We have just experienced a Shakespearean moment. There is real excitement in the land, a sense of new beginnings, as the Elizabethan figure of Julia Gillard takes the reins as Prime Minister.
It was a swift, clean transition. We were spared many more months of leadership speculation amid the steady draining-away of Labor's electoral support. The rightwards drift in the electorate will now be stopped. Gillard will win the next election for Labor. Rudd would probably have lost it.
Labor faction leaders acted with ruthless precision. Rudd, to his credit, has accepted the inevitable with grace and dignity. As Wayne Swan said, politics is a tough game. The loyalty compact between political leaders and their parties is that leaders must succeed. Rudd was starting to fail.
Gillard said rightly that a good Labor Government, despite its great achievement in saving Australian jobs from the GFC, had lost its way. As deputy PM, and a minister loyal to both her party and leader, she had no alternative but to accept the call of factional leaders for her to take the leadership.
To suggest that this is a case of personal ambition and disloyalty is tomisunderstand the special nature of politics. Politics is about gaining and retaining power in order to implement a policy program. For her to say no was not an option.
Gillard's first statements on climate change and the resources super profits tax were well judged. These two issues go to the heart of why Rudd had to go.
On climate change, Rudd first went wrong in July-December 2008 when he set out to broker down Professor Ross Garnaut's science-based recommendation for a 25 per cent cut in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. He shrugged off Garnaut's expertise, bowing instead to pressure from the coal energy lobby to adopt an ineffectual 5 per cent 2020 emissions reduction target, to be achieved by shonky international emissions trading.
The resulting Emissions Trading Scheme destroyed Rudd's standing with voters serious about the climate crisis. His refusal to test his ETS bills in a double-dissolution election in 2009 drained away yet more support.
Gillard did not promise to return to an ETS. She said simply that she will advance use of wind and solar technologies, that she believes in climate change and that humans contribute to climate change, and that it is a disappointment to her as it is to millions