FOR the whole of her political life, Julia Gillard has been a member of Labor's Left faction. This has not been a youthful indiscretion, as she remains a committed member of that faction even today. She is the first Left leader of the federal Labor Party in my lifetime. Not that anybody in the Canberra press gallery seems to have noticed. As they sleepwalk through her small-target policy announcements on a daily basis, no one in the press gallery seems to have asked the question as to why Gillard is in the Labor Left.
The policy decisions of the left-wing of the ALP have been consistent ever since I was at university in the late 1970s. On the economic front they have always believed in higher taxes and big government spending programs. Some supported death duties, capital gains taxes on the family home and cuts to government funding to non-government and Catholic schools. They were strongly opposed to privatisation and never had a problem with deficit budgeting. On the foreign policy front, the Left was afflicted with a virulent strain of anti-Americanism. It disliked our traditional ties to Britain and clouded its hatred of Israel by pretending that its main Middle East foreign policy objective was Palestinian self-determination. On the industrial relations front, the Left strongly supported centralised wage fixing, compulsory unionism, wildcat strikes, pattern bargaining, the use of picket lines and unlimited union right of entry.
Now which of these traditional policies of the Left does Gillard believe in? Remember, she has been a member of this faction for three decades. What is it about these policies that attracted her to the Left, where she remains today?
In many respects the Gillard of today is unrecognisable from the person just three weeks ago. Now she prattles on about getting old bombs off the road, lassoing the unsuspected and bussing them to Canberra for a year-long lecture on climate change, and she now worries about deficit budgets. The truth is that Gillard today is, like Kevin Rudd, a total phony and a policy fraud. Gillard's strategy is to try to win the election on her personality, hoping like anything that no one will ask what she really believes in.
It is said she is popular among women, although if a ballot had been taken against Rudd, Jenny Macklin, Maxine McKew, Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek would have all voted against her for factional reasons. Yes, let's have Australia's first female prime minister, unless she is in the other faction.
The real problem for Gillard is not only that she is pretending to be something she is not but that, like Rudd, she is herself a prisoner to the caucus. Rudd was in his own faction, which didn't number too many. In the end, as soon as the Right decided to remove him, he didn't even have the numbers to put up a credible showing. Some suggest his support was about 30 out of 110, made up of a few Queenslanders, a number of people to whom he'd grown close as a result of them winning in 2007, and the usual array of disgruntled, disaffected and disillusioned MPs that make up any parliamentary party irrespective of its political colour. Oh, and add to that some opponents of Gillard's from her own faction, such as Anthony Albanese.
The truth is that Gillard, like Rudd before her, is not part of the majority grouping that makes up the caucus. In replacing Rudd with Gillard, the Right has repeated the failed experiment of NSW where it installed Nathan Rees, a member of the Left faction, with disastrous consequences. On his way out the door, Rees took aim at those nasty factional powerbrokers who'd been kind enough to install him in the first place.
Irrespective of the election outcome, it is blindingly obvious that history will repeat itself in the federal parliamentary Labor Party at some time in the future.
That is to say a member of an enemy faction (Gillard) will be replaced by one of the Right's own favoured sons when the time comes. The answer as to who that will be is also obvious: the Victorian federal member for Maribyrnong, Bill Shorten, who is the Labor Party's natural leader.
Rudd's demise was for a whole host of reasons, chief among them that he believed his deputy would never attempt to remove him. Had he been politically awake during the last few months of his prime ministership, Rudd would have been aware of the threat to his position. As of June, the only real threat to this position was in the form of Gillard. Rudd had every reason to remove Peter Garrett on the grounds of political incompetence but he also had every political justification for sacking Gillard for her manifestly incompetent handling of what became known as the Building the Education Revolution scandal. This may sound a little far-fetched, but had he done so, he might still be leader today.
Remember, many in the ALP still regret the fact that Gough Whitlam didn't sack John Kerr, before Kerr sacked him. Still, Gough couldn't complain. Bill Hayden did ring him from a phone box not far from Yarralumla, but to no avail. Rudd's supporters were assuring him the day before the challenge that caucus was rock solid for him. No wonder Labor dumped him.
