9 September 2010
Gillard leading Labor off a cliff
This was an election principally driven not by politicians, minders or party tacticians but working journalists.
David Marr brought Rudd down (with an opening sentence some lawyers argue was treason), Phillip Adams partly resurrected him with his broadcast confessional, Bryce Corbett (of the Women's Weekly) by raising her private life did great harm to Gillard from which Mark Latham, another journalist, bizarrely rescued her with a handshake; and then came Laurie Oakes, who all but finished off Gillard with the shocking news that negotiations preceded Rudd's exit and Cabinets often robustly disagree, and Kerry O'Brien who with his weekly skewering inquisitions reduced both candidates to gibbering wrecks.
No move by any campaign strategist or mining giant was as decisive as these journalists' interventions which were in their way as history-changing as Woodward and Bernstein.
And they changed history almost inadvertently, for none, I believe, were ideologically driven, merely sniffing blood. They raised some ordinary questions of ordinary behaviour and pretended they were important, beating them up, as they were trained to do, into livid, suppurating scandals.
They told some big lies too, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps not. They called Rudd's ending unique: never before was a first, elected leader thus brought down, shock horror, lord, lord, the days that I have seen. Yet Gorton was brought down after his first win at an election and so was Menzies; and Whitlam after only thirty-five months in office was brought down too, by a secretive and unelected though scarcely faceless man. Curtin won a single election and was likewise foreshortened, and the party leaders Snedden, Hayden, Peacock, Howard and Latham evicted after one lost election, Downer, Crean, Nelson and Turnbull without even one. Yet we were told Rudd's fate was unique, and we believed this baseless fabrication and grew angry at the shock and the horror of it, the way we do. What fools these mortals be.
Another thing was the number of days these worthless, intrusive, distracting, trivial headlines chewed up. Rudd's interventions cost eight days; 'the new Julia' three; the Women's Weekly two; Mark Latham's brusque body language two; the debate format three; Abbott's unsleeping marathon two; leaving only 15 days out of 35 for debating policy difference.
We were told Abbott's choice not to sit on a stage but to stand upright in an auditorium was 'game-changing'. Why? It proved nothing; it meant nothing. We were told he would get little sleep for one whole night and this was somehow significant. Why? It meant nothing, nothing at all except that he was ambitious and physically disciplined, and we knew that already.
Subjects as big as the fate of the earth however were sidelined, and hair tinting, airbrushing, marriage - plans and old lovers contrastingly emphasised. The need for us to continue offering young Australian corpses to poll-cheating Karzais' unending bloodbath went unexamined (why?), but the fact that Gillard's former leader approached her on a street-walk was said to have 'crossed the line'. What line? That you cannot ask a candidate for office a question in a public place? What line?
Five young diggers died in a spurious cause while the election raged and this was fine. Mark Latham adopted a bullying tone and this was a national scandal.
Worst, I think, was what might be called the campaign's 'theological correctness'. Mary MacKillop must be praised though the Prime Minister, an atheist, by definition despised her religion. The Prime Minister, a defender of jobs, hailed free trade as irreducibly necessary, though it killed jobs right and left, as Bob Katter with poignant dingo yelps and chest-beatings correctly noted. The war must go on though next to no Australian soldier or civilian, not one, thought it should. It was theologically correct to say it should, and, lo, it will. The surplus must return, though thousands will suicide for want of income because it does. Taxes must not go up, though interest rates are always free to. Why? Please explain.
The Unexamined Idiotic Premise (UIP) was everywhere apparent in this lump-witted campaign. That Rudd, who had without mercy ended the careers of Beazley, Howard, Nelson, Debus, McMullan, Kerr, McKew and Garrett, himself deserved mercy and a new career, though they do not. Why? That Rudd deserved a high ministerial position after vilely maltreating the highest office of all. Why?
Most amazing was the UIP that assassins get honeymoons - believed by Gillard even as late as our conversation in the Penrith Panthers on August 20. "Had to go with the honeymoon," she said to me and Rhys Muldoon.
Assassins get honeymoons. Really? John Wilkes Booth was dead within five days, Lee Harvey Oswald within three. Brutus was deeply unpopular an hour after Caesar's death, hunted down and killed within a year. Keating was deeply unpopular immediately after he topped Hawke and his polls deep-sixed though they recovered later. Peacock was so unpopular after he topped Howard that he lost an unlosable election. Yet fools thought Gillard would get an automatic honeymoon after an uncontested ballot brought on at a day's notice and a felled Prime Minister outlining through tears his 800 achievements in a courtyard. A honeymoon period? Really?
And she will get none this time either. She has become through a bungled campaign, the worst since 1966 (when Arthur Calwell running against the Birthday Ballot and the Vietnam War lost 22 seats), that very strange thing, a powerless, genderless Prime Minister without influence or friends who is promising to 'open the curtains and let in the sunlight' after a lifetime of secrecy, flannel and backroom intrigue. So secretive that she wouldn't tell Rudd his fate, or the nation who her Finance, Defence or Foreign Ministers would be (why not?) or if she planned to marry Tim or when she would occupy The Lodge (why not?), or how she differed in significant policy from the man who had lost his way and why, if he had lost his way, she wanted the wandering drongo back, and why Cabinet discussions would 'go with me to my grave', she is now on a promise to let the sunlight in and be frank and open about everything. She is just So-o-o-o 2007' as a female friend just said to me and dizzyingly unsuited to the modern age.
The independents, by discussing things of real concern (like how the rural half live and what we do with our water) and restoring the old Athenian practise of thoughtful public discussion of things on the public mind have shown how wrong, how crashingly wrong has been the prevailing technique of whatever-it-takes and winning-the-24-hour-news-cycle and parroting-the-focus-group and dumbing-down-our-future-expectations and returning-to-surplus-by-2013-whatever-the-cost-to-our-civilisation, and she is the old-fashioned epitome of all that is wrong with media-tortured politics (as Faulkner, Debus, Turnbull, Tanner, Swan, Brown, Stott Despoja, Xenophon, Wilkie, McKew and, oh yes, Beazley, Hawke and Whitlam never were) and she really shouldn't be there.
Still, there she is. And so it goes. The veteran of 11 (count them) significant campaign mistakes that cost Labor its majority and its policy agenda and its earthly power and its humanist reputation, and so it goes.
Smiling still, in denial still, in spin-mode still, laughing prettily still and telling us not to worry, I'm 50-years-old and on a steep learning curve but not to worry, don't you worry about that, planning no significant change in ministry or policy and political manners (and what bad political manners she has, budgie-smugglers and mincing poodles, I mean, really) and walking breezily at the head of a lemming-throng over a crumbling cliff as she always does. And so it goes.
See how she goes.
And so it goes.
Bob Ellis' next book, Suddenly, Last Winter, is out this November.
