Killing Season: Labor's collapse was the worst I've ever seen, says British adviser
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Version 0 of 1. Former British cabinet minister Alan Milburn, who advised Australian Labor in the 2010 and 2013 election campaigns, delivers the final blunt verdict on Labor’s term in office in the ABC’s documentary series The Killing Season. “The hard question that the Australian Labor party has to ask itself is this: how is it possible that you win an election in November 2007, on the scale that you do, with the goodwill that you have, with the permission that you are gifted by the public, and you manage to lose all that goodwill, to trash the permission and to find yourself out of office within just six years. “I have never seen anything quite like it in any country, anywhere, anytime in any part of the world. No one can escape blame for that in my view,” he said. But in a new chapter for her autobiography My Story, Julia Gillard rejects the idea that Labor’s constant leadership turmoil during its six years in office was particularly about her and Kevin Rudd, although she argues Australia’s concentrated media ownership might exacerbate Australia’s apparent preoccupation with leadership change. She claims the fact Tony Abbott faced a leadership spill motion last February, at a time when he was under political pressure “as near to zero as you can get” showed instability was caused by a range of new pressures on governments of all political persuasions in modern democracies. “Up until that point, those who are paid for their political commentary and expertise had largely concluded that the leadership changes between Kevin Rudd and me were best explained as being something to do with the nature of the Labor party and its factions and something to do with the characters of two individuals,” she writes. “I have sought to explain how this kind of analysis was always simplistic and slipshod. How it deliberately ignored internal turmoil in conservative governments, including the replacement of Ted Baillieu as premier of Victoria. The changing pattern of political incumbency had also been underscored by Queensland’s hugely dramatic repudiation of its one-term conservative government led by Campbell Newman and Victoria’s return to Labor, also after just one term. “Now, after the events of 9 February 2015, whatever one concludes about my story, the theory that this was all about Kevin, me and the Labor party cannot stand. This view has passed its use-by date. Contemporary reality has rendered it absurd.” She points to the changing nature of the media and the difficulties it poses for politicians, and Australia’s history of leadership rivalry. “Looking nationally, the dominant media narrative about leadership is that now we tend to instability, whereas earlier we did not. Yet history seems to be telling us otherwise. In reality, a metanarrative of Australian national politics for more than 30 years has been leadership tensions: Hawke and Keating; Howard and Abbott and his undeclared contenders. “What seems to be changing is not the underlying cycle but the speed at which it goes around. While we share so much in media and political culture with other democracies, it seems that in this area, we are at the head of the pack. Neither the United Kingdom nor Canada, despite having the Westminster system, has seen leadership become such a dominant narrative, prime minister after prime minister, government after government. No easy explanation presents itself as to why we should be so fixated. But the nature of our media market may offer some clues. Put simply, we live in one of the most concentrated media markets in the world.” At the conclusion of the third episode of The Killing season, Rudd suggests things could have been different. Asked whether he and Gillard were better as a team, he replies: “Of course we were, and we were a very effective team and I wanted her to succeed me, I really did.” But Gillard disagrees. “I don’t see what alternative reality was possible other than the ones we lived through. I think people are really wistfully hoping for something that was never going to be.” |