The federal Labor party has hit the panic button and expedited a leadership transition that it probably hoped it would not have to undertake until after the next federal election. That Julia Gillard has replaced Kevin Rudd as Labor leader is not in itself a surprise.
Whereas it had been the Liberal party that looked to be in some disarray over its leadership at the beginning of the year, it’s now the government that looks to be in a very big mess.
The fact that this has come to pass only months ahead of the next federal election is the breath-taking aspect of this event.
What the leadership change confirms is that the private polling being done by the major parties is agreeing with the newspaper polls that all say that the Rudd government has had a horrible six months and that Labor would lose the next election.
The strength of this intelligence was such that Liberal leader Tony Abbott enthused to his party room that a ‘famous victory’ was at hand.
Mr Abbott has since denied saying this, but the growing confidence of the opposition leader and his colleagues has been very noticeable. Over on the Labor side, meanwhile, panic has been the most noticeable response to the polls.
The very poor polling results for Labor since the ascendancy of Tony Abbott to the Liberal leadership has put intolerable strain on Rudd’s leadership, however, it was not that alone which lead to his demise.
Rather, the evidence of a decline in support for Labor particularly in marginal seats in New South Wales and Queensland dovetailed with the factional campaign to destabilise his leadership that appears to have been running for some time.
What the poor poll results did is send a flock of nervous marginal seat-holding backbench MPs in to the arms of the handful of right faction powerbrokers who had been working against Rudd for months.
Make no mistake about it – Labor is in serious electoral trouble and may yet suffer the ignominy of being the first one-term government since Jim Scullin’s faction-ridden Labor government was tipped out during in the Depression in 1931.
The Coalition must be pinching itself to believe its good luck as the government implodes before their very eyes.
Whereas it had been the Liberal party that looked to be in some disarray over its leadership at the beginning of the year, it’s now the government that looks to be in a very big mess.
It is clearly the view of some Labor strategists that elevating Julia Gillard to the leadership can act as something of a circuit breaker to the current poll trends.
Sometimes leadership transitions have worked – the shift from Bob Hawke to Paul Keating, for instance, was rewarded with a Labor victory in the 1993 election.
Gillard’s supporters are no doubt hoping that history can repeat itself.
There are great risks involved in the deposing of Rudd, however. While social progressives and feminists rejoice at the appointment of Australia’s first female prime minister, it remains to be seen how much the rather more conservative electorates in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Brisbane, and in the Queensland regions share in this enthusiasm.
The reasons why this is so important is that Labor holds 10 such seats in Queensland and eight in NSW, all of which could be lost with swings between 1 and 4 percent. If these were to be lost, the Labor majority would also evaporate and Tony Abbott would be the next prime minister.
Labor also has some problems in their historically safe inner city electorates of Melbourne, Sydney, Grayndler and Denison where the surge in voter support for the Greens monitored in the polls will have the greatest impact at the next election.
Labor could lose any one of these seats to the Greens – a thought, perhaps, that preoccupied finance minister Lindsay Tanner when he announced his intention not to contest his seat of Melbourne at the next election.
The electoral risks in destabilising the leadership are great for the Labor party.
The interesting thing about Rudd’s demise is that his fall owed more to his failure to work with the party’s varied wielders of power than a bout of unpopularity in the polls.
When the dust settles and people look back, they will realise that Rudd’s approach to leading his own political party was as inappropriate as those other Labor leaders who also crashed and burned in relatively short periods of time – Gough Whitlam (1972-1975) and Paul Keating (1991-1996).
Only Bob Hawke managed to lead the Labor party in a way that allowed him to successfully contest four elections before the powerbrokers got him. Whatever Hawke had, Whitlam, Keating and Rudd did not.
Gillard might have the skill to emulate Hawke’s longevity – but she will have to survive the next election first to test that ability, and this might yet be beyond her party’s reach.
Dr Nick Economou is a senior politics lecturer at Monash University and a regular media commentator