Lenore Taylor, political editor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 6 August 2013 11.55 AEST
If Kevin Rudd can turn around Labor's fortunes on election day, it will be personal vindication as well as political victory
Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott – there's a lot at stake for both in this election. Photograph: AAP
A few weeks ago, Kevin Rudd summoned his staff for their first pep talk. Many of the 20 or so who gathered in the prime minister’s “round lounge” meeting room didn’t yet know each other. But the new prime minister was sure that he, with their help, could stage the most dramatic turnaround in recent Australian political history.
Most had abruptly abandoned post-politics lives, or the service of other ministers, at the urgent request of the reinstated leader. Some of the hastily re-gathered loyalists had new babies on hips. Others had left family to pack up and move home from overseas.
Like a cliched Hollywood drama where the rescue party bursts in just when all hope appears lost, Rudd returned as the Labor party faced an electoral defeat so devastating there were real questions about its long-term viability. But half of his assembled rescue party didn’t yet have their official computer log-in, and hadn’t unpacked the boxes on their desks.
Adding tension to the astonishing plot twist is the fact that Labor itself remains divided about whether its possible saviour is a hero or a narcissistic megalomaniac. For Rudd himself, the fact that his colleagues were forced to return to him almost exactly three years after they cut him down, just before the 2010 poll, is the ultimate story of vindication. Some who still privately despise him fear that if he wins, it will also be a tale of revenge.
But for those in the room on 3 July, the rescue mission they’d just signed up for was worth it, and any doubts were questions for later. Rudd had assembled a team which, like Tony Abbott’s first team in 2009, when he took over a Liberal party scarred and demoralised by its civil war over climate policy, was heavy on staff responsible for media and messaging.
Treasury deputy secretary Jim Murphy, who had worked with Rudd during the response to the global financial crisis that had so defined his first time as leader, had been seconded to oversee a policy team. But this was an outfit designed for campaigning, and even policy had an urgent electoral purpose.
Rudd’s first task was to paper over the policy sinkholes into which Labor’s primary vote was disappearing. He has always positioned himself as the man in the sensible middle ground of the policy spectrum. But Abbott had rewritten the narrative in key debates while Rudd was flying around the world as Julia Gillard’s foreign minister, or later, after he failed in a February 2012 leadership ballot against Gillard, languishing on the backbench.
Rudd’s immediate job was to elbow aside the perception that Abbott was the voice of the rational centre. And with the electoral timetable bearing down on him, he had to do it forcefully and fast. First he turned to climate policy, which had contributed so heavily to his own demise when he shelved his original emissions trading scheme and poisoned the leadership of his successor with her initial fixed-price carbon “tax”.
There was no time to reprosecute the whole daft debate about big new taxes. Rudd decided instead to bring forward to 2014 the floating price, which was going to start one year later anyway. It was an expensive piece of political inoculation, handing back $3.8bn to polluters who will lower their prices so families won’t have to pay higher power bills, for which most of them have already been compensated anyway. Without even a flicker of embarrassment, the new prime minister insisted this made him the carbon tax “terminator”.
Second, he tackled party reform so he would have an answer to the claim that the “faceless men” who ousted him the first time could do it again. His party had little choice but to acquiesce to rule changes that would give Rudd vastly increased power if he did manage to pull off his rescue and get them all re-elected.
Third came asylum policy, the issue said by more than any other Labor backbenchers to be “killing” them, electorally speaking. Mingled with the unease voters felt about asylum boats arriving in increasing numbers was the horror that the dangerous journey was actually killing some of those seeking refuge.
Here Rudd employed the most shocking of his shock tactics, outmanoeuvring Abbott from the right with the announcement that no asylum seeker arriving by boat would be allowed to settle in Australia, but would instead be resettled in Papua New Guinea.
With Rudd now insisting he had “axed the tax” and had a more decisive policy to “stop the boats”, Abbott was left without some of his most effective lines of attack. But he still had one weapon left in his arsenal: Labor’s alleged record of “incompetence”. He wielded it at every opportunity. Advertisements listed Rudd’s record of failure. In almost every response on every issue, Abbott mentioned that the new Labor leader was “all talk” and not to be trusted.
It was an argument that had worked well against Gillard, but it is unclear whether it will be as effective against Rudd. An Essential poll taken in early July found that 42% of voters believed Rudd was trustworthy, compared with 32% who thought the same about Abbott.
And Rudd returned, insisting he was a changed leader who now consulted on everything important and conducted a proper cabinet process, instead of the much-criticised four-person “kitchen cabinet” that took most of the important decisions in his first term.
Ministerial colleagues confirm this is true, sometimes exhaustingly so. And it would be impossible for anyone, let alone someone with the self-belief of Rudd, to go through the harrowing humiliation of being dumped and publicly maligned without emerging having learned some lessons and in some way changed.
But an equally valid criticism of his first stint as prime minister was that he sought too much advice on too many subjects and ended up with an administration in paralysis. And there was not enough time after he returned to the leadership to really test whether anything had changed in that regard.
With asylum changes and the state of the budget both announced, the way was clear to launch the campaign. The 55-year-old Queenslander was back on the hustings.
It was the first time Rudd had the chance to ask the governor general to call an election. Opposition leader Kevin 07 had won at the polls, riding a strong national mood for change just nine years after he was elected as the member for the Brisbane seat of Griffith in 1998. But he was ousted as leader before he could return to the voters.
In Labor’s head office there has also been some desperate last-minute rewrites to strategy. In the desperate last days of the Gillard era officials had been quietly drawing in their defensive lines, giving up on marginal seats and concentrating on electorates that should have been safe Labor territory. Almost as soon as Rudd returned, nationwide polls showed a recovery of 10 percentage points in Labor’s primary vote, which in two-party preferred terms had Labor at level-pegging. State-by-state breakdowns showed that in some states, particularly Rudd’s home state of Queensland, they were back in the game and on the offensive.
This campaign is a contest between two proven campaigners, both of whom have everything on the line. Rudd is determined to prove he is the successful leader he always believed himself to be. Abbott is equally determined not to throw away what had seemed for the Coalition to be an “unlosable election” much like the 1993 poll lost by John Hewson, for whom Abbott was an adviser.
Rudd’s style is to present as a moderate and as a “love me or loathe me” wonky but very competent kind of leader. He is good on the traditional campaign trail, and, with almost 1,300,000 Twitter followers, he uses social media to humanise and self-satirise his seriousness, especially for younger voters – tweeting pictures of shaving cuts and pathetic attempts at chin-ups in a kind of political equivalent of a “dad joke”.
But before getting swept away by the extraordinary plotline of Rudd leading Labor to a last-minute comeback, it pays to remember the magnitude of the task. This is the same man who was excoriated by his own colleagues as a selfish, dysfunctional, egomaniacal saboteur. He has been leader again for just weeks and he inherited a party riven, disillusioned, publicly discredited and desperately short of money.
If he did manage to pull off a victory, it really would be stranger than fiction.
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