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(Part I here.)
In August last year I reckoned in the Canberra Times that “[o]ne thing is for sure: over the coming years, the world will change, and it will do things to Australia that we cannot begin to imagine. How the Rudd Government responds, and how many elections it wins, will determine the eventual narrative.” (Bottom here).
It only took a month for the unimagined to arrive: the GFC, which will certainly loom in subsequent “narratives” about the Rudd government.
Rudd’s opinion poll ratings have of course been very high by historical standards. This flows on to all sorts of things, like media coverage (witness the change after one Newspoll last week) and his party’s tolerance of his control-freakish behaviour.
I reckon that it’s not really all, or even mostly, due to him, and that if a reasonably bland and disciplined someone else like, say, Stephen Smith had become Labor leader in late 2006 much of the same would have happened and be happening now in the polls. (Kiwis are giving their dorkish first term PM a similar reception.)
But in the longer term, what really matters is how the government does at the next election.
If for some reason Rudd loses in 2010, all those sky-high polls will, naturally, count for zilch. Less than zilch probably: the schmuck was so obsessed with the daily burnishing of his standing in the electorate (the story will go) that he failed to invest political capital in the future.
We will have a textbook account of what not to do: do not fill your office with unhardened youngsters, do give ministers their heads, do show a bit of personality, you have to make an unpopular decision once in a while …
If, like the first Howard (and a lesser extent the first Hawke) government, the ALP survives but not by much and/or gets a scare, Rudd’s bubble will, if not burst, then deflate.
Parties are not very loyal these days, and in this case you can imagine there would be no loyalty at all: off with the annoying twerp’s head!
If the government wins comfortably or even increases its majority, legend status will resume – at least until the first utility bills after the introduction of the CPRS.
I have read Kevinism Parts 1 & 2. While you haven’t indulged in it, there is often an element of ridicule in what the commentariat has to say about Rudd. They give the impression that he cannot be taken seriously, that what happened in 2007 cannot be true and that there are gaping policy/personality holes in the Rudd government not yet exposed. I think the commentariat has greatly underestimated Rudd and has missed the point about the first two years of office.
Contrary to what Paul Keating has said, Rudd has set about repairing the social fabric of the nation: extricating the nation from the Iraq war that we entered based on a lie and changing the way the international community perceives us. He humanised our refugee policy which the former government used to great effect including a claim that children were thrown overboard just to win an election. Again based on a lie. The Rudd government also had the decency to say sorry to our Indigenous people, something acknowledged around the world and which the so-called conviction politican Howard could not bring himself to do. Utterly shameful. Rudd also took the long view on climate change, starting a process [even before the 2007 election] to develop an ETS and of course to sign the Kyoto protocol. The result has many flaws but at least it is an action plan. Unlike Howard in his first two years where resignations abound, Rudd has been blessed with competent ministers, particularly the gang of four. Gillard is exceptional quality.
Rudd [like Howard] has also been very lucky. He had been gifted with a dreadful opposition, a leader without authority and a stunning and intelligent partner whose success women would want to aspire to. Therese Rein is worth a couple of percent to the government. Just compare her and the profile she has established to that of her predecessor.
There will be a election in under a year. Rudd could still lose if everything goes wrong: the economy tanks for some reason, incompetence takes hold or more importantly the government starts to lie to us big time. I don’t think any of this is going to happen. Rudd has an agenda and he will stick to it.
What I find amusing about your Future of Kevinisms Peter is you seem somewhat resigned to Rudd’s character being incompatible with the narrative of the conviction politician. I find this amusing because your mumbling has been the main cause in me coming to believe that it has virtually nothing to do with the character/personality/charisma of the individual and that being prime minister for five years would have made the most weak-willed schmuck into a conviction politician.
The people that really help the narrative I suspect are dominated by critics who feel the need to say something nice about the prime minister to be level headed and be grateful for all the wonderful things living in Australia include. They can’t laud an ideology they have a problem with and self professed humanitarian might find it hard to call one of the mandatory detention prime ministers a “decent bloke”. I suspect as Rudd nears the apparently inevitable end of his premiership(Howard and Keating were both fairly obviously dead a while out, a close election might change this) they will come to acknowledge his conviction by suggesting stuff like the apology and the abolition of the pacific solution were very courageous considering how Howard had convinced the nation they were so dangerous.
As for longevity dictating the narrative; well I think the narrative is always going to be conviction. If he is a one (or even two) termer it’ll probably be a Whitlam like narrative whereby the courageous Rudd sacrifices his political capital to implement necessary social and economic reforms and becomes a martyr for the cause. If he is a long term prime minister the conviction will be the source of his success.
And JA I thought the Beazley, Evans, Crean, Brereton team that took on Howard, Costello, Reith, Downer in 1998 got were highly effective.
Lentern,
It was in the earlier Kevinism post that I wondered about whether ‘conviction’ will come to be applied to Rudd. You may be right and this may come to pass. Certainly with one (comfortable) re-election under his belt lots of things will change: “it wasn’t an aberration or just a vote against an old government etc etc”.
But I don’t think it’s possible in the unlikely event he’s a one-termer. Then he’s just a Dud who got the politics all wrong. That’s what Howard would have become if he’d lost in 1998.
To Lentern: I agree that Beazley et al were highly effective [to the point that Labor gave Howard a scare in 1998] but I was referring to ministers. In 1998, they were of course in opposition, prior to which they were effective ministers in the Hawke/Keating governments. The proof of competency/effectiveness etc is when they are in government and running something and implementing policy, hence my reference to Rudd’s ministers. It is widely reported [and believed] and the first Hawke ministry [1983] was the best since the second world war.
To Peter: In outlining the Rudd’s govt’s much understated narrative that focused on repairing the social fabric of the nation, I overlooked the abolition of the nasty bits of workchoices. Labor’s first budget also contributed to the narrative and changed priorities. It included Labor’s education agenda and elements of health, industry, social welfare policies by cutting $7 billion in future spending foreshadowed by Howard to fund roughly $7 billion of its own. Of course the GFC in September 2008 changed priorities again. Such are the thrills and spills of government!!
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