The removal of Kevin Rudd

To quote Annabel Crabb:

Perhaps we should borrow the filing system of former British Labour figurehead Tony Benn, who used to say that politicians could be classed into three categories: fixers, straight men or maddies.

Mark Latham was a "maddie". After Latham retired Kim Beazley was asked how could Labor have made someone like Latham their leader and what would they have done if he had become Prime Minister. Beazley said that if Latham had been Prime Minister and it had become apparent to the party that he was not suitable for the office Labor would have removed him. That's what happened to Kevin Rudd in 2010. It became apparent to those around him that he was not a suitable person for the office of Prime Minister. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons Labor did not communicate the real reason for Rudd's removal to the voters of Australia.

So why wasn't Kevin Rudd prime ministerial material? John Mendoza was senior adviser on mental health to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He quit his job shortly before Rudd's removal because, he claims, of Rudd's dysfunctional leadership. In an interview on ABC radio he discusses some of the problems.

David Marr wrote Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd in Quarterly Essay 38. An edited extract - We have to talk about Kevin - was published in June 2010 and is well worth reading for and insight into Rudd. He has just written an article about the removal of Rudd: Total candour was only way to stop him:

No Kevin. This isn't a breakdown in civility. Your colleagues are at last telling us why you were sacked. And here the political is inescapably personal: you couldn't run the place. The result was, as Julia Gillard said yesterday and every newspaper and television station has been repeating since, "chaos and paralysis".

He also writes:

For months before his execution the media had been reporting Rudd's dysfunctional dealings with ministers, the relegation of his cabinet, and the ceaseless difficulty of getting the man to sign anything.

Much might have been forgiven if the decisions Rudd finally reached were extraordinarily good. But they weren't. For all the effort, he doesn't come up with particularly interesting solutions," a former aide told me. "His policy positions aren't breakthroughs, not particularly new or exciting. After all that work, they are dull."

James Button was at one time a speech writer for Kevin Rudd. In Time we heard truth about the real Kevin he discusses his time working for the Rudd Government and the reasons for Rudd's removal.

The truth is, Rudd was impossible to work with. He regularly treated his staff, public servants and backbenchers with rudeness and contempt. He could be vindictive, intervening to deny people appointments or preselections, sometimes based on grudges going back years.

He made crushing demands on his staff, and when they laboured through the night to meet those demands, they received no thanks, and often the work was not used. People who dared to stand up to him were put in "the freezer" and not consulted or spoken to for months.

His staff's prodigious loyalty was mostly not repaid. He put people down behind their backs. He seemed to feel that everyone was always letting him down. In meetings, as I saw, he could emanate a kind of icy rage that was as mysterious as it was disturbing.

He governed by, and seemed almost to thrive on, crisis. Important papers went unsigned; staff and public servants would be pulled onto flights, in at least one case halfway around the world, on the off-chance that he needed to consult them.

Vital decisions were held up while he struggled to make up his mind, frequently demanding more pieces of information that merely delayed the final result. The fate of the government seemed to hinge on the psychology of one man.

As I watched this unfold in Canberra, I tried hard to put aside my poor experience of working for Rudd. I had been a journalist for more than 20 years and knew that just because three people complain about something or someone does not make it true. When 30 or more witnesses complain, you can start to believe it.

He goes on to write:

But, amazingly, apart from a handful of conversations praising his formidable intelligence, his efforts on the economic crisis and the fact that he left some ministers alone to do their work, there was no other side to the story. Hard-bitten commentators will say that character, or kindness, are irrelevant to politics; what counts is getting the job done. But you can never escape the human factor. In the first six months of 2010, Rudd's personality and government policy collided, to catastrophic effect.

People saw it coming. As much as four months before his downfall, Canberra insiders were warning that in the next few months Rudd had to land his health plan, the Henry tax review, a new plan for the carbon pollution reduction scheme after it had been defeated in the Senate, and the federal budget.

Each one was a massive operation. Each one required months of parliamentary and public battle. It was like trying to land four jumbo jets at once on the same runway, and people said it could not be done.

Some of these people were in a position to say these things to Rudd but he had stopped listening. He shut them out. While the clock was ticking and those aircraft were descending, Rudd kept visiting one more hospital, creating one more media opportunity with one more entrapped patient.

As a result, policy was neither properly prepared nor argued. Rudd focused obsessively on the health reforms, which turned out to be unimportant, and too little on the carbon scheme and the mining tax, which mattered immensely. It was in these circumstances, with the polls tumbling and mining companies' anger rising, that Gillard took the decision to mount a leadership challenge.

If I could I would quote the entire article. It's well worth reading.

Laurie Oakes quotes a Labor insider, now no longer in Government, about the problems when Rudd was Prime Minister, especially the last six months. In Why they hate Kevin Rudd so much Oakes writes:

It was through the negotiations over carbon pricing that "we learnt that Kevin Rudd would never have that ability of all successful long-term leaders and that is to go into a defensive crouch and absorb a few days of punches to hold a position that would serve him well in the longer term.

The PM had a reflexive fear of even momentary unpopularity, so that he became an easy target for every lobbyist in town". It says that, despite Rudd's reputation as a policy wonk, "this was something we never, ever saw behind closed doors. His instinct was invariably for the politics of a policy problem.

"His most common put-down of officials and his own policy wonks was: 'That's a fine idea, but how do I explain it on Today Tonight?'

"I suspect he simply didn't like the way officials thought - of practicalities, long-term consequences, consistency with other policies.

"These all became an unnecessary burden in his management of the politics and the media cycle. Nearing the end, he seemed to take each piece of considered policy advice as a personal affront or thinly veiled invitation for him to commit political suicide".

The highly respected Andrew Probyn, in Resurrection of Saint Kevin, writes:

One of the mythologies pushed by some in the Rudd execution squad was that the Labor Party faced oblivion if they had stuck with him.

The ALP would almost certainly have lost all but one of the 15 WA seats because of the mining tax debacle and lost a fair few in NSW and Queensland as well, but the greater risk under Mr Rudd, it was judged, was that the ALP would sneak across the line.

The caucus acted against him in June 2010 because he was in a rare moment of vulnerability. They could save themselves three more years of the same.

Let's go over that bit again. The reason the ALP caucus (not the factions, not the faceless men, not an ambitious scheming Gillard as Rudd might claim) no longer wanted Rudd as leader was because they were afraid he might win the next election. His leadership was so poor that they judged the risk of losing without him was a better alternative than winning with him. They would rather have risked opposition than another three years under Kevin Rudd.

At the end of the day the argument between Rudd and Gillard is fairly simple. Rudd argues he should be the leader because he's more popular and can win the next election. Gillard argues that she should be the leader because she can better govern the country. No doubt there is an element of truth to Rudd's claim. He is a very good campaigner and he knows how to handle the media. He's also a far better public speaker than Gillard. If Labor was in opposition then Rudd's argument might well be compelling. However, Labor are the party of Government, they are there to govern in the best interests of the country. The Prime Minister's primary job is not to win the next election, it's to govern the country. Kevin Rudd might be a great campaigner, but he was a lousy Prime Minister. A country needs a Prime Minister who can govern, not one who's highest priority of the day is ensuring his face appears on the nightly news. That's what Kevin Rudd doesn't understand and that's why Labor was right to remove him in 2010 and why they should reject his attempt to regain the leadership.

One final thought. If Rudd somehow returns to the Lodge and goes on and wins the next election Labor are going to have a serious problem. At some stage they will have to remove him again.