Australia's political goldfish bowl from the outside

09 September 2013

When an election results in a change of government, a stock line of punditry is to search for a 'when was it lost?' moment.

There will be those, for example, who cite Kevin Rudd's stilted and uninspiring performance in the first leaders' debate. Others will point to his increasingly panicked, policy-on-the-run approach to campaigning, which resulted in eyebrow-raising pledges about tax cuts for Top Enders and moving the Garden Island naval base to somewhere north of the Tweed.

Those who seize on these promises will typically do so by way of arguing that the 'old' Kevin, the one sacked by his Labor colleagues in June 2010 for not being a team player, had resurfaced — indeed, that he had never really gone away.

Still others will attribute Labor's downfall to the toxic atmosphere of disunity that characterised its second term in office, steadily leaching away the voters' trust. Depending on who gets cast as villain-in-chief, the blame in this line of argument is attributed either to the beneficiary of the coup of 2010, Julia Gillard, or to the undermining of her prime ministership by Rudd, the man she deposed.

These explanations are favoured by intra-party pundits, who on Saturday night could be heard telling interviewers that disunity is death, and that if Labor is to rebuild it must move beyond the divisions of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era. Since most of these party elders also hinted at whom they blamed for disunity, it may be doubted whether the divisions will heal anytime soon.

Good arguments can be made in support of each of these theories, and they are not mutually exclusive: they all go some way to explaining why later this week the Governor-General will commission Tony Abbott as Australia's 28th prime minister, at the head of a Coalition Government with a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives.

But for me the real when-it-was-lost moment came just past the midpoint in the campaign, and it was truly bizarre, far stranger than anything Rudd might have said about relocating the navy or tax inducements to live in the tropics. And if the campaigning politicians and the media pack following them round the country noticed it, they chose to ignore it. That is not surprising, because it was an event that exposed the assumptions both groups work by. It was the publication of a leader in The Economist, calling for the return of the Rudd Labor Government.

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Australia's political goldfish bowl from the outside

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