Interesting times ahead for Australians

THE  2010 Australian federal election is over and the electorate has sent a very clear mixed message to the political classes.
On the one hand, the electorate as a whole has stopped short of returning the Labor Party but, on the other hand, it has not elected the Liberal coalition.
Depending on negotiations with the independents, we will see over the next few days who will govern Australia for the next three years.
There are some fascinating aspects to the 2010 election results.
The ouster of Kevin Rudd is still very much in play.
Julia Gillard’s prime ministership has not been decisively legitimised at the ballot box. As a result, the validity of the coup in the first instance is still very questionable.
This has in turn given rise to a furious struggle to shape the narrative concerning both the Rudd demise and Labor’s election campaign.
The leaks obviously hurt Labor’s campaign. But the dismissal obviously prompted the leaks about how Gillard had argued against the generosity of two key Labor welfare reforms that she had later boasted about.
The disclosure disrupted the Labor campaign, forced Gillard to call an emergency news conference to defend herself, and raised questions about her attitudes to age pensioners and working mothers.
Already some Labor luminaries have made pointed remarks about the wisdom of removing an elected prime minister in such a clinical fashion.
The comments on some discussion forums and in other arenas clearly evince a degree of public anger towards parliamentary secretary Bill Shorten, senator Mark Arbib, unionist Paul Howes and the others who were involved in the events of June 24.
The appearance of Howes, who is the Australian Workers Union national secretary on Lateline on June 23 to argue the case for Rudd’s dismissal was puzzling for most Australians given that he was not an elected member of parliament nor were all members of Labor’s caucus aware of what was going to transpire the next day.
Removing Rudd meant that Labor could not run hard on his achievements in office.
Thus the stimulus package was not effectively discussed. Nor was economics, an (Tony) Abbott weakness, greatly in play during the campaign.
This left Gillard with little to really say in defence of Labor.
The awkwardness of the Rudd-Gillard rapprochement was palpable.
It is a sad situation, but Labor’s ills are all self-inflicted.
Dropping the emissions trading scheme (ETS) cost Labor core votes.
It appears that Rudd was forced to make this decision by Gillard and Arbib and, at the time, it greatly damaged his credibility.
Pushing for the mining tax probably cost Labor votes in Queensland and Western Australia.
Introducing a huge mining tax in an election year was a baffling decision.
Removing Rudd in such a brutal fashion cost Labor legitimacy and most likely more core votes.
Tony Abbott ran a strong and sincere campaign.
He offers the possibility that a post-Howard Liberal Party, minus Howard’s tendency towards dog-whistling and narrow-mindedness, could actually be a Liberal Party for all Australians.
Abbott’s book Battlelines offers some useful insights into his general philosophy in terms of both his conservatism and his general scepticism of exclusion-based politics.
Given the result he’s achieved, if Abbott was a political risk when he became leader, then Labor should be very grateful that neither former Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull nor former deputy prime minister Peter Costello was the opposition leader in the 2010 election.
Labor will need to think very carefully about the way it has conducted itself in the past few months.
Democratic legitimacy depends not just on the constitutional rules governing political office but on the degree of trust between the people and their elected representatives. Labor has not handled that trust very well.
Given that Arbib, Gillard and their ilk are professional politicians, their decision to force Rudd to push back the ETS demonstrated a lack of understanding of their core vote.
Similarly, little thought appears to have been given to how Rudd’s dismissal would play out with the voters.
Particularly given the way in which former New South Wales premiers Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees were removed from office, it does seem a strange oversight.
Somehow the NSW Right’s “win but don’t govern” ethos seems to have made its way to Canberra.
That left a lot of voters wondering about Labor’s loyalty and intentions.
It certainly would not have helped when Gillard, standing next to Keneally, promised the Epping-Parramatta rail link.
Bob Carr promised this to Sydney well over a decade ago when he was the premier of New South Wales.
The upshot of Labor’s carelessness with the public’s trust is that now it remains to be seen whether Gillard will be Australia’s shortest serving non-caretaker prime minister. Her tenure might be a brief period in time or with luck it could be a defining era.
If things go badly it could well be that certain members of the Labor government have advised and plotted their way out of government.
If Labor does survive with the support of the independents, it will need to work quite hard to re-establish itself.
In the interim, the quirk of fate which has a Labor minister related to the governor-general has thrown up another constitutional issue. There are interesting times ahead. – onlineopinion

*Dilan Thampapillai is a lecturer with the School of Law at Deakin University.