Politics by the book

Gillard is pictured as a very good one-on-one negotiator, a talent to which I can personally affirm. She was superb at getting things done, even though she had to battle every inch of the way with a hung parliament. But, she did not excel at handling political crises and created a public image that she was a poor communicator. All of this culminated in a number of significant policy blunders that had a key role in her being overthrown.

Kelly is tough on Wayne Swan over the mining tax and his failure to produce a budget surplus in six years as Treasurer, but he fails to acknowledge that Swan had to overcome an enormous liability in getting an indecisive Rudd to sign-off on anything and, even when he did get decisions, then find that Rudd had changed his mind before it could be implemented.

Tony Abbott gets better treatment than anyone in the book, but Kelly does point-out that Abbott has not yet overcome his personal unpopularity with voters. He won the 2013 election solely because a majority of voters wanted a change of government, no matter who led it.

But, the most memorable part of Triumph and Demise is the chapter about the fight for the heart and soul of the Liberal Party over Climate Change, resulting in Turnbull losing the leadership to Abbott by just one vote. It was a bitter struggle, as Turnbull tried to come to a bipartisan agreement with Rudd for an Emissions Trading Scheme. He almost got there, but the climate deniers felt that they had to stop him forever.

Most of the caucus did not want Abbott as their leader but, when Hockey chose to sit on the fence on the issue, they had no option but to back Abbott. Hockey would have won easily if he had backed the deniers. Perhaps, it is to his credit that he chose not to.

It was during this momentous battle that Rudd lost his only chance to get the ETS into law. Had he made strategic concessions to Turnbull, it would have passed through Parliament. But, he chose to publicly and constantly denigrate Turnbull, whom he feared as his political opponent for the 2010 elections, and did all he could to destroy him. This destabilised Turnbull to such an extent that his enemies in his own party felt confident enough to replace him with Abbott, and so Rudd lost the only significant ETS supporter that he had outside of his own party — the Greens having given it the thumbs down as being inadequate.

It was dumb politics. In his mind, he placed the winning of the 2010 election above the passing of legislation to overcome the “greatest humanitarian challenge of all time.”

JULIA GILLARD

My Storywas not written by Gillard as a response to Paul Kelly, but it nevertheless fills this role. It’s interesting to absorb their differing versions of major events.

The huge problem that Julia had as PM was that she did not ever have the clear air necessary to allow her to be herself and achieve her political goals.

From the moment that she rightly and correctly removed Rudd, she was vilified everywhere as a political assassin, and was relentlessly hounded by Rudd, who became seriously pathological in his hatred of her. She then had to concentrate on successfully maintaining a minority government and achieve important goals.

Everything she sought to achieve had to be negotiated with the Greens and Independents, and was almost invariably a compromise. She also had to keep Unions onside, as they were the cornerstone of her survival within her own Party. On top of this, she faced the most negative Leader of the Opposition in Australian political history, Tony Abbott, who was relentless. That she survived for three years was an achievement of significance.