Monday's leadership ballot will offer a much needed opportunity to clear the air and move on to a healthier, more open climate in Australian federal politics.
Whether or not Rudd contests, the result should begin to heal the deepening wounds the party has suffered from weeks of Machiavellian plotting and rumour-mongering. As Tony Burke said on Thursday, the vote will lance the boil so that healing may begin.
Most Australian voters of Labor sympathies will breathe a sigh of relief that the subterranean issues of leadership and thwarted ambition are out in the open. Now elected ALP federal representatives may freely make their final individual decisions.
Those decisions will be informed partly by self-interest (under which leader can each member of caucus best hope for re-election at the next national election?) but also, one hopes, by consideration of which leader is likely to operate cabinet government most effectively in the national interest.
I believe the right course of action will be for the caucus to support Gillard.
Politics in the Australian party system has to be a team sport. Players must stand behind the captain, loyally papering over their faults. They must not undermine them with disparaging judgements, either on or off the record or by leaking to others.
Things are at last being said in public about Rudd's record. Eminent Labor politicians such as Simon Crean, Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon, Tony Burke, Anna Bligh and Peter Beattie are saying in different ways that this saga must end now. These are not 'faceless men', but men and women with clear faces, opinions and responsibilities.
Rudd had acquired a reputation as PM for failures as an efficient decision maker and manager. He failed to show decent and productive respect and courtesy for ministerial colleagues and senior public servants. He was autocratic and unreasonable in his determination to monopolise power and exploit all the prerogatives of his office. These things were well known in Canberra.
The gossip out of Foreign Affairs since he became Foreign Minister is that those habits had not changed. Last week's leaked YouTube video tended to confirm this.
Rudd's was not a high-achieving government in terms of policy runs on the board. It was good at articulating messages of general philosophy and intent — how Australia needed to put the John Howard era behind us — and Rudd knew the arts of stroking and flattering the public. His government took Australia safely and calmly through the first stage of the Global Financial Crisis.
But it badly messed up the carbon pricing issue, leaving environmental reformers like Ross Garnaut marooned. It messed up the mining tax and pink batts. The style was high-handed and autocratic, but at the same time careless with detail, messy and inefficient.
When the supporters of Gillard moved to unseat Rudd in June 2010, they did so in the belief that the Labor ship was under serious threat from Abbott, but was salvageable. The election outcome of a hung parliament was a narrow shave. But it was a genuine election and a genuine outcome, whatever Abbott may say about it. His claim that this is an illegitimate 'unelected' government is nonsense.
Minority government has presented unique challenges to Gillard and her team, to which they have responded with dignity, clarity and efficiency. Labor now has real policy runs on the board: a carbon pricing system, a mining tax, health funding reform, and the start of education reform. The working style of cabinet is by all accounts collegial, respectful and far more effective than before.
Crucially, Gillard took the decision in 2010 to invite Rudd to stay on as Foreign Minister. He was given the opportunity to make a serious and continuing contribution. And generally, he did, as the Libya intervention and the well-managed Obama visit attest. (His record on relations with China is mixed — there is little doubt he lost Beijing's trust starting in 2008, and has never recovered it.)
But Gillard and her team have been forced to fight on two fronts, against relentless attacks from the Opposition and its media sympathisers, and from undermining forces within the party. The anonymous undermining can only have originated from those close to Rudd.
Burke explained it well on Thursday. Gillard's team had hoped for the best after the change in June 2010 — that Rudd and his backers would accept what had happened, and move on in doing their jobs. This did not happen. Other agendas were in play.
And here arises Labor's dilemma. Gillard's determination since June 2010 to publicly assume the best of Rudd left her until this week unable to articulate to the public the ways in which he was failing in loyalty to her government. A sense of decency kept her and her ministers silent on his failures as PM.
As a result, in the apt words of Eureka Street correspondent 'Pam' yesterday: 'Gillard is perceived as a good leader by the party and not by the electorate, and Rudd is perceived as a poor leader by the party and not by the electorate.' This is a problem of Labor's own making. Now, because Rudd's backers have fatally overreached themselves in recent weeks, it has the chance to set things right.
Gillard says that if defeated she will retire to the backbench. She calls on Rudd to make the same pledge. Clearly, there will be no more ministerial posts for Rudd under Gillard. Whatever the outcome on Monday, a chapter has ended.
Now the party has a quick repair and public education job to do over the next few days and weeks, in reminding all Australians that politics as a team sport requires solidarity and mutual loyalty.
Tony Kevin is an author and former ambassador to Cambodia and Poland.