Two years in, Labor is delivering on many of its election promises, yet there is little affection for the PM. Even on his own side he is respected but not revered, writes Shaun Carney.
KEVIN Rudd said he would reverse WorkChoices. He did it. He said he would radically recast education. He is doing it. He said he wanted an activist industry policy. He has implemented it. He said he would introduce an emissions trading scheme. He appears to be getting there. Most vital of all, he said he would do whatever it took to try to steer Australia clear of what appeared to be an inevitable recession. He pulled it off.
Not bad work for a new Prime Minister in his first two years in office, some might say. But is that the sense across the nation? Is there a feeling of accomplishment and comfort with the Rudd Government?
Probably not. The bulk of Australian voters like having Rudd in the job but they are yet to fully embrace him. Rudd's colleagues respect him, and are thankful for his role in getting them into office, but they do not revere him. Business leaders, having got past their disappointment at Labor's implementation of the Fair Work regime, find they can work with Rudd. Union leaders, many of them intellectually and strategically exhausted after their fight against WorkChoices, remain sceptical.
In short, there is no Cult of Kevin.
Labor governments do not come along very often in Australia. Each one is dogged by a series of often conflicting questions: Is it Labor enough? Is it too beholden to Labor's support base (i.e. the unions)? Can it act responsibly?
A lot of the contemporary analysis of governments, especially this one, is based on how their behaviour, rhetoric and policy aspirations measure up against their predecessors. The tendency is not to judge the Government on its own terms.
If we compare the first two years of the Rudd Government with the first two years of the other two postwar Labor governments, the contrast is stark. The Whitlam and Hawke governments were already several months into their second terms at this point, due to early elections, with all the attendant wear and tear that went with going through a re-election campaign only 18 months or so after securing office in the first place. Both saw their electoral support decline at those second elections.
The Howard government also only squeaked back in when it sought
re-election for the first time in 1998. All the polls suggest that under Rudd, Labor is on track to increase its vote and its parliamentary majority at next year's election. Of course, there is still plenty of time for the Government to screw up and blow that lead, but this is the strongest consistent poll showing a new government has had since the Fraser years.
The key criticisms of Rudd are that he carries potentially fatal flaws within his political character - that he defers the tough decisions or is nothing but an empty spin merchant or is too heavily conflicted philosophically because he is a right-wing free trader leading a supposedly left-wing party.
Whether these are the factors that will lead to the inevitable end of Rudd's time as prime minister, we cannot say. But some critics are guilty of selective memories of previous first-term governments, all of which demonstrated more extremes of behaviour than the current Government.
The fact is, no one comes to the prime minister's post fully equipped for the job; all of the incumbents since Gough Whitlam improved their skills as they settled into the position.
Bob Hawke experienced the MX missile crisis, the Ivanov affair and the suspension of a key minister, Mick Young, in the Paddington Bear affair during his first term, which was capped off by the misjudgment of an absurdly long re-election campaign.
John Howard had a good first year in office and then fell in a heap, heading off on an excessive and indulgent overseas trip, and then watching as a series of ministers and a key adviser were forced to resign over irregularities in domestic allowance payments. And yet, both Hawke and Howard won four elections and, in their respective times, secured the honour of being the nation's second-longest serving prime minister.
The Fraser government had its share of close-run things in its first term too; as it ran towards re-election in 1977, its treasurer and deputy Liberal leader, Phillip Lynch, had to step down while he was investigated over some land deals. And the Whitlam government's rollicking first term surely does not need recounting.
With all of these governments, a sense of crisis, either current or imminent, was never that far away. By contrast, the Rudd administration has been almost demure.
It has not been blemish-free. Rudd is profoundly disappointed that he failed to reach his goal of keeping his frontbench intact all the way through the Government's first term. Joel Fitzgibbon's departure from the defence post in June over his failure to comply with the ministerial code of conduct hurt Rudd personally.
Fitzgibbon had been an early supporter of Rudd's in 2006, and Rudd had wanted to be able to go the 2010 election with the boast that his Government had avoided the string of ministerial controversies and missteps that had dogged the Howard, Hawke and Fraser governments during their first terms.
Perhaps it's that lack of high temperature that has caused what might be judged to be a sense of distance between Rudd and the voting public to continue to exist. The relationship has not been forged through a crisis of confidence in the Prime Minister.
There is, so far, no process of fall and redemption in Rudd's public story.
He appeared, made his mark, grabbed the leadership while hardly anybody was looking, leapt ahead in the opinion polls and has stayed there ever since, securing an election victory along the way. The trajectory has been in the ascendant.
So what type of government does Rudd lead? It is definitely not built on the charismatic foundations of the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating governments. Interestingly, despite being the most dour and least flamboyant of the Labor prime ministers of the past 40 years, Rudd possesses more power than any of his ALP predecessors thanks to his ability to personally appoint his frontbench.
Previous leaders have been handed a frontbench elected by caucus, generally fashioned through factional horse-trading.
Rudd does not face those constraints and as a consequence he is able to involve himself more deeply in a wide range of policy areas, most notably his old stamping ground of foreign affairs. Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith in many respects shares his portfolio with the Prime Minister. This is partly because the Government is still new and Rudd needs to travel to make connections with other world leaders, but it is also down to the PM's workaholic ways and his not-insubstantial intellectual self-respect.
More broadly, however, this Government is a manifestation of Rudd's political vision, one that was formed through his early life as a Queenslander. The key to Rudd's style of governing was contained in his famously twee and mildly self-mocking greeting at the ALP national conference in April 2007: ''My name is Kevin, I'm from Queensland and I'm here to help.''
Rudd is only the second Queenslander to have been elected to the office of prime minister. The previous PM elected from the Sunshine State was Labor's Andrew Fisher, who held office on three occasions during the first two decades after Federation.
A former miner and union organiser, Fisher was a nation-builder who established the Commonwealth Bank and the Australian Navy. Rudd made it his business to read historian David Day's excellent biography of Fisher soon after it was released last year.
Read Full Article »