We have just experienced a Shakespearean moment. There is real excitement in the land, a sense of new beginnings, as the Elizabethan figure of Julia Gillard takes the reins as Prime Minister.
It was a swift, clean transition. We were spared many more months of leadership speculation amid the steady draining-away of Labor's electoral support. The rightwards drift in the electorate will now be stopped. Gillard will win the next election for Labor. Rudd would probably have lost it.
Labor faction leaders acted with ruthless precision. Rudd, to his credit, has accepted the inevitable with grace and dignity. As Wayne Swan said, politics is a tough game. The loyalty compact between political leaders and their parties is that leaders must succeed. Rudd was starting to fail.
Gillard said rightly that a good Labor Government, despite its great achievement in saving Australian jobs from the GFC, had lost its way. As deputy PM, and a minister loyal to both her party and leader, she had no alternative but to accept the call of factional leaders for her to take the leadership.
To suggest that this is a case of personal ambition and disloyalty is tomisunderstand the special nature of politics. Politics is about gaining and retaining power in order to implement a policy program. For her to say no was not an option.
Gillard's first statements on climate change and the resources super profits tax were well judged. These two issues go to the heart of why Rudd had to go.
On climate change, Rudd first went wrong in July-December 2008 when he set out to broker down Professor Ross Garnaut's science-based recommendation for a 25 per cent cut in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. He shrugged off Garnaut's expertise, bowing instead to pressure from the coal energy lobby to adopt an ineffectual 5 per cent 2020 emissions reduction target, to be achieved by shonky international emissions trading.
The resulting Emissions Trading Scheme destroyed Rudd's standing with voters serious about the climate crisis. His refusal to test his ETS bills in a double-dissolution election in 2009 drained away yet more support.
Gillard did not promise to return to an ETS. She said simply that she will advance use of wind and solar technologies, that she believes in climate change and that humans contribute to climate change, and that it is a disappointment to her as it is to millions of Australians that we do not have a price on carbon. In the future, she said, we will need one, but first we will have to establish a community consensus for action. If elected as Prime Minister, she concluded, 'We will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad.'
These words leave policy flexibility for Gillard to adopt Garnaut's recommendations for a domestic carbon tax. International emissions trading won't be going anywhere soon, and meanwhile something must be done to cut Australia's emissions.
On the RSPT, Rudd reached for this risky policy initiative when he saw how much credibility he had lost on the ETS. He was trying to inspire voters by invoking the Australian theme of a fair go for ordinary people against rapacious big miners. But he could not seize the day. An effective miners' campaign in a society now tied to the mining industry's fortunes through mass superannuation was draining away support from Labor.
Gillard, wisely, has turned the page on the RSPT. She has unilaterally cancelled the government's advertising campaign against the miners, and called on them to respond in kind. She has promised real negotiations, to be conducted by Swan as Deputy PM and Treasurer, and Martin Ferguson as Resources and Energy Minister. She has thus lanced the RSPT boil in a way that Rudd could no longer do.
Both Rudd and Gillard were the right choices for the times. In 2007, Rudd made us believe in him. He was the only Labor leader who could have toppled Howard. The electorate had become conditioned to accept as normal Howard's grey, bean-counting, Uncle Sam's coat-tails style of leadership. Rudd was sufficiently familiar to be unthreatening. Then, Gillard would have frightened voters off. Not now.
Gillard will successfully defuse the RSPT issue. But these are still early days for her policy leadership on the testing issue of climate change.
Gillard will be subject to the same powerful coal-energy vested interest voices. They will urge more phoney solutions in defence of the coal-based Australian energy status quo. She has a brief window of time to put her stamp on climate change policy leadership, to affirm that Labor will make a real start after the election on Australia's necessary path to decarbonisation. This will take courage, a quality she no doubt does not lack.
Finally, a personal view on Rudd's character. Was David Marr right — was he a leader fatally flawed by anger from a traumatic childhood? I don't buy it. Politicians of worth — as Rudd is — transcend tough childhoods.
I have known Rudd some 20 years. We were colleagues in Foreign Affairs in the late 1980s, where we worked closely together in the Policy Planning Branch. Later I assisted for a brief period in 2002 in his Shadow Foreign Minister's office at Parliament House.
Politics is a high-stress game and all leaders can be forgiven occasional bouts of bad temper. Reported incidents were no big deal, and are not keys to the man. Rudd is a decent, highly intelligent, energetic and well-motivated man, who has made great contributions to Australia. I wish him a continued, useful and satisfying role in public life. He would make an excellent Foreign Minister, if Stephen Smith were to move on to another portfolio.
Farewell PM Kevin, welcome PM Julia.
More on the leadership takeover:
It's a girl!
Gillard's win a loss for feminists
Moving forward with Gillard
Remembering Rudd
Tony Kevin is the author of Crunch Time, a book exploring Australia's inadequate policy responses to the climate change crisis.