor, as many blue-collar workers perceive a connection between the mining boom and the industrial and manufacturing sectors which employ them.
While South Australia is rarely given a guernsey as a “mining state”, BHP Billiton’s massive Olympic Dam project single-handedly allows the industry to punch above its weight, as it is associated in the public mind with the state shaking off its “rust belt” reputation from the 1990s.
Uncomfortably for Labor, BHP Billiton says the tax will jeopardise a $20 billion expansion to the project which is currently under consideration, a process that will certainly not be completed before the election.
Premier Mike Rann captured attention last week when he claimed any decision to stall the project would cost Labor four or even five seats.For all that, the Liberals have big hurdles to clear if South Australia is to produce any of the seats it needs to overhaul Labor’s majority.
The problem is a lack of low-hanging fruit — even the most marginal of Labor’s six seats, Kingston, sits on an imposing margin of 4.4%.
Furthermore, the March state election suggests Labor has a trump card in the form of a ruthlessly efficient marginal seat campaign machine, which helped Mike Rann hang on to office with just 37.5% of the primary and 48.4% of the two-party vote.
The only seats in the state which swung to Labor were the two most marginal, Light and Mawson (respectively in Wakefield and Kingston federally), and the critical eastern suburbs seats of Hartley and Newland likewise held firm against a torrid tide. Elsewhere, Labor suffered double-digit swings nearly everywhere they could afford to.
Federal Labor will be hoping to achieve similar successes in working-class areas with a campaign to focus minds on industrial relations, thereby shoring up valuable support in Makin and Wakefield in particular.
Beyond Adelaide, the state’s three non-metropolitan seats are of limited electoral interest, notwithstanding the vague threat the Democrats and now the Greens have posed in Mayo, where Jamie Briggs struggled over the line in the September 2008 by-election that followed Alexander Downer’s resignation.That leaves Barker in the state’s east, which covers rural territory which has never been of interest to Labor, and the outback electorate of Grey, which has transformed over the past two decades from safe Labor to safe Liberal — testament to the decline of the “iron triangle” cities of Whyalla, Port August and Port Pirie, and reflecting the experience of Kalgoorlie west of the border.
[And what adjective would Joe use to describe the unhinged one’s ascension?]
Is “whoops” an adjective?
The difference between a cactus and a caucus is that with a cactus the pricks are on the outside.
[Is “whoops” an adjective?]
No, Laocoon. Perhaps we could adjectivise the word.
Lewis Carroll had it down pat:
[ `What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.’
`What IS a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
`Why,’ said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?’
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.’ ]
Via Twitter:
[Therese_Rein
Thank you so much to everyone for your warm and supportive messages. Sending hugs back… ]
http://www.smh.com.au/national/rudd-tweets-his-thanks-to-supporters-20100625-z9hm.html#poll
Let me think about adjectivising words BK: Abbott has just been O’briened
The sad thing is that the Revolutionary Socialist Party probably have a larger array of policies than the Greens.
[Let me think about adjectivising words BK: Abbott has just been O’briened]
Nice try, Laocoon, but “O’briened” is the past tense of an albeit new verb.
TP
That lolcats is funny
nice circuit breaker
🙂
Laocoon
Perhaps “whoopsical” may fit the bill.
Clarke & Dawe hve their own Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/ClarkeAndDawe
Yes BK, a verb is indeed an “action” word…I must have been overwhelmed by Mr Action himself, Tony “death squad” Abbott
Glen #737
So Julia can do a “You & the Libs were too gutless to challenge Howard when polls showed he would lead you to certain defeat. In the same circumstances, the ALP and I had the courage to act in the Party’s best interests” job, Glen?
No you, don’t, Glen. Because you know that’s how the ALP will play it.
[Let me think about adjectivising words ]
Why not ‘reddened’?
808
They don`t even have registration as a party. There policies are unlikely tro be nearly as developed as the Greens policies.
The punters hated Tip, as did the Liberal Party Room….
Anyone who cannot see the following links in 816 needs their eyes checked.
http://www.aec.gov.au/Parties_and_Representatives/Party_Registration/Registered_parties/index.htm
http://greens.org.au/policies
What a laugh costello gave me. Crying crocodile tears/ mocking/ smerking (take your pick) about how *ruthless & efficient* labor took rudd down.
I would have thought that he would have wanted to avoid that subject at all cost – lest the obvious comparision be drawn – that he didn’t have the balls to challenge. He sat back and watched his party put to the sword. And the other libs were just as gutless.
And then the senior ones jumped ship like rats, before it sank.
I’ve said before I really felt for kevin rudd yesterday as his world fell to pieces around him and I still do.
But gutless costello with his political heart the size of a carraway seed is not fit to lick rudds boots. Let alone draw attention of how he personal failed when his own party needed him.
howard was right about costello. costello and the libs know it too.
abbott – great interview tonight. You are in the brown smelly stuff from hereon in, up to your neck. From now on, the questions are going to get worse. BTW how are those policies going ??
[What a laugh costello gave me. Crying crocodile tears/ mocking/ smerking (take your pick) about how *ruthless & efficient* labor took rudd down.]
Costello was too gutless to do what Gillard and Rudd did. They both had the guts to knock off a faltering leader. Costello never had the guts to do that.
[Costello never had the guts to do that.]
Or, apparently, contemplate it.
Interesting take on the Spill:
http://drag0nista.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/conned-or-captured-voter-sentiment-and-rudd%E2%80%99s-demise/
Tip actually had a similar problem to Rudd, which is that neither of them really took the time to built a support base amongst their back benchers.
[This leadership change is completely in the vein of Labor politics. ]
briefly: Assuming Tingle’s take is accurrate, then that statement isn’t true. The Rudd Removal occurred without caucus agreement, or even it would seem, knowledge. Your assessment of the conditions around Rudd’s leadership may be fair (I don’t know to be honest), however even if Rudd’s leadership was at the behest of Gillard’s support, it doesn’t explain why his removal as leader was necessary without the knowledge of ministers, Cabinet or caucus, or as an ambush – which is certainly how it appears, esp with Howes on Lateline seemingly trumpeting a Gillard victory.
Arbib, Feeney, Shorten are all in their first terms as MPs. They are hardly John Faulkner types: long serving, well respected, so it’s implausible to me that they’d have any real pull in the parliamentary party.
hahahaaha
http://www.rsvp.com.au/profile/display.jsp?handle=ItsKevin07&s_rid=smh:rainbowstrip:content2:25-06:rb_krudd:beendumpedlately?joinrsvpnowforfree
Difference was we’d have lost even with Costello by APEC 2007. It had to be done in 2005/6 with Howard retiring.
Howard had had 11.5 years in the job and 4 wins and 1 loss under his belt.
Rudd got rolled without facing an election as PM when he would have won anyway and he ends with a 1-0 win loss ratio.
RedWombat @ 825
That IS clever, I must admit. Well, sort of.
826
Howard lost in 1987 and 2007 so he lost twice.
[Howard had had 11.5 years in the job and 4 wins and 1 loss under his belt.]
He lost in 1987 as well.
829
Too slow!
Glen
Robb & Minchin would never allow anyone as liberal & Leftie as Holt and Gorton to win pre-selection (not that they’d want to be part of the current illiberal, arch-conservative NeoCon party) or trust a turncoat like Lyons.
[Rudd got rolled without facing an election as PM when he would have won anyway and he ends with a 1-0 win loss ratio.]
Hang on, just the other day (while Rudd was still PM) you didn’t know who was going to win and now you say Rudd would have won.
No 826
Rudd was neither the first nor the last PM to suffer bad polls. For Labor to dump him before he has had a chance to face the people again essentially proves Latham’s point right. It’s an exercise in marketing, and Labor hasn’t the slightest care about values, ideas and principles.
Centrbet has just taken down the market for Liberal leader at the next election. What do they know?
so if Rudd had lost the 2010 election he would have a higher winning percentage than Howard.
828
By APEC 2007 he’d only lost once.
G.P has your party apologised for wanting Australia to have a recession.
it voted to have one.
Well if you are going from Howies first 2 (1-1) and Rudd’s (2-0) then yes.
No 837
My party is irrelevant to what has just happened in the last 48 hours.
I’m watching the full interview with Mark Latham, and can say that his commentary which has appeared as sound bites in the nightly news have been entirely cherry-picked.
The NSW Right with Arbib and Co does Mexi.
They rule your Party.
I’d hate to think how many PMs the Libs would have gone through from 1996-2007 if every time we got to 52-48 behind we assassinated our leader?
Glen, nice try at changing the subject. Costello and the rest of the libs just never had the balls, never had it in them to even try to salvage a win . Admit it or not it is on the public record.
If *it* HAD to be done in 2005/06 why wasn’t it done ? No ticker any of them !
The senior former lib ministers post 2007 election then displayed a mad scramble jump to get off the HMAS liberal gravy train. Even the elders of the party – the so called keepers of the flame.
What a pack of third raters….
The likes of Nick Minchin, who paved the way for Tony Abbott to rise to high office, have now seen their chickens come home to roost.
As he has demonstrated again on the 7.30 Report this evening, Abbott cannot change his mode of political interaction, as he is congenitally incapable of conducting himself in any way other than in full-on, attack dog style, and this style just won’t work in the longer term up against Julie Gillard without the majority of voters seeing his behaviour as mysogynistic bullying – not a good look, and no way to win over women, who make up the majority of those who vote on election day.
The SA powerbroking Senator and climate change denier elevated the monstrous Tony Abbott to the leadership of the Coalition by knobbling Malcolm Turnbull over the ETS and derailing his tenure, but in doing so he has unleashed the lugubrious Liberal leader to rampage across the countryside, laying waste whole political constituencies in his pursuit of former PM Rudd, with the burning torch-carrying News Ltd mob following in his path of destruction.
Abbott is like the robot Gort, made famous in the original 1950’s sci fi classic ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ capable of creating unimaginable havoc unless he can be controlled by his masters, but it looks increasingly like there was, and remains no-one within the Coalition who has learned to say the words “Klaatu, barada, nikto!” to rein in the Leader of the Opposition before he leads his party over the precipice to utter defeat with his shrill rhetoric and strident attacks.
No 841
Just imagine it. Quite unbelievable.
There’s no way anybody can say that Rudd was on the nose like Keating, or even Howard for that matter. Both of those PMs had decades of history with the electorate too. Dumping Rudd so soon smacks of desperation to be frank.
gp went :
How very true 🙂
[If *it* HAD to be done in 2005/06 why wasn’t it done ? No ticker any of them !]
Umm Dave for the very reason that the class of 1996 refused to knife the leader who gave them their jobs. Something many a rat in the Labor caucus failed to do on June 23 2010 the gutless wonders.
Generic Person@844
Read the following two posts from Bilbo, since you obviously have come in late to class.
William Bowe@634
and in particular:
William Bowe@642
Glen – Mexi fully supports what happened to Rudd. his leadership style of micromanagement is not going to work when the tough times happen.
I have worked with peopel tht remind me of Rudd, very likable and great when things are going right but once their is a problem they just cannot cope.
The only time the Liberal Party should have changed leaders was in 2005 rather than introduce the worst act of parliament to ever be seen since at least the white australia policy
yes GP the Liberal Party has been irrelevant since it failed to move to a Costello leadership.
I agree Rudd was not on the nose like Keating was