It’s a political crisis, not Australian Idol

It would seem on the surface that the Liberal leadership has descended into fantasy with talk that the politically astute former Treasurer could be a serious contender only six months after having turned it down when offered it on a plate. However, combined with Tuesday’s Newspoll surveying the popularity of various leadership combinations (that curiously included a proposed combination of Costello/Turnbull), it has prompted an outbreak of political calculation from pundits. Convoluted scenarios have been produced about senior Liberals wanting to leave Nelson in just long enough until the right time for Turnbull to come in, or maybe some other leader filling the gap to take the hit in popularity until the Liberals put the right person in at the right time.

All of these scenarios are just journalese nonsense. What none of these calculations can ever explain, and couldn’t anticipate at the time, is why the Liberals’ electorally most popular leader didn’t just romp it in six months ago. Turnbull lost the leadership ballot because the party is not engaged in some detached judging of a talent contest, it is in the middle of a political process over which its participants do not have control.

Australia is going through a profound political crisis. It doesn’t seem like it because this is not about a dramatic clash of alternatives but more like an implosion. It is clearest in the Liberal party since the election but was already evident with the paralysis in the leadership in the run up to their defeat. It is the crisis in the Liberal party that will be the driving influence of its leadership.

A political crisis has its own dynamic, especially one has profound as this one. For a political party whose historical role has come to an end, there is a point at which it becomes clear that the past is no longer viable but the future is no longer recognisable. This leads, for a while, to a suspended hiatus between the two that is the secret of Nelson’s leadership. He won the leadership contest because the past (Abbott) realised if he didn’t withdraw, the result would a Liberal party unrecognisable under Turnbull.

With such a negative basis for assuming the leadership it is not surprising that Nelson would be unable to stop the rot. What has not helped him, however, are tactics that have not only exposed the Liberals bankruptcy but made it seem as though the crisis in the Liberal party is really about him and so hastened calls for his removal.

The usual way that this goes is that the next stage is for the past (i.e. the old Liberal leadership) to try and regain control. There are signs that they are starting to do so. A couple of careful party appearances by Howard have clearly been designed to buck the party up and remind them of what they stand for (which isn't Turnbull). The trouble for them is that their main objective, the prevention of a Turnbull win, is still not assured. Nelson’s ineptitude has forced them to move earlier than they would like, but without the certainty that by doing so, Turnbull won't get up.

The uncertainty that a candidate preferred by the leadership, such as Bishop or Abbot, would win, is probably why we are hearing more about Costello. In theory, he would be the only feasible candidate that would have a chance of preventing a Turnbull win if a spill occurred. Could it be why we also had that strange combination of Costello/Turnbull in the Newspoll survey that The Australian then trumpeted on its front page as the ‘Dream Ticket’? Given the Liberal heirachy's desperation, having the party run by someone they distrust, but at least keeping Turnbull from the top job, would be the best they could dream for. Never mind that Costello is electorally unpopular, politically inept, hated by his colleagues and doesn’t want the job. Nor that Turnbull would never accept a deputy leadership under him. This is not about making sense to a political outsider, but the sign of a leadership struggling to regain ownership of a party that is slipping out of their control.

Stringing them along

The problem with the republic debate was that there used to be two debates rolled into one. On the one hand there was the debate we always heard about, the one within the political class and their supporters over the best way for them to be represented here and overseas. While they would no doubt like to stand on their own two feet, they have had too little authority to do so and so have had to cling to a Monarchy on the other side of the world. That solution has been getting well past its sell by date as the Monarchy loses credibility even in the UK, and even some of those on the pro-Monarchy side of Australian politics recognised a need for a new solution. It was what gave Keating the impetus to try and resolve the issue by creating a new political basis for an independent stand.

However, that attempt failed because of the second debate that is less readily acknowledged: namely between the political class and the broader public who are less interested in how the political class want to represent themselves but just want a say on who is the Head of State. The republican side always contained an uneasy coalition between these two differing reasons for supporting the republican model – a national identity one and a broader democratic one. The two may want to get rid of the monarchy but there is a conflict between them over who was to have the final say. The second argument would occasionally break through in Australian politics usually in dramatic circumstances such as the conscription debates of the World Wars and the 1975 Dismissal. It is the flaw in the republican argument that was exploited by Howard the last time it emerged, in the 1999 referendum.

It was nice to see Bob Carr on the TV the other night and be reminded just how patronising Labor luminaries were during the 1999 referendum to those opposing the attempt to keep the choice of President in politicians' hands. The usual reason given for Keating’s model of restricting the choice of the President to MPs was that it was less radical and so more likely to win the referendum with a supposedly conservative/stupid electorate.

There were three problems with this. Firstly, it was less democratic. Secondly, because of this it was less popular. Thirdly, they lost anyway. Once the Australian Presidency became presented as the property of Australian politicians, it allowed Howard and the Monarchists to turn it from a referendum about an unpopular British Monarchy to one about an even more unpopular Australian political class. With the Monarchists warning of a “politician’s republic”, the republican movement managed the singular feat of losing a republican referendum in a republican country.

They looked to have learnt little from this. Bob Carr still seems to be believe the reason they lost is that the Australian electorate is too conservative/stupid. So his answer is the “minimalist republic”, changing arrangements as little as possible so that one day we all wake up and find the G-G is now called the President, effectively administering the republic to a reluctant electorate much as one gives unpleasant medicine to a child.

However, behind all the spurious discussion over tactics there was another reason put against the direct election model that got a little closer to the truth and shows the problem for any re-run. There was a palpable fear that any directly elected President, even with restricted powers, would have an authority that would rival those elected in Parliament. This touched on the central problem of the Australian republican debate. The factors that were eroding the authority of institutions such as the Monarchy in the UK are also at work here and undermining the credibility of the political class. The irony of Keating’s national identity project was that just at the time significant sections of the Australian political class decided to take the leap for an independent stand, their authority to do so was weaker than before, something that led to Keating losing power in Canberra and for them to lose control of the republican argument three years later.

If anything that problem has become even worse today and those in Canberra on the weekend who thought Keating's republic was back are wrong. There was a fairly perceptive article by Denis Shanahan yesterday on the nature of the alliance that has now been set up at the Summit between Rudd and what Downer thought looked like all the old Keating 'luvvies’. As Rudd said, the main purpose of the Summit was less the ideas themselves but to set up a process to bypass the old political system. The ‘best and brightest’ played a useful role, namely having the presumption to unquestioningly rush in and fill the gap left by the political parties.

For now, Rudd has used the revival of the republic as the keystone of that alliance. Michelle Grattan's view that he is getting swept along by the momentum of the call for the republic at the Summit makes little sense since it was Rudd who reflagged the republic and started the whole ball rolling a few weeks ago just before meeting the Queen.

But Rudd is not Keating. In fact he is almost the opposite. Whereas Keating’s project was to create a new identity for the Australian political class, Rudd’s is to displace it, even if he uses Keating’s issues to do it. He has already shown this with the apology, which for Keating was a way of rehabilitating the political class and bring an apologetic nation behind it, whereas for Rudd it was the basis of a full frontal attack on the political class - and on them only. For Rudd, Australian politicians are not even suitable anymore for the role of G-G, something he made clear at the beginning of the year when there was speculation over Beazley taking the role. It is hard to believe that he will think they should choose the President.

For Rudd, the republic is likely to be viewed like the apology, i.e. ‘unfinished business’ to be tidied up, rather than a new foundation on which to build a new political project going forward. By all his ducking and weaving when asked whether it will happen in the two years wanted by the Summit participants, he seems to still see it no more urgent than he did a few months ago. What is more important for his current purposes is that he keeps his new 'political class' on-side talking about the republic while he displaces the old arrangements. In fact for Rudd, keeping an ongoing debate alive is probably more important than the bit of constitutional housekeeping that is likely to be the end result. Like a true technocrat, he is all about process.

Funeral oration for the political class

What we are looking for from this Summit are new directions for our nation’s future. And if we succeed, what we are looking for is also new insights into how we can govern Australia, a new way of governing our nation. Because the old way of governing has long been creaking and groaning. Often a triumph of the short term over the long term. Often a triumph of the trivial over the substantial. Often a triumph of the partisan over the positive. And the truth is all sides of politics, Brendan’s and mine, we are both guilty of this. It is time we started to try and turn a page.

K Rudd Parliament House Canberra 19 April 2008

If the apology was a body blow to Australia's political class, the 2020 Summit was its funeral – and it was as celebratory as an Irish wake. Having prefaced it by showing something very close to contempt for Australia's political elite with his preference for visiting Cate and the baby over joining Keating, Fraser and other luminaries of Australia's political class for Button's funeral, he then went to Canberra to bury them.

Rudd's speech was a funeral oration for the political process by which, until now, Australian government policy has been decided since Federation. However, it is striking how on both sides of the political fence, no-one else wanted to face up to what this Summit was really about.

There were hints that some in the political class were uncomfortable, especially on the Liberal side, but they struggled to know how to deal with it. Thank goodness Anzac Day provided the Victorian and NSW Liberal leaders with alternative media stunts to excuse themselves from the one Rudd was holding in Parliament House. But generally the coalition was all over the place, led by Nelson. He attended the event, then dismissed it as a schmozzle, then claimed some good will come out of it but then refused to add any ideas of his own (probably clinging to the idea that there might be more appropriate times in the same building for doing so). Whatever he said about it, his attendance, like his listening tour, brings the Liberal's political bankruptcy to the open, which will make Nelson increasingly intolerable to the party's hierarchy.

On the Labor side, some were also having trouble getting to grips with it. Bob Carr tried to belittle the Summit it by saying that it was no point coming pushing agendas, and anyway government would still be filtering them – a point of view flatly contradicted by at least two of the Summit's convenors. Carr believes that ultimately the Labor will decide what policies to adopt. What Carr doesn't realise is that the event undermines Labor's right to do so.

Besides Carr, however, the general acquiescence of the Labor party to have people who wouldn't be seen dead in the Labor party influencing the policy of what is nominally supposed to be their government, shows that the ALP has already come to terms with their political bankruptcy. At the Summit, this was probably most symbolised up by the sizeable attendance of that organisation for left-wing political displacement activity, Get Up, which is full of Labor activists showing more enthusiasm for getting people to vote than giving them something actually to vote for.

If the political class was coming to terms with the implications of the Summit, the media were having their own troubles as well. As the event drew nearer there seemed to be a growing realisation from some quarters that accepting an invitation may have some dangers, the media's dilemma nicely drawn out by the panel discussion on yesterday's Insiders. Yet while some journalists may feel uncomfortable attending there is still no real sense in the press of what is really happening. Bolt, one of the few critics of the event, has mainly seen it as a subterfuge forum for Labor politics rather than something that shows that there is now barely such a thing.

If the media and politicians were uncertain in their criticism of the Summit, they certainly weren't going to be joined by the nation's (for want of a better word) intellectuals, who rushed to Canberra to fill the gap. There seemed little questioning from the 1,000 (or anybody else) over what right they had to influence public policy. They probably thought, like Geraldine Doogue, that they were representatives of the public, ignoring the fact that we had an extensive process to resolve that a few months ago. They are not of course, they represent nobody but themselves and the particular interests of their set, given away by their almost unanimous support for the republic. They are probably the last ones in the world to realise that the only reason they are there is less due to their own talents than that the political process of the last century has now run its course.

The Mandarin’s anti-politics jamboree

I will also be taking a proposal along to the Summit for discussion.

K Rudd at the Sydney Institute 16 April

It is entirely appropriate for Rudd to use the Sydney Institute as a forum for setting out the purpose of the 2020 Summit. It was where Gillard two years ago set out her call for the end of ALP factions. With Gillard having argued for the end of politics inside the ALP, the new leader of it now wants to extend it to the national stage.

Rudd’s speech on Wednesday night was mainly noted for his proposal for creating universal child care centres by 2020. But the importance of the speech was not the proposal itself, but the way it was presented.

Rudd put forward two key propositions in the speech. The first was to proclaim the end of difference between ‘left and right’. This is not new, it has been proclaimed endlessly since the end of the Cold War. What Rudd has done is to draw out the consequences of it.

It is interesting that despite everyone agreeing that the difference between left and right has gone (and certainly in most policy areas it is true) it is still possible to tag some ideas, or people, as left or right-wing. Those labels are still used in the media (when talking about the right-wing of the NSW Liberals, for example) and everyone knows what they are talking about. Indeed despite Gerard Henderson occasionally getting huffy about it, he and his Sydney Institute are generally tagged as right-wing, and, again, everyone knows what they are talking about.

In fact, most revealing was the embarrassed reaction all round when Nick Johnson from the Sydney Institute board stood up after Rudd’s speech and said so far his government had done things “that many socialist governments should be pretty proud of”. The key point is not that recognisably left and right-wing political debate still does not go on, but that because key segments of society such as organised labour and business no longer have an interest in it, it lacks legitimacy. If this is true, then it means that the political class carrying on the old left-right debates also lack legitimacy. This was the basis of the anti-politics attack that Rudd launched so effectively last year against Howard and those on his own side, and it is the basis on which he is realigning Australian politics now.

Rudd’s second point in the speech was to set out his response to this end of politics, something that is being widely mis-interpreted. There seems to be a view that Rudd has moved into the centre of the political spectrum. However, it is more accurate to say that he has left it all together. His job is now less like a politician than that of a technocrat, organising and disseminating the ideas of others and that is the purpose of the 2020 Summit.

The problem in the current discussion of the Summit is that the attention is entirely focussed on the event itself. However, its real importance lies in what it displaces, namely that policy-making body called the Australian Labor Party that may have been under the impression on the 24th of November last year that it had been given its chance to implement its own program. The Summit legitimises the idea that the ALP has no more right to impose its agenda than the Liberals or anyone else who is attending the Summit. Even when Rudd has his own proposal, such as the child care centres, he is happy to bring it to be considered at the Summit just like any other participant.

It is striking just how widely this premise of the Summit is being accepted, even by those who would have been thought to be concerned that the ALP is being displaced by a Summit that has Miranda Devine coming along. Maybe it is not too surprising that in the generally Labor-supporting blogosphere there appears widespread support for a route that bypasses the old political process that they had no influence over. But even an old Laborite like Phillip Adams seems unconcerned. In a rather coy piece he worries that in accepting his invitation it might be a bit elitist (and if any of the little people feel left out and want him to speak on their behalf, he helpfully provides an e-mail for them to send ideas) but nowhere in the article is there a sense of what it will mean for that other elite group he supports, the ALP.

Nor is there a sense in Adams's article that this side-line in policy-making might possibly compromise his day-job of commentating on current affairs and this government. At least there seems to be some awareness by some of the nation’s media chiefs that there could be dangers in getting associated so closely with the government’s agenda, which may not be that of setting policy, but setting up a new way for choosing who can and who can not.

Dead man walking

Nature might abhor a vacuum but that doesn't mean she can necessarily fill it, and Nelson is living proof. Rumours that Nelson could be replaced are not coming to the surface because the alternatives are any more credible than they were five months ago when he was elected, but as a gut reaction to the political bankruptcy that Nelson has helped to bring to the open since then.

The political bankruptcy of both major parties is not new, it has been a feature of Australian politics for the last fifteen years. Howard managed it through the War on Terror and the tease of a Costello succession. But even he began struggling near the end as the War on Terror unravelled over Haneef and the leadership went into paralysis, culminating in Howard's disastrous decision to announce his retirement.

The difference since the election is that now both major parties have openly acknowledged that bankruptcy. However, while Rudd has the apparatus of the state and his own diplomatic skills to fill the gap with his tour overseas and his call to the best and brightest at home, Nelson has nothing. The fact that Rudd's advantage over Nelson is ultimately in his ability to use the power of the office rather than anything in either leaders' program underpins the skewed polling. It is not surprising that Nelson's approval rating on its own is not that bad (36% in the latest Newspoll), it's not as though he stands for anything that would upset people. But when it comes to a direct comparison to Rudd, Nelson's unprecedented low rating reflects the advantages the office of Prime Minister now confers in the absence of political alternatives.

Unfortunately, against that unfavourable background, Nelson's tactics have not helped. Stoking up the possibility of a merger with the Nationals was a useful distraction. However, like Howard's turn to the states, Nelson's Listening Tour was a disastrous move. He exposed the party's political bankruptcy but without the anti-politics edge that Rudd employed on his tours in opposition. More worryingly for Nelson, by making such a big deal of himself and his past and how much he cares, and listens etc. etc., he has personalised the bankruptcy of the party and turned it into an issue about him.

Despite this, there is a sense the Liberals know that this is not just about Nelson and that the problem goes much deeper. Certainly it is possible to get a feel for that listening to the trouble Greg Hunt had in putting forward a distinctive party line on just about anything on Friday night's Lateline. There was a telling point in Greg Sheridan's report in The Australian when he noted that some Liberals were concerned that they will reach the same point as the state Liberals where they are no longer considered as an alternative to government. The 2007 election campaign obscured the electoral impact of the Liberals' crisis at the federal level but Peter McGauran's resignation has brought home the fear that the forthcoming by-elections will begin to expose it.

It is a sense that this is not just about Nelson that may give him some time. What also might help are the alternatives. There was little real understanding in the press why Nelson won the leadership in the first place. It was mainly seen as a matter of numbers after Abbott dropped out. However, Abbott's sacrifice was for the greater good to prevent a Turnbull takeover and it highlights why Malcolm's succession is not necessarily an inevitability. For the old leadership, discredited after the election loss, Nelson was a necessary stop-gap until it could recover.

When exactly that will be is looking further and further into the distance as Rudd re-makes the political landscape. The old leadership represents what is recognisable as the centre-right party that dominated Australian politics for the last 60 years. Their inability to gain control over their own party is a sign of the irrelevance of that party's historical agenda. Nelson has been politically dead from day one. He is a leader who never won a mandate in his own right but because the party's leadership is suffering from the implosion that started under Howard. For them, watching the Liberal 'brand' erode under Nelson is preferable to seeing it disappear altogether under Turnbull's Keating-esque agenda.

Read through

Maybe the Chinese were too polite to ask, but they may have wondered why the high-powered delegation to a meeting in Beijing that would form the centre of Australia's foreign policy did not include the Foreign Minister but did have the Minister for Climate Change.

The Chinese visit has neatly brought out the new parameters of Australian foreign policy and the role it plays in Australia's domestic politics. On the one hand we saw in action one of the most diplomatically active Prime Ministers Australia has had for some time. This is not because Rudd is engaging in 'middle power' diplomacy. Indeed one of the reasons Rudd needed to make his controversial speech at the Beijing University was to reassure audiences here that he was not going down the middle power road and do what some had feared, get too close to China at the risk of the US alliance. As Rudd constantly repeats, keeping close to the US is at the bedrock of Australia's foreign policy.

However, the point is that the US's position is changing. The loss of global leadership during the Bush administration is the problem that both Democrat and Republican candidates are grappling with this year. It is being discussed through the two ways the US political establishment is feeling that loss of authority, the Iraq war and the rise of China. Rudd's main job in this tour has been to adapt Australia's foreign policy to deal with both.

Rudd has first shifted the focus of Australia's military involvement from the mess in Iraq, where hardly anyone followed the US, to the mess in Afghanistan, where everyone has gone. Shifting the focus away from Iraq is something Howard probably would have also done, however, his political authority in Australia was too tied up in it to enable him to survive to carry that out. Rudd's commitment for more troops to Afghanistan following his attendance at the Nato summit has caused much less fuss than Howard's Iraq commitment. Opposition to Iraq was always less about the ethics of invading another country than the unilateral nature of it. Since that is not the case for Afghanistan, it is likely to be much less controversial.

It is also likely to be much less useful politically. There was always an underlying internal dimension to the Iraq invasion, that it made the country more likely to be singled out for terrorism. This link only used to be openly made by those opposing the war but it was always implicit behind those supporting it and was the assumption hidden behind the introduction of Ruddock's anti-terrorism laws in 2004. With Afghanistan being a global jamboree, there is likely to be less argument that Australia's involvement will have a domestic read-through.

What will have a domestic read-through is the second area that Rudd needs to deal with, China. When Bush said that he values Rudd's expertise on China, he didn't mean that there were manpower problems at the US State Department. What Bush meant was that Australia was expected to play its part in bringing China into the international order set up by the US. By this it means placing hoops in front of China to get them to jump. Tibet has been one in the run up to the Games. However, after the Games the more enduring one will be climate change, hence the presence of Penny Wong.

Just as residents of Sydney or south-eastern Queensland are being told that poor infrastructure spending on water (such as they have also seen on roads in Queensland or the railways in Sydney) is really their responsibility on how much water they are using, so the Chinese are being lectured on not adding to the carbon levels already put there by the developed world. Climate change is not only being used at the level of personal behaviour but to rework the federation, and now fresh from the COAG meeting over the Murray, Wong is being brought in to front the Chinese.

What we are seeing is a direct read through of foreign affairs into Australian politics that doesn't happen very often. Even during the War on Terror, translating it into support for anti-terrorism measures at home never really happened, especially among the legal profession that was supposed to uphold it, leading to the Haneef fiasco. This time, however, the global agenda of climate change is something that is now becoming embedded in the Australian body politic. This direct read through of domestic and international politics is why we now have a Prime Minister with the skills of a high-powered diplomat and a Minister who spend her time between dealing with the South Australian Premier and the leaders of one of the most powerful nations on earth. It leaves little for the Foreign Minster to do but to stay at home and tell us what it means.

Listening very carefully

Rudd's talk of an independent Australian diplomacy may have excited Australian foreign policy experts, whose jobs presumably rely on there being such a thing, but as he tours the globe, Australian foreign policy continues to look as though it will be doing what it has always done for the last 60 years, follows the US's as closely as possible. Rudd can present it as a new way only because US foreign policy itself is undergoing change as it tries to recover what it lost through the Bush presidency.

Australia's role, and for the new PM in particular, is to sensitise itself with those changes and realign Australian foreign policy accordingly. To do this it has been important to meet and listen to not only Bush but also his likely successors (just how quickly Australian foreign policy has needed to adapt is shown by the fact that one of those three successors being considered by the US political establishment to lead it was someone who, only a year ago, the then Australian Prime Minister implied was Al Qaeda's candidate of choice).

But Rudd is not only formulating foreign policy through this trip, it will hopefully help towards creating an agenda for domestic consumption. He will need it, because the one that the new government has used since coming to power, around the economy, is starting to run its course. George Megalogenis is right in Saturday's Australian, Swan's message is becoming so mixed and contradictory, as Labor's inflation scare succumbs to economic reality, that it is hard to see how it will survive the Budget.

One problem with Labor's message that inflation was out of control while interest rates were hurting families, was that it was not very flattering to the RBA which was responsible for both. Last week the RBA's Glenn Stevens hit back, saying that both of these were being exaggerated. Gillard's claim for evidence of mortgage stress as coming from what she heard on the street was pretty lame, but Labor couldn't come back hard on the RBA while respecting its independence. At the bottom of this conundrum is Labor still trying to make an economic argument when it has already admitted that an economic policy is no longer possible, something Rudd has confirmed by motivating his world tour as an alternative to watching the economic crisis unfold on CNN.

Rudd's world tour to find an agenda is certainly likely to be more productive than his opposite number's tour of the nation's 'servos' for a similar purpose. It must be fairly disconcerting to true blue Liberal voters, only a few months after they voted for a party to carry out its program, to see its leader now touring the country asking voters what exactly it is. Especially as he seems to be doing so by hanging around in the sort of places where he is more likely to be listening to the thoughts of die-hard Labor voters than anyone else. Shouldn't he be shooting the breeze in the cafés of Burnside and Toorak instead?

The trouble with Nelson's cringing Ozzie Ocker act and his excruciating personal revelations is that he is aping Rudd's tactics as opposition leader without knowing why they worked. The unprecedented personalized style of Rudd's campaign and claims that the government was unaware of real hardships of Australian families were effective not because his personal story was that interesting or that those hardships were any worse than before. It was because both underpinned the charge that the Howard government was out of touch which in turn was a product of Howard still carrying as though he had an agenda when he did not, summed up by that annoying piece of IR legislation that business didn't need.

If there is one thing Rudd has been careful of since coming to office is of not appearing to have a programme that he doesn't have. He has gone out of his way to present himself as open to new ideas, even if at the risk of side-lining and humiliating the ALP. Any undermining of his authority as a politician by admitting that he has no program, is countered by his ability as a technocrat to use the state apparatus to either gather together the best and brightest, or send him off around the globe, in order to find one.

For Nelson, without such means at his disposal, such a listening tour just ends up undermining his authority in the electorate. His is also undermining his authority in the party. This is despite the old leadership still not ready to move against him until they are sure the Turnbull threat has receded. Nelson's tactics have only accentuated the vacuum in the party's leadership of which there is no clearer sign than the revival of hopes for the politically astute former Treasurer.