A thread for discussion of part two of the ABC’s documentary on the life and times of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government.
Last week’s opening instalment of the ABC’s The Killing Season treated us to the thrills and spills of the Rudd government’s first two-and-a-half years in government. In tonight’s episode, we move into the sharper end of proceedings. Here again as a thread for discussion of what transpires. Play nice, everybody …
Author: William Bowe
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.
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Meher
Honestly those of you who still carry on about Rudd and Beazely have REALLY lost the plot.
Firstly Gillard was a key player in the removal of Beazely so it really is irrelevant to the Rudd story. Gillard gained MOST from the removal of Beazely, since she was elevated to deputy leader, something that would not have happened under Beazley, given Jenny Macklin was in the job.
Secondly, Beazley had been a leader for a LONG time and had already LOST two elections. He had developed a rather nice but weak and cuddly persona, which would never have beaten a wily Howard. Clearly many in the ALP (Julia the leader) really did not think him up to the job, hence the appointment of Latham (Jesus what misjudgement from Gillard) and the Crean experiment.
The comment about the role of the “innocent” neophytes is silly. These guys were skilled factional players, knowing how to play the power game in their own small ponds, but swinging the votes in highly factionalised ALP or union ballots is a far cry from playing the federal ELECTORAL game, and these guys did not grasp the ELECTORAL impact of what they were doing. They came to parliament thinking it was just an upmarket union ballot.
dtt@101: I certainly wasn’t carrying on about Rudd and Beazley, merely observing that the same forces that – according to the show last night – made sure that Gillard carried through and challenged Rudd, were the forces that also pushed out Beazley and pushed out Rudd: Arbib, Bitar, Dastyari, etc. Hawker played a key role in the elevation of Rudd, but I don’t think he ever switched to the Gillard side of the fence (but I’m not sure: maybe he did for a bit. Certainly, Amanda Lampe, who headed Gillard’s office for a bit, was something of a protege of Hawker).
By the time Rudd challenged Gillard again in 2012, Arbib and Bitar were gone: off to work for James Packer, as Rudd observed last night. But Dastyari and Hawker were prominent again.
Why does it matter? Because these were the same guys responsible for the revolving door of NSW leaders in the late 2000s. As I observed earlier, they all come from different cultural backgrounds, but all share the same culture of bowing to the great god of opinion polls and focus groups.
So, I think it all matters.
BTW, just so we’re clear, I understand that Mark Arbib – the same guy who Rudd denigrated several times last night – was the bloke who locked in an unwilling Caucus behind Rudd in 2006 when, for a period, it looked like Gillard would have had the numbers. Why? Presumably because Rudd went better in focus groups.
There’s a story here, and it’s actually not one about whether Rudd and/or Gillard were good or bad people. It’s about a toxic culture. Is it gone? I don’t know.
I read the abridged ABC transcripts of the show and found it interesting. It was certainly an interesting time in our political history. I’m not sure any of the players come out of this with much glory.
One thing that I found very interesting last night was a supposedly left winger surrounding herself around the slimy likes of Arbib Howes et al.
And where are they now? Working for Packer!
How on earth did Gillard think having that lot working with her was a good idea?
Never liked her and never will.
dtt@103: Re your point about electoral impact. We’ll never know what that was. The Gillard version of history, which I believe gets a lot of support from people who were up close and personal with Rudd and his office at the time, was that Rudd was exhausted and losing the plot in 2010 and would have struggled in an election. Gillard, by the skin of her teeth, managed to hang onto government.
As I said earlier, perhaps Rudd would have gotten his act together and run a great campaign and won. We’ll obviously never know.
What we do know now, with the benefit of hindsight, was that a group of people who were not happy with the change of leader were hell-bent on undermining her and pulling her down and started doing so before the 2010 election. It is difficult to believe that Rudd was not a leading member of this group, but I am fully expecting him to deny in next week’s episode that he did anything to undermine Julia, ever leaked anything to Laurie Oakes or Peter Hartcher, etc., etc. So those posters who want to keep on loving him will have an excuse for seeing him as blameless in everything.
The show last night gave interesting glimpses into Rudd’s character. Some former leaders would have probably sat there and said some things like: “I partly blame myself for what happened, I didn’t do enough to take people with me” or even have talked about the bad culture I referred to in my previous posts.
But not Rudd. With Arbib and Bitar, the guys who had made him party leader in the first place, it was straight out: they’re evil, look at them they’ve gone to work for Jamie Packer, enough said. With Swan, it was “he’s a traitor, I’ve never spoken to him again since 2010” (gee, that must have made life easy for Treasury and Foreign Affairs officials trying to work together in the 2010-12 period).
Rudd seems to have no grasp of larger processes or factors that might compel people sometimes to act against him, even though they like him. It seems that you are either fully on the Rudd bus, or on the side of the forces of darkness. There is really no cause other than the Rudd cause: if anything stands in the way, it should be torn down. If anything goes wrong, it’s always the fault of others who are against me, not about anything I might have done differently myself.
MTBW@104: “One thing that I found very interesting last night was a supposedly left winger surrounding herself around the slimy likes of Arbib Howes et al.
And where are they now? Working for Packer!
How on earth did Gillard think having that lot working with her was a good idea?”
Just as much as Rudd liked it in 2006.
meher
Are you of the NSW Right? You certainly sound like one of them.
As I said before, meher comes across as a spinmeister for the likes of Arbib and Bitar. He does a good job, but in the end it’s all needless verbage because most of us can recognise an approximation of the truth when it stares us in the face.
You just need to look at the characters that the protagonists surround themselves with. Howes, Arbib, Bitar, Feeney et al. What a bunch!
I didn’t watch last night but is it possible the diffidence people have described in Gillards’s interview is simply due to her acute embarrassment at having been taken in by shonks like Arbib and Bitar?
adrian
[You just need to look at the characters that the protagonists surround themselves with. Howes, Arbib, Bitar, Feeney et al. What a bunch!]
Exactly!
ajm
If you can get it on iview make sure to have a look at it. Sarah Ferguson did an excellent job.
ajm
[I didn’t watch last night but is it possible the diffidence people have described in Gillards’s interview is simply due to her acute embarrassment at having been taken in by shonks like Arbib and Bitar?]
Definitely. She looked like a puppet. She actually admitted to agreeing not to challenge Rudd during that famous two hour confrontation, and then rang Arbib and was told to go back in to Rudd ten minutes later to challenge him.
It’s no coincidence that Arbib and Bitar both left after the fiasco. They coordinated it. And killed two Labor PMs as Albo said.
The curious question about Gillard is why/how she was ever accommodated in the Victorian Socialist Left. I recall just how radical a beast it was in the 60s and 70s under Cairns, Hartley and Crawford and even a communist like Halfpenny was able to exert undue influence. I know because I was there! In many respects it was well to the left of the Communist Party and a strong hard-left residue still remains. We know Gillard was reviled and distrusted by the Tanner Left as well as the Ferguson Left. We also know her so-called radicalism did not embrace marriage equality and that picture of her knitting something or other for the royal baby reinforced to me her …… er…… flakiness. Surely others in the party/left factions also knew.
So how did the comrades ever have confidence in her? We know Tanner saw through her as he rebuffed her earlier preselection attempts, so where was her power source? It could have been with the AWU and her ex-beau Bruce Wilson, but those RC events happened in the early 90s immediately prior to her eventual election in 1998 to the seat of Lalor when her shredded reputation in certain union and legal circles was still fresh. It’s puzzling.
While I admired her administrative abilities of cleaning up the mess that Rudd’s office certainly was, she was no leader. She had little strategic focus and she was too amenable to the persuasion of others. Sorry girls; she was an excellent no. 2, but an uninspiring no.1. Some people are just born that way.
Ross, does this answer any questions for you?
http://www.theage.com.au/business/union-influence-a-worry-for-the-developing-green-path-20100820-1393o.html
Ross
Totally agree with your comments!
Ross
[The curious question about Gillard is why/how she was ever accommodated in the Victorian Socialist Left.]
Were the other “lefts” strongly male dominated at the time? Perhaps she couldn’t make any progress there for that reason.
From Malcolm Farr at news.com.au
[A former ALP powerbroker has firmly denied ever labelling Bill Shorten untrustworthy, after explosive claims were aired last night. Mark Arbib, then a Labor senator but now out of Parliament, told news.com.au: “It didn’t happen.”]
lizzie
[Mark Arbib, then a Labor senator but now out of Parliament, told news.com.au: “It didn’t happen.”]
I wouldn’t trust Mark Arbib as far as I could throw him.
I didn’t watch either of the Killing Fields episodes but the discussion about them is quite interesting!
When is the ALP going to stop putting forward people the ALP then tell us have psychopathology or at the very least “can’t be trusted” even by their own side?
Latham, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, and now Shorten.
Ross@113: I think Gillard was on reasonably solid ground with the Ferguson Left at some point. As I understand it, she used Emily’s List requirements to defeat Tanner’s preferred male nominee for preselection in her seat: a seat which, as Labor factions do, Tanner’s harder left friends saw as “belonging” to them. Tanner never forgave her, although other Victorian hard left people certainly did, for a while. (Tanner, of course, never saw himself as “hard left”: I remember hearing him once say that he wasn’t a hardline socialist, but he was “anti-corporatist”: a bit of a giggle when one remembers what he does for a living nowadays! But speaking as a man who has been through more than one painful divorce – which I understand is also the case with Tanner – I sympathise with his need to try to earn as much money as he can.)
My recollection from dealing with them in various ways at the time was that – thanks significantly to the sterling efforts of Ferguson himself – the Victorian Left in the 1980s and 1990s was becoming a more complex and diverse sort of place than it had been in the Hartley/Crawford/Halfpenny era. Gillard would have fitted in ok somewhere, although I do agree that having a relationship with Bruce Wilson was skating a thin ice (not because of any alleged corruption he might have been involved in, but because he was an operator in the CFMEU’s nemesis, the AWU).
I think even now, Gillard’s personal views would accord with a lot of those of the Victorian “soft left” (for want of a better term). The breakdown of relations between she and Ferguson, and even Carr, seemed to be more to do with interpersonal disagreements rather than policy ones). Her moderate social conservatism on issues such as gay marriage wouldn’t have been out of place in the Victorian Left a generation ago: what do you reckon Hartley would have had to say about the issue!!
MTBW: so are you saying that you wouldn’t trust Arbib as far as you can throw him when he says that he didn’t say that he wouldn’t trust Shorten as far as he could throw him?
BTW, I had dealings with Gerry Kitchener (who was also close to the Ferguson group) in the distant past. I choose to make no comment about the man other than to say that he seemed a nice enough bloke.
But I will say that – in the light of the Bob Ellis case in which Ellis put slurs about one or both of the wives of Abbott and Costello into the mouth of Rodney Cavalier, who then fervently denied he had ever said them, leading to a huge payout by Ellis’s publisher – the ABC was reasonably brave putting Kitchener’s comments to air. Arbib’s response was 100% predictable.
meher
I stand by what I said above.
I like you apparently was a member of the NSW ALP for nearly thirty five years.
I was a delegate to State Conference for more years than I can remember and had no truck with the Right ever.
Meher
And I should say that I challenged Roozendaal for the State Organiser and received 42.8% of the vote on the conference floor.
MTBW@123: No, I’m not a member of the NSW Right. Nor a member of the Tasmanian ALP Right (which is virtually non-existent down here where it’s pretty much all the way with the CFMEU).
My politics for a long time now have mostly been slightly to the right of the Right of the ALP (somewhere between those of Latham and Turnbull, probably a bit closer to Latham on most matters except culture and the arts, where he is bit of a philistine), although I am a very committed environmentalist.
If you read my earlier posts in this thread (and I admit they were rather long) I thought I was being scathing about the influence of Arbib, Bitar, Roozendaal et al because I think they help to make the NSW ALP into a policy-free zone.
However, if we look at the more noble previous history of the NSW Right, I am very supportive of the broad suite of policy positions put forward by the likes of Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran, Laurie Brereton, Paul Keating, Mark Latham, Bob Carr and even Graham Richardson (on the environment).
Of course, there were things not to like about these guys: some of them (Keating, Wran, Richo and Brereton all come to mind here) allowed themselves to associate too closely with some dubious characters on the fringe of the party (eg, Aussie Joe Meissner). But then Ian McDonald used to hang out with some interesting people too.
They also presided over a rather tribal system of political development in which loyalty and patience were sometimes (but not always) valued over merit: but, once again, the Left is hardly blameless here too.
However, what I do like about where people like Wran and Keating and Latham (who, if we leave aside his personality defects, has a superb policy brain) was that their broad political views have the following characteristics:
. committed to giving a fair go to the underdog, while remaining pro-business and, at most, only mildly socialist;
. respectful of people’s religious convictions, while being gently socially progressive (Laurie Brereton, for instance, would be to the left of many Labor Left people on social issues);
. generally far more interested in environmental protection than the Left (Wran, Richo, Carr, Brereton and Latham are all very interested in environmental issues, whereas your hero John Faulkner is about the only instance I can think of from the NSW Left);
. interested in sensible economic and taxation reform, rather than the unrealistic “put award wages through the roof and tax the hell out of the rich stuff that the Left say they want;
. attuned to the attitudes of middle class people in the suburbs, rather than just those of inner city armchair lefties and the ever-declining population of militant unionists; and
. always moderate and inclusive in their approach to governing NSW or the nation.
Australians are very wealthy people by world standards, but most of us do have social consciences and a commitment to giving a fair go to those citizens who aren’t able entirely to help themselves.
But you can’t push Australians too far to the left. There has never been the slightest evidence to suggest that Australians want socialism: when Chifley boldly offered to them, they resoundingly rejected it. When Rex Connor, under Whitlam, wanted to borrow masses of money to invest in development, they showed they didn’t want that either. So a right-oriented Labor leadership is best-placed to lead the party into office and then going about achieving some important social democratic outcomes and, as has been shown again and again, do something to protect the environment. (Down here in Tassie, you’d die waiting for the Left-dominated State ALP to do anything to help the environment.)
That’s my view and I don’t feel that I have any reason to be ashamed of it. I respect what you have undoubtedly done for the ALP, and greatly respect your hero John Faulkner, but I’m glad that the faction you belong to has never held sway in NSW or nationally.
MTBW@118
Now it has been officially denied we can believe it.
https://www.change.org/p/the-hon-tony-abbott-po-box-6022-house-of-representatives-parliament-house-canberra-act-2600-we-urge-the-abbott-government-to-cease-attacking-prof-triggs-and-instead-set-about-addressing-the-appalling-treatment-of-children-in-detention-and-the-violati?recruiter=318089439&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=share_email_responsive
A petition in support of Gillian Triggs for all those who are not on the side of Abbott, Morrison, Bishop and Dutton!
I dont know about Gillard being ‘taken in’ by Arbib and Bitar. Id call it a confluence of interests.
They brought NSWitis to Canberra and it screwed up everything. Including, it must be said, Gillard’s career. She should have been a 1.5 – 2 termer after a handover from Rudd somewhere around the end of his 2nd term.
Instead she got one troubled term, and was herself rolled by the same forces that installed her.
Reading the comments I see that hero worship always prevails when discussing political figures. Human nature is that politicians MUST be hardened deal makers to get anywhere.
We vacillate between being angry that politicians are too soft, then get angry when they appear too hard. But the in-between balanced personality is given short shrift also for being wishy washy.
Politics isn’t American Idol. I know our media likes to portray it that way but it ain’t. So much good policy from across the spectrum gets lost because of personality politics. And we all fall for it (just as the politicians and their apparatchiks do).
In a way, these after-the-fact expose style programs are a way for media to ‘validate’ their actions as promoters of this idolisation. Reading comments from many media types recently show a kind of selective amnesia that puts them at arms length from events they were crucially involved in. Plus, their partisan/image-political superficiality is allowed to continue because what is uncovered only reinforces their lack of in-depth analysis.
I haven’t been watching the show (I’d get too angry) but is there any sense about what the coup was really all about. Or is it opaque because we’ll never really know what Bitar, Howe and Arbib were really up to.
BILLY!
Crikey wants Greentard back. Willing to dangle a trip to Melbourne to get it too:
K-1-7@114, Thanks for that informative link re the identity of Gillard’s early backers. On one hand she aligned with hard-arsed comrades in Wilson (AWU) and O’Connor (CMFEU), both of whom turned out to be Labor rodents. What values did she share with them? On the other, her early alliance was with with the ‘soft-left’ Ferguson, which I wasn’t aware of. So, how do you reconcile the two sides?
I suppose if you are determined to get into parliament, then climb the greasy pole to the top, you need help from a …er… diverse range of sources. I just can’t reconcile her genteel and demure values as a mature woman to her supposed youthful radicalism. And as for her taste in men, well………. O’Connor to Wilson to Tim! What a contradiction she was!
Well, I’ve learnt something new today. Apparently it was Craig Emerson that coined the term “the killing season”.
[
Craig Emerson @DrCraigEmerson 19 mins19 minutes ago
@mumbletwits Guilty as charged, your honour. I coined “the killing season” when correctly predicting Malcolm would be challenged by Abbott.
]
And as for her taste in men, well………. O’Connor to Wilson to Tim! What a contradiction she was!
A shallow and sexist comment.
Please everyone remember that the series has been extremely well, almost flawlessly, edited in order to sustain the theme of the title. Some of the sentences have been pruned to entice more viewers in the ‘preview’ shots.
Meher Baba@120, Geez, talk of ‘Bagdad Bill’ Hartley takes me back. However, I disagree strongly that he would not have backed marriage equality. Bill was up for any and every progressive cause because he loved to sow discord and he just loved seeing his name and face on the front pages. Being on the edge of his magic circle in those days I witnessed how his face used to light up at any controversy. Like so many social activists, ego was a huge part of his complicated personality. It’s one hell of a journey from the Little Libs in WA, to nearly causing the downfall of Whitlam re the Iraqi loans affair to end his life being the reviled mouthpiece of Saddam Hussein in Australia.
You make a most valid point about Tanner’s ‘anti-corporatism’. I also vaguely recall his reference to something similar, but anything more radical than an ‘anti-corporatist’ stance in this country would get you sacked by the G-G. There are limits, you know! Seriously, he was a genuine reformer and I was sorry to see him retire much too early. I believe he is on his third marriage with a tribe of kids to care for, so it does make his volunteer work with Melbourne’s Somali community very meritorious. A really decent bloke!
Thanks Ross. I have heard it said that Hartley was a pretty likeable guy, whatever one thought of his political views: which started out seriously Young Liberal (and I believe Christian) and then went all the way across to where they ended up.
Tanner always impressed me, but his exit from politics when Gillard became leader bore all the hallmarks of a dummy spit. And one does hear suggestions from time to time that he wasn’t totally removed from the subsequent undermining of her: maybe that’ll come up in the final episode next week, we’ll see.
I didn’t know about his work with the Somali community: certainly a worthwhile activity.
He was the sort of bloke who, under different circumstances, might have become a leader: intelligent, articulate, scrubs up ok, etc. When Keating lost in 1996, Tanner and Latham were widely seen as the two great white hopes of the party beyond Beazley. Sadly, neither of them were able to fulfill their potential: Latham because of personality defects, and Tanner because his factional connections didn’t work to his advantage, and probably also just pure bad luck.
K17@114: Gee, that link rather reinforces my arguments about the anti-environment propensities of the Labor Left, especially the CFMEU (although, to be fair, the CFMEU at least has improved a bit since then).
meher
Just wanted to add I never joined a faction but voted with the “soft left”.
AJM@116, you raise a valid point about female representation in the ‘other lefts’. I recall Victorian MLCs Jean Maclean and Joan Coxedge being dominant voices within their own ultra left faction following Hartley’s expulsion in the 80s. Also, Joan Kirner was influential in the SL and ended up Premier. Kirner grew out of community activism on education, health etc, whereas MacLean and Coxedge had support from radical industrial and student unions. The former equated to broad support, the latter to narrow support. The difference was stark.
Were the other “lefts” strongly male dominated at the time? Perhaps she couldn’t make any progress there for that reason.
K17
[I haven’t been watching the show (I’d get too angry) but is there any sense about what the coup was really all about. Or is it opaque because we’ll never really know what Bitar, Howe and Arbib were really up to.]
It was the polls and sense they were going to lose the next election.
[It was the polls and sense they were going to lose the next election.]
You’d have to add the incompetence of Rudd as an administrator and communicator.
[You’d have to add the incompetence of Rudd as an administrator and communicator.]
Funnily enough there was overwhelming support from about 99% of Labor PBers while he was PM, right up to about 10 seconds after he was tossed out.
He just couldn’t do wrong according to most here.
Diog
I don’t think I was here then 🙂
But in their defence, he was a hero for defeating Howard and the gloss took a while to rub off, I suppose.
lizzie@142
It is difficult for people here to comment on administration as you have to get right into the midst of things to see what happens there, so the only knowledge we have largely comes from his detractors.
But you comment that he failed as a communicator is just laughable.
Last night included his debate with Abbott on health where he just slayed Abbott.
Rudd was generally acknowledged as a great communicator and campaigner.
Where he did demonstrably come unstuck was in seeing the necessity to build support for policies before enacting them. e.g. Mining Tax.
In that he was not alone.
bemused
[Rudd was generally acknowledged as a great communicator and campaigner.]
Yes, he was a great campaigner. No question. His reputation as a poor administrator comes from many sources, not just his stint as PM. Perhaps you haven’t read enough about it. His ministers found it difficult to reach him when they needed to. Staff were kept waiting for hours for meetings. I think it slowly built into frustration.
It was more than that Lizzie – a read of Pollbludger in the months leading up to Rudd’s removal would show that many of us were frustrated that Rudd was being undermined at times by his own side (particuarly over the mining tax). Psephos (who we knew was a staffer of Sen Feeney, one of the conspirators) was a frequent contributor at this time. Many of us couldn’t understand why Rudd was left to carry the burden of selling the message on his own, and Psephos implied often that there was a greater plan and we had to be patient.
We now know what that plan was……….
Poor administration is hardly a valid reason for dumping a sitting PM even if it were true.
hairy nose
OK. I didn’t read PB then. But as an ordinary voter, so to speak, I began to have a sinking feeling about the next election after the climate change debacle.
adrian
I think ‘administration’ covers a wide field in this instance.