Rudded: the knack of being all things to all people - David Burchell

David Burchell for The Austraian - 31/12/2011

ONE icy Canberra winter's morning some 18 months ago, in the sepulchral quiet of one of Parliament House's lonely stone courtyards, a bewildered-looking Kevin Rudd conducted one of the strangest press conferences ever seen. 
  
As his demeanour flickered between the stoic, the aggressive, the lyrical and the maudlin, he took his viewers through the fabled seven stages of grief, illustrated by pain-etched snapshots of his personal policy triumphs.

A public personality lovingly crafted and assembled over years, partly through the agency of the breakfast television cameras, seemed to unravel completely in front of those same cameras.
In retrospect, you could say this was the moment that began our present journey into a kind of political fantasy land, where almost nobody seems sure any longer who is really who, what is what and, least of all, what will happen next.

Public opinion pollsters rarely query voters about such psychic fissures in our public life. Yet, so far as anecdotal evidence can take us, Rudd's public breakdown that cold Canberra morning, and the mysterious sequence of events that led up to it, was interpreted by Australians in strikingly different ways.

Some viewers freely confessed they too had been reduced to tears: for them Rudd was a victim of the cruel ways of politics, whose human frailty had been exposed in public by heartless men in shady back rooms. Rudd's evident emotionalism over his government's achievements - those painful moments where he paused, for 10 or 20 seconds, while he sobbed silently through clenched jaws at the injustice of it all - spoke to their own deeply felt political emotions.

Others, watching the same emotional unburdening, reacted in precisely the opposite manner: for them it was shameful, even slightly grotesque, that the former PM had wrapped up his personal disappointment in the garb of a political emotion.

In this time of profound public confusion, since Labor had chosen to offer no compelling public explanation for its leadership change of heart, people were compelled to improvise explanations for themselves. In a loose analogy to John F. Kennedy's assassination almost 40 years ago, there were vague stories of "faceless men" who had decided to end Rudd's political life because he was too bold or too threatening to some "interest" or other.

This talk was fuelled in some measure by the opposition, which made hay while the sun shone, as oppositions necessarily do in such circumstances. But it had been sparked by Rudd himself, since it echoed his own dramatic version of events as he had explained it to the TV cameras, in one of his familiar moments of white fury, on the night before the leadership challenge. And so the curious two-sided view emerged that Julia Gillard was an illegitimate PM, a view promulgated by those on the Left who shared Rudd's own personal fantasy image of himself, and by those on the Right who, in the wake of the Coalition's tantalising near-victory at the 2010 election, viewed Gillard as the usurper of the Coalition government that should have been.

Gillard was chosen by her peers because she was Labor's ablest parliamentary performer, but also because she seemed to be everything Rudd was not: she was known for her calmness, her absence of ego, her political realism.

Yet, in the emotionally charged atmosphere of Rudd's departure, this made her the best and the worst of successors.

To some, her calm exterior offered comfort after the strange roller-coaster Rudd moment, which had promised so much more than it delivered, and offered so little by way of sober and realistic political strategy. To others she remained a perpetual target of anger and suspicion.

After the high drama of the Rudd moment, her stoicism was interpreted by many as merely the absence of an emotional faculty, even to the point of inhumanity, as in the famed example of the Queensland floods, where her failure to cry in public produced perhaps the greatest single emotion-driven polling reverse of modern times.

Looking back on the turmoil, anger and division that has characterised Australian politics over this period, historians will have little choice but to label ours as the Rudd Moment, a time when almost all the verities that have marked our political debates over the past half-century have been tossed into the air, to land again, holus-bolus, either disarranged or arranged in unfamiliar patterns.

As this newspaper's Paul Kelly has observed, the great reforming ambitions of governments from the 1980s and 90s have by now either worn out or run their course. Much of what passes as policy innovation now is little more than a process of restless administrative reorganisation under grander names, as in the long-running ballyhoo over the federal government's health policy, which is more an exercise in shifting bureaucratic deckchairs than a fundamental reform.

At the same time, the fragmentation of the electorate into ever smaller demographics - like "ute-man" or the fabled "doctors' wives" - notoriously drives contemporary politicians to become ever more tentative and risk-averse, as the task of assembling a viable electoral majority becomes increasingly fraught. All of this is bound to be deeply unsatisfying to political idealists.

Yet our era has also witnessed a striking increase in that proportion of the electorate which views itself as independent and voting on "the issues" alone, in the so-called post-material fashion; as political scientists anticipated many years ago, as they viewed the rise of the salaried professional class and the decline of manual labour.

Once, this group constituted 10 to 20 per cent of the electorate. Now it may comprise as much as a third of all voters, with the obvious consequence that there is now, in effect, a third party in Australian politics: the party which refers matters not to the parties, but to their own conscience.

Historically you could say that our political balance of power has always depended upon the force of enlightened self-interest: most citizens, both richer and poorer, have generally voted with a keen eye to what they think of as the interests of them and their "kind" even if they have always believed their other eye to be trained upon the national interest, seen as rising above such things.

In the post-material view, by contrast, self-interest - enlightened or otherwise - is best understood as a petty and selfish motivation. In its place the post-materialist voter imagines a descending order of priorities, from the global down to the local, where questions of human rights and the global environment always come first, with all others in diminishing order as they proceed towards the self.

On the face of it this is commendably noble and high-minded. Yet, since in practice none of us is without self-interest or self-regard, the danger is that one's own interests never wither away: instead, they merely hide in the background.

You could make a strong case the tension between this high-minded, no-compromise style of thinking on the one hand, and the older enlightened self-interest way of thinking on the other, has shaped every significant political debate of the Rudd era.

From the outset Rudd must have recognised an opportunity, even as he could not have been unaware of a threat. If Labor spoke directly and feelingly to this burgeoning camp of idealists - many of whom had been driven away from the Coalition during the later Howard years by "conscience" issues such as refugees and the environment, and were hankering for a new, more conscientious approach to politics - it might perhaps yoke together a new progressive coalition, much as Gough Whitlam had done in the late 60s and early 70s.

On the other hand, if Labor handled this task poorly, it ran the risk of alienating old-style suburban pragmatists, or falling between the two stools.

Rudd's solution was, characteristically, clever and crucially flawed. From his first interview as opposition leader he consistently presented himself as standing on both sides of this attitudinal divide simultaneously: he was a fiscal conservative and a Keynesian, a preacher of fiscal rigour and a believer in the unlimited capacities of government, a hard man and a lifelong admirer of Dietrich Bonhoffer, an intellectual and a knockabout bloke. To bookish audiences he spoke as a fellow intellectual and concerned leftist; in the suburbs he was Kevin the good bloke, who could barbecue with the best of them.

In the event, however, this juggling act (or Jekyll and Hyde performance, depending on how you look at it) was too complex and demanding for an over-confident, political new boy.

When the global recession hit in 2008, Rudd insisted that what was best for the country was also what satisfied the lobbying demands of different political constituencies: new infrastructure, new environmental programs, local projects which might once have been considered pork-barrelling, but which were now matters of national survival.

At the same time, the grand "moral challenge" of climate change could be attacked and beaten without the least inconvenience to anybody, since the public proceeds of an emissions trading scheme would always more than cover individual losses.

Meanwhile Rudd, personally, would triumph over the combined opposition of the mining companies to create a new resources tax - only because the mining companies, if they understood their interests properly, should know they had nothing to fear from it. In the end, as we know, all these balls fell from the air more or less simultaneously.

Some dual-purpose stimulus programs were found to be poorly designed and financially imprudent; the ETS was opposed in parliament from the Left as too weak and from the Right as too strong; and the mining companies, taking poorly to their public demonisation, staged a highly successful revolt. Rudd's clever experiment was finished.

Despite these failures, there is something so persistently attractive in the Rudd formula - the idea that you can be an idealist and a pragmatist at the same time, and (better still) all without cost or conflict - that it has become part of the political common sense of the era. If you doubt this, consider first the constantly embattled situation of the government.

The more it cleaves to dull economic reality, the more it disappoints the idealists, who simply firm in their attachment to the Greens. The more it tries to be "visionary", the more it alienates the old-style pragmatists. But consider also the peculiar state of the opposition, which finds itself likewise suspended in space, unwilling or unable to alienate its many "soft" supporters by spelling out what it intends to do about almost anything, for fear that, it will suffer the same damaging splits. They have both been "Rudded".

Aspects of Rudd's behaviour continue to arouse anxieties about his emotional well-being. He habitually speaks and writes as if he were still his party's leader: his recent speech to the ALP conference in that vein only came as a surprise if you had not been following his other speeches, such as his book launch for former speechwriter Troy Bramston, when he regaled listeners with his own life story and principles, lacerated his foes, both Left and Right, but failed to discuss the book supposedly being launched..

On repeated occasions in the past 12 months he has spoken in the persona of the PM, has mis-described himself as the PM, or has spoken as if he was expecting to return to the job quite soon. During the Queensland floods last December he appeared on TV, his face flushed red-pink, waist-deep in grey floodwater and carrying constituents' belongings in travel cases on his head, almost in the persona of Mother Theresa.

Yet Rudd's spectral presence remains one of the elemental features of our political landscape. Hardly a week goes by without some new prediction of a leadership bid, even though most educated observers still doubt he would garner much more than a dozen votes. While his support in Labor's party room remains negligible, Rudd continues to enjoy warm support in what could be called the political class. ABC radio journalist Philip Adams admitted to weeping over Rudd's dismissal, and tore up his ALP membership card in disgust. Bob Ellis, the stentorian, larger-than-life literary figure who has wandered the fringes of the ALP for several decades, likewise waxes lyrical about his old friend.

Sometime Labor adviser Bruce Hawker, who in his role as lobbyist was a regular visitor to Rudd's prime ministerial suite, was recently filmed at the ALP conference talking up the possibility of a leadership spill. With the exception of Hawker, you could describe these individuals as Labor hero-worshippers, like those garrulous, boozy celebrities who used to idolise Whitlam, and spin bitter stories about the CIA's supposed hand in his dismissal.

For these people, Rudd seems to have become the new Gough - the leader-figure who can carry the nation with him into a new era of social progressivism, by sheer force of charisma.

Therein lies the Rudd mystique. Freed from the trammels of prime ministerial responsibility, he's become a kind of wraith, an all-purpose moral cipher, ready for use by any idealist whatever who dislikes the state of contemporary politics, and wants to imagine something grander, loftier, more complete. He's both the actual problem and the imaginary solution. He's like the Cheshire Cat, who in its gradual disappearance left nothing behind but its enigmatic smile.

The Australian - December 31, 2011