Real Julia foiled by old battles

There appears to be two, not necessarily incompatible, views that have emerged to account for the demise of Julia Gillard as prime minister.

One, which seems popular among the Left, is that this occurred because she was a woman. It is a view that Gillard herself, albeit partly, shares. The Left also seems to adhere to the supposition that an especially nasty campaign of destabilisation led by Kevin Rudd had also played a causal role in unseating her.

The prevailing view is that a desperate, and largely dysfunctional, Labor caucus has turned to the popular Kevin Rudd in order to have a fighting chance of winning the upcoming federal election.

I do not think that either of these views serve as an adequate explanation of recent Australian political history. To be sure, all of the above factors played a role but they do not serve as good explanations if by explanation we mean the unravelling of underlying causes.

Clearly Gillard was not unseated because her government pursued a radical feminist agenda out of tune with a predominantly patriarchal public opinion. Whatever we might say about public opinion, and Gillard's own personal preferences, hitting single mothers and opposing gay marriage, among other things, does not demonstrate that Gillard led a government determined to advance a feminist restructuring of patriarchal Australia.

So one could only argue that themere fact that Gillard was a woman accounted for the level of hostility that a misogynistic opposition and public had for her. This view does not tally with the reception that Gillard received when she first became prime minister, which was very positive. One could even argue that the mere fact that she was a woman played some part in her becoming prime minister.

Furthermore, the Australian public has welcomed female political leaders at the state level.

Queensland and Western Australia are the most conservative states in the land. Both have had female premiers. As someone that grew up in Western Australia I well recall Carmen Lawrence's standing in the electorate helping to both save the Hawke government from defeat and limiting Labor's losses at the 1993 state election.

Labor did not lose in 1993 because of Lawrence's gender, rather, Labor could not escape the WA Inc saga that accompanied the 80s boom overseen by the Burke government.

To be sure Anna Bligh was trounced at the polls in 2012, after having led Labor to victory in 2009, but that was because she pursued a neoliberal privatisation agenda despite telling Queenslanders that would not happen but knowing full well that it would. The asset sales largely occurred at the behest of credit rating agencies acting in the interests of investors and financial markets.

Why should the most conservative states have little issue with female premiers but have no truck for a female prime minister? It would be like asserting that a Democratic African-American presidential candidate was not able to carry Alabama on racial grounds, even though a Democratic African-American resides in the governor's residence.

Moreover, for much of the period of her prime ministership Gillard herself polled better than her party and the, male, leader of the opposition. If the mere fact of her being a woman accounts for her public standing, and hence her defeat, surely that could not have been so.

The Australian experience appears to be in accord with a study just published by Princeton University Press, written by Deborah Brooks, which shows that female political candidates are treated no differently by the American electorate than men.

There can be little doubt that Kevin Rudd had waged a protracted campaign against Gillard's leadership of the Labor Party, made more difficult by the realities of minority government. But his efforts to undermine her leadership had little affect on Gillard's own standing within the parliamentary party, as evidenced by her commanding defeat of Rudd in the 2012 leadership ballot.

It is not the campaign of destabilisation within the parliamentary party that eventually achieved traction. Rather, it is the destabilisation without that helped to tarnish Labor's public standing that is key here.

The shadow of Kevin Rudd loomed large over just about every policy announcement, nay over almost every public appearance, that Gillard had made following the 2010 election. For that the actions of the corporate media are more important than the actions of Rudd, or his supporters within the ALP.

They are more important because leadership ructions within a parliamentary party become a source of permanent news to the extent that those ructions reflect a significant sentiment of discontent within the party. Rudd had very little support within caucus, so the Rudd destabilisation campaign was waged in alliance with the corporate media and was, we might conclude, largely manufactured to the level of crisis by the corporate media.

As senior Labor figures tiresomely pointed out the leadership crisis was a crisis of the media's making for there was no intrinsic crisis regarding the leadership within the party itself.

Kevin Rudd is simultaneously both arsonist and fire fighter; he lit the fire, with fuel given to him by the media, that engulfed Labor and now he presents himself as the regular CFA.

Of the two, the Rudd forces and the media, it is the actions of the media that are more important as the media was the more powerful player.

This media campaign did tap into a vein of opinion in Australia that is misogynistic and patriarchal, but that tapping of the vein was done for other, predominantly economic, ends. Furthermore, the carbon tax and refugees also were a problem for Gillard to the extent that these issues became closely linked, by means of a scare campaign with the critical assistance of a compliant media, with cost of living pressures particularly in the mortgage belt.

But why did the corporate media portray the Gillard government in so poor a light?

The Bank of International Settlements recently published a report calling for governments to cut public spending, which is a reference to further dismantlement of the welfare state, and to move forward with further labour market deregulation, which is a reference to cutting wages and curtailing the power of the organised working class.

These twin objectives also reflect the preferred policy positions of corporate Australia, and they also are the direction which the Liberal Party would like to take Australia toward. There are very powerful forces in this country that would like the neoliberal transformation of Australia to continue and they have a very effective tool in an increasingly centralised corporate media to further that transformation.

Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan recently, rhetorically at least, were heading in the opposite direction. Much ire was directed their way by sober heads in the media for having the temerity to revive talk of "old style class warfare." This came after a number of measures, and essays and speeches, that addressed the growing level of inequality in Australia.

For the government what was at issue was returning the budget relatively quickly to surplus, partly through progressive tax and superannuation measures, and, following Barack Obama, trying to politically exploit public disquiet against rising inequality. The Liberal Party, by contrast, seeks to return the budget to surplus by attacking the public and protecting the interests of the rich.

In Australia we now have a highly class conscious and politically motivated class of oligarchs. This oligarchic class has arisen because inequality in Australia has gradually become Americanised. As Andrew Leigh, the Labor member for Fraser, has pointed out, inequality among the rich has increased as the top 0.001% have tripled their share of household wealth from 1984 onward.

This class of oligarchs is politically motivated because they fully understand that their interests need careful protection and tending to in a democratic society.

Comrade Gillard's entry into politics at large was shaped by an adherence to working class politics and socialist beliefs. Both of these, in this no different to her long time critic Lindsay Tanner, she put aside upon her entry into parliament. Note the juxtaposition; rising inequality, new class of oligarchs ascendant, abandonment of socialist beliefs and class based politics.

The key defining idea of Real Julia, as opposed to comrade Gillard, was the notion that class based politics reflects "old battles." It is the abandonment of the notion that class still matters, that class and inequality constitute the core of politics in a capitalist society, that accounted for Gillard's "lurch to the Right."

She was wrong. That error was her undoing.

The rich have been waging a one sided class war for the past 30 years. It is this class war that accounts for the rise of inequality in Australia, but also globally, over the same time period. A key component of that class war is the weakening of working class organisations, both industrial and political.

In the centenary edition of the ALP policy platform it is stated that Labor found its origins in the idea that a political party was needed to "take forward the struggle of the working class against the excesses, injustices and inequalities of capitalism." Woe betide any Labor leader should they utter such words today.

It is the rise to prominence of an organised working class movement that helped to bring about government dedicated to the pursuit of social justice. We should not be the least bit surprised to learn that, in turn, neoliberal politics partly depends upon the weakening of the organised working class.

This has been achieved via a number of mechanisms, such as diluting class consciousness through consumer culture, but also, crucially, via a largely class collaborationist cadre of union and Labor leaders. Notice that Andrew Leigh's tripling of the wealth of the top 0.001% coincides with the Hawke-Keating Labor government, and its Accord with Bill Kelty's ACTU.

Appropriately the words cited above are currently buried at the back of the policy platform rather than proudly exhibited at the front. Indeed the Labor name nowadays does not even dare have the word "party" replaced now by the more diluted corporate marketing inspired "Australian Labor."

The new Australia is the type of Australia our new class of oligarchs would like us to have, and furthermore continue to nurture.

The Australian Labor Party simply is in the way of people who are more dedicated, but also more able, to ride this class war to ever new heights. Labor can only go thus far and no further.

It does not matter who leads Labor; that will remain the case so long as there exists another political party more in line with corporate power.

Julia Gillard was, in part, elevated to the Labor leadership in order to head off a challenge waged against Rudd by the oligarchs. That worked, to a degree, but the oligarchs redoubled their efforts and Real Julia is no more. Support for Julia Gillard collapsed because of an unremitting campaign waged against her by the corporate media, a sharply right wing Liberal Party marching in lock step with the oligarchs, and a sniping megalomaniac determined to unseat her from within.

To head off this determined assault Labor has now, sadly necessarily so, gone back to Rudd.

This is a deft political move borne of desperation. Labor now finds itself with little room for manoeuvre in the new Australia.

The oligarchs were against Labor not because of Gillard, rather, they were against Gillard because of Labor.