The joke when Peter Costello was trying in vain to cobble together a viable leadership push was that he had enough supporters to fill a Tarago van. Kevin Rudd probably has around the same level of support – Kev’s van might also be fitted with a trailer to carry a few extra bods up the back – but it in numerical terms it is far from being an unstoppable juggernaut which will steamroll Julia Gillard out of the top job.
My name's Kevin, I'm from Queensland…Photo: Courier Mail
It’s the numbers that matter in politics. In the absence of good numbers, aspiring leaders fall back on psychology. History suggests it offers no sure path to the leadership. Quite the opposite.
Peter Costello was a bit like the dorky guy at the school disco who hung around in the corner hoping a girl would ask him to dance.
In politics, power is not given away. It must be taken.
Keating, the junkyard brawler, knew this when he fired his first shot at Bob Hawke’s leadership. He knew he didn’t have the numbers. When Keating said, lying, that he only had “one shot in the locker”, he did so knowing that his one shot had blown such a hole in Hawke’s leadership that he would triumph in a second spill.
Costello never learned this. He says that it was because he was a party man, not a reckless individualist, that he never put the Liberals through the hardship of a forced ballot. Howard regarded this as weakness and he and his supporters used it to maintain his grip on the leadership, even up to the point where it became a turn-off for voters who believed it was time for a change.
The speculation about a Kevin Rudd comeback is quite tedious. All that matters is whether he is going to have a crack or not. If he doesn’t he almost certainly will not become prime minister again.
At the moment Rudd’s campaign has at its centre a major tactical flaw which is reminiscent of Costello’s failed designs on the prime ministership during his final two terms of office.
Firstly, Rudd wants Caucus to come to him. He wants to benefit from a groundswell of recognition by MPs, in defiance of factional bosses loyal to Gillard, that he was done wrong in 2010 and that he and only he can beat Tony Abbott.
Secondly, Rudd also seems to think that Julia Gillard will be unable to sustain the daily barrage of snippy little leaks that are chipping away at her authority and distracting her from governing.
This is all about psychology, framed around the hope that even if he doesn’t have the numbers, either the Prime Minister or the Caucus will simply conclude that things cannot continue the way they are.
What Kevin Rudd fails to realise is that there are a significant number of MPs who are so utterly disgusted by his tactics that they are becoming even more resolute in opposing his return.
MPs I have spoken to since Sunday’s little shin-dig at The Lodge said there was a sense of bewilderment and frustration at the way things are currently playing out. Many of these MPs have just spent an uninterrupted month in their electorates and have not been on the telephone to anyone in the press, but have been dismayed by the daily procession of leaks running down their boss. They are not so naïve as to ignore the woeful reality of Gillard’s start to the year, losing Andrew Wilkie after abandoning mandatory pre-commitment on poker machines, and enduring the acute embarrassment of her dopey former staff member’s complicity in the Australia Day fiasco. But despite all this their anger towards Rudd is more intense than ever.
One frontbencher, who like so many others freely describes Rudd in language unfit for a family newspaper, told me that he believed support for Rudd had, if anything, decreased.
“What Kevin fails to realise is that this transparent little trick of pissing on Gillard’s parade whenever she gets any clear air is galvanising us behind her,” he said.
This could well be wishful thinking but it exists quite widely within the Caucus, as evidenced by the unnamed minister over the weekend who, when asked of a surge in support for the former PM, jokingly asked whether he had surged from 14 votes to 15.
The only way the numbers will ever be tested is if Rudd muscles up. Sitting there waiting to be asked to dance doesn’t work.
One other feature of Rudd’s campaign of low-intensity psychological warfare is that his apparent reliance on outside help is also starting to irritate people of influence within the Caucus.
Rightly or wrongly, some uncharitable assessments are being made of Labor strategist Bruce Hawker who appears to have cosied up with the former PM. In his many public utterances as a commentator on Sky News, Bruce Hawker could normally sit on the fence for Australia, but he has been notably candid of late in his assessment of how troubled Julia Gillard’s prime ministership has become. Hawker is now running Anna Bligh’s campaign in Queensland where Kevin Rudd has chosen to play a starring role. Paul Keating publicly savaged Hawker last year when he backed John Robertson for the NSW Labor leadership, saying the lobbyist was typical of the “sicko populism” which had infected the ALP where winning was now regarded as more important than policy.
Say what you like about the faceless men, but at least people such as Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib and David Feeney were elected. If we’ve got a PR company helping to decide who runs the country, the voters would rightly feel even more disenfranchised than they did in June 2010 when the bloke they’d just elected suddenly disappeared.
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