Heed the fatal peril of excess

In the breathless commentary over Kevin Rudd's spectacular self-immolation and Julia Gillard's ascent, we must not lose sight of a significant lesson. Rudd's demise is the latest instance of what has become a defining theme of national politics in Australia over recent years: the perils of leadership excess (both for the leaders themselves and the polity).

Think of the increasing dominance of John Howard as he endured in office, and of the unwillingness of his colleagues to take him on even though they had concluded towards the end that his government had ''lost its way''. Think of the way the ALP handed itself over to Mark Latham in 2003: so desperate to reclaim power that it was willing to gamble everything on a leader despite deep doubts within the party about the fitness of his temperament for office. Then, in 2006, Labor surrendered its collectivist traditions to a new messiah, Kevin Rudd, who was widely known to be pathologically controlling, whose defining trait was his self-belief that he was the cleverest man in the room, whose personal ambition transcended party.

We saw how this played out. Rudd's insistence on being central, so that all issues must flow through him, was rapidly noted as characteristic: reports of the logjams and chaos that this caused in his private office, and of the growing disquiet and dissatisfaction of the public service, were soon legion. He treated public servants as underlings. For support, he depended on a few intimates, and an advisory group of staffers subject to his moods and attentive to his demands. His decision style excluded all but his closest staffers and the fabled ''gang of four''.

In a self-reinforcing cycle, Rudd's high-handedness and failure to consult meant that he was disliked by his peers, accentuating his over-reliance on the few young, clever men in his office - whose loyalty was unquestioned, but whose political judgment, tempered by responsiveness to Rudd's imperious demands, was less certain. All the indicators of a self-referring, unduly cohesive in-group that would misjudge the imperatives of political reality and of advice from others were in place: a closeted process thus came to govern decisions.

In tandem, experienced parliamentarians were marginalised; caucus restiveness at its exclusion from debate and resentment of Rudd's inner circle increased by the month; and there came to be serious questioning about the failure of cabinet process. Immersed in his inner circle, Rudd did not communicate effectively beyond it, leading both to failures of implementation (as if decisions, once taken, would simply be turned into action) and to the astonishment and disillusion of specific stakeholders, the electorate, and finally, fatally, his own caucus.

In reflecting on Rudd's fall, however, we ought not to ignore what went before. To a large degree, what Rudd did was to capitalise on developments in our political system that have been consolidating power around leaders for several decades. This is the phenomenon of prime ministerial government, characterised by an accretion of resources at the disposal of a government leader and a withering away of countervailing restraints.

And it is a problem that has not only manifested in the ALP. The Liberal Party is still struggling to reinvent itself post-Howard, after the former prime minister's supremacy over party and government reached such extraordinary levels by the final term in office. Its current leader, Tony Abbott, has shown that he too is likely to be prone to the disease of leadership excess by making sudden shifts in policy that have not been referred to his shadow cabinet colleagues.

One might argue that Labor's decision to depose Rudd has shown that even the most authoritarian prime ministers are subject to the ultimate check of having to retain the confidence of their party. And there are grounds for believing that Julia Gillard is cut from different cloth: that she is blessed with a more democratic temperament compared with her predecessors. Wisely, she has already signalled her intention to run a more collective government.

Yet it is not enough to rely on the temperament of a leader. Given the trend of recent years, it is timely to ask whether our institutions of governance are robust enough to curb leadership excess. In a context where political success has become so dependent on leader performance, a culture of deferral to leaders becomes endemic (until they stop delivering that success and then the search begins for the next messiah).