In Canberra last night: an old political truth reaffirmed — Clive Kessler

JUNE 27 — It is an old saying.

“To be a good prime minister you need to be a good butcher.”

You have to be ready to use the knife when necessary.

Politics is a tough game. Tough and unfair.

It has certainly been unfair to Julia Gillard.

Overall, in a profession that is not generally held in high regard in her country, she has been better than many and far better than most.

She has been a good, decent, principled, disciplined and intelligent leader, a very good “chair of the board” of the Cabinet that she led.

But she has been a failure.

A failure in a trade and calling where failure is simply not acceptable.

A regrettable situation. But that was abundantly clear.

She had evidently failed.

She had failed because she had not been allowed to succeed.

How?

Whatever her slips and missteps, the fault was not hers alone.

The blame is to be shared.

The first part of that responsibility is that of the Australian people itself, who in the end passed a judgment on her performance that her party colleagues in Parliament could no longer ignore.

They gave a failing mark to her for how she had handled a situation that they, not she, had created.

They found her guilty of not being a strong leader in a situation from which, by their own choice and action as voters, no strong leader — only a master of survival by negotiation and improvisation — could emerge.

Voters in the end had become fed up not so much with the government but with national politics, as exemplified by what was happening, or not happening, in the national Parliament.

By how that political failure was made to appear, how it was typified and projected, by the political opposition as the failure alone of the prime minister and her party, above all of their political and moral character.

Parliament was deadlocked.

It was deadlocked as a result of the aggregate decisions, one by one, of the Australian voters who returned a “hung Parliament” in 2010.

In that situation, without a majority of her own, Prime Minister Gillard had to work with the support of several independents. It was no easy thing. At times the challenge that it presented was like “herding cats”.

The high-wire act may not have lasted six months. Few expected even that.

But it went to “full term” over three years.

It ended yesterday on the second last sitting day of that Parliament elected in 2010.

And during those three years it passed some important legislation, registered some important achievements, notably in such basic social policy matters as a national disability insurance scheme.

But overall it could not succeed.

It could not succeed because there was not the will or goodwill in Parliament to enable the prime minister and her government to succeed.

The opposition under Tony Abbott was a spectacular success: as an implacable, single-minded, adamant and inflexible opposition.

It was there to oppose. And it did. Consistently and purposefully.

On important matters — notably the question of so-called “border protection”, asylum seekers and the “Malaysia solution” — it would not agree to anything.

It would accept nothing other than the implementation of its own policies by Julia Gillard’s ALP government; and when her government offered Abbott and his key shadow minister of immigration exactly that, even that was not good enough.

Their bluff was called and exposed.

They wanted their own policies, but implemented by themselves, not by the government of the day.

That is, they would not agree to anything but government impotence and failure.

The government had to be blocked and humiliated, no matter what proposal it placed on the table.

The government in its eye had no legitimacy, or had to be made to look as if it did not. So it had to be obstructed and blocked at every step.

The last three years have been, on the floor on the House, a triumph of obstructionism. Of saying “No!” come what may, on virtually all significant issues.

The strategy of the Abbott opposition was clear.

They spent one-half of their time and energy making the country ungovernable by the ALP, and the other half of their strength deriding the government for not being able to govern.

It was a winning formula.

The last time that this approach had been used so successfully was by the Chilean opposition from 1970 to 1972.

Abbott’s opposition liked to say, when Gillard’s minority government came to power, that “this Parliament has no legitimacy”.

This was nonsense. It was even an insult, a culpable act of contempt against Parliament.

The Parliament was legitimate. Unquestionably. It had been properly and legitimately elected by the people of Australia.

It was they, the people, who elected the Parliament and produced the deadlock.

A deadlock whose nature and consequences they deplored, and for which they were in time persuaded to hold the minority government responsible.

At other times the opposition was happy to suggest that it was not the Parliament but the government based in it that lacked democratic legitimacy.

But again, in that deadlocked House, the government that Gillard fashioned by astute negotiation was also fully legitimate.

Governments are made and broken under the system of parliamentary democracy “on the floor of the House”. There is only one question: do they or do they not command a majority there in the popular arm of the legislature?

Gillard’s government did.

But it was denied the ability to act, to function, by Abbott’s determined opposition and consistent obstruction.

It was denied the appearance of competence, the mundane charisma of proven and successful routine, the legitimacy that flows from continuing everyday effectiveness.

And, whether it was fair or not, in that situation, or so it became increasingly clear, Gillard was leading her troops, her ever more demoralised army, to monumental defeat.

It was a defeat, her colleagues finally concluded, that had to be averted, if at all possible. And if not averted then minimised.

And the only possible way — not guaranteed, but just perhaps possible — was a return to Rudd’s leadership.

First time around, Rudd’s leadership may have been a roller-coaster ride to those who were there as he sat self-absorbed in the driver’s seat. But he retained a strange popularity outside the political world, among the unfathomably “recalcitrant” people.

They may not know much about politics, but they know who they like.

And, whatever their reason, many of them like Rudd.

They like him far more than they ever liked Julia Gillard.

Unfair, perhaps, but true.

In 2007 he had seemed a man of the time: a Harry Potter “political twin” at the peak of the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Times are different now. And Rudd is perhaps changed too, just a little.

But he still carries with him some of that strange Harry Potter aura and magic, to people who drawn to that weird script and “narrative”.

They can accept him, his weaknesses and defects notwithstanding.

The same leeway or “slack” is not and was not extended to Julia Gillard.

Yes, being a woman did not help among certain people. Among certain cultural diehards, in both the “old Australian” and the “immigrant” communities.

But, no less important yet far less noted than gender is the “class” issue.

To be precise, not class but what sociologists since Max Weber prefer to characterise as “status”. This involves the matter of public “esteem” and recognised, approved dignity rather than the crude economic dynamics of class.

To many on the other side of politics, the traditional or conservative side, the way Gillard spoke and presented herself, and especially her accent, made her “common”.

She sounded like a waterfront barmaid, some said.

The disdain was overwhelming. For them Gillard, no matter how able or intelligent or competent, was simply not fit to govern. Her background, and the stamp that it had left on her, disqualified her. They could not accept being led by a woman of — to them and their supposedly refined tastes — such vulgar tone and character.

Among those who considered themselves her social and cultural superiors, she was simply too “low”, beneath them.

On the other side, many everyday working Australians also felt unhappy and uncomfortable with her.

Sure, they like people with “the common touch”, people of their own kind, to associate with, people with whom to mix at work and in leisure time.

But when it comes to politics, when it comes to national leadership, they do not want the common touch, they do not want someone at their own level.

They want leader whom they can look up to, somebody whom they can see as better than themselves and even admire.

Someone embodying not who they are but what, if the world were a better and fairer place in their eyes and by their own standards, they might themselves be.

Their “common sense” preference is for somebody who is not simply common. It is for somebody who can rise, on their behalf, above commonness. And for them Julia Gillard was simply too common, too ordinary, too much like their own earthbound selves.

You could see what she was doing, you might even approve of it at times. But you could not admire her. You were not uplifted when you heard her speak, often with passion and genuine commitment and even a direct, everyday eloquence, about the things that mattered to her — and by no means to her alone but to many working Australians.

It was this reassuring ordinariness, an ordinariness that clothed her great talents and abilities, that counted against her. A non-“folksy” ordinariness that her adversaries in opposition were able to turn against her. That many people outside the narrow world of politics were prepared, or were persuaded, to hold against her.

Yes, politics is a tough game.

From a position of weakness leading a minority government, Gillard played it tough and hard.

And, against the odds, with remarkable success — until the prospect of imminent electoral catastrophe prompted her parliamentary colleagues to admit their despair and throw their support, in a final desperate move, back to Kevin Rudd.

And when they did, Gillard proved her very “uncommon” nature and genuine “class” (in the sense of the ability to display graciousness under pressure and in adversity) by leaving office as she did, with her parting words to her colleagues and the nation: entirely without self-pity, without recrimination, with a winning display of dignity

and solid personal character.

It is a great shame that these characteristics are not enough these days, or so Australia’s recent experience would seem to show, to deliver success into a good politician’s hands.

“To be a good prime minister you need to be a good butcher.”

Gillard proved herself capable of meeting that requirement in 2010, and now Rudd had shown the same in 2013.

But can he now save something for his party, and hers, from the looming disaster?

Their colleagues now hope so. There is nowhere else to look for hope or consolation. One can only try to discern some tentative signs of rescue and redemption in a scene of desolation and despair.

That is why the ALP has now returned to Kevin Rudd.

And now, onwards from here. To where?

* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.