By Shaun Carney
Kevin Rudd says he has a lot of hard work to do on the way to the election. But what if a majority of voters are no longer interested in hearing what he has to say? That is surely the nightmare prospect confronting the federal government.
It is what happened to John Howard in 2007. Faced with bad polls and with only months to run before the election, Howard tackled his problem areas. He added a safety net to WorkChoices and changed the minister. Nothing. He announced a climate change policy, including an emissions trading scheme. Again, nothing. Too many voters were over him. Every time he tried to work his way back into their favour, he only managed to make things worse.
Illustration: Jim Pavlidis
Most political problems have long gestation periods. Rudd's key problems — the issues that have undermined his stature and left many of his supporters disaffected — are his haplessness in the face of boatloads of refugees entering Australian waters and his placement on the backburner of the carbon pollution reduction scheme.
Both go back a long way and serve as hallmarks of Rudd's chief weakness as Prime Minister: his failure to tend to issues. Rudd's style is in-tray/out-tray. When an issue has to be dealt with, it's processed and pushed along, making way for another issue. Something is either an action item or it is nothing.
Thus the carbon pollution reduction scheme was formulated and sent off to be negotiated last year. And Labor's policy on asylum seekers, less hardline than that of the Howard government, was simply left to operate. In both cases, Rudd saw no need to change the settings of the public debate or even to continue to make the case for Labor's position. Having got the policies off the books, so to speak, he did not tend to them.
He is paying for this now in terms of public opprobrium, and it could eventually cost him the prime ministership. After two years in the job, there's been little to suggest so far that Rudd embraces the idea that a prime minister, having established a relationship with the public, needs to work constantly on that relationship. It is not about affection but about dialogue. It is also about insurance. Having done virtually nothing to keep in touch with the public on the asylum seeker issue and climate change throughout last year, Rudd found himself with no insurance against those issues turning on him.
Once the boats started coming in larger numbers, he was exposed. The asylum seeker issue is now utterly toxic for the ALP, a seemingly eternal wedge separating Labor's blue-collar and middle-class constituencies.
Having initially softened the policy, Labor upset the blue-collar base. By then toughening elements of it up a few months ago, it has started to lose its white-collar supporters and failed to win back the disaffected blue-collar voters. It will always be outbid on this issue by the Liberals, who took their lessons from the master, John Howard.
The decision to put the carbon pollution reduction scheme on ice for at least another two years will surely become a definitive example of how not to deal with a major issue. It is a cock-up of historic proportions.
Essentially, it was a budgetary decision. With no prospect of the plan becoming law during the term of this parliament, contingencies for the scheme had to be removed from the budget.
This was the in-principle decision that the committee comprising Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner reached in late April. Because that in-principle decision was leaked, the government was caught on the hop and was left to confirm it and respond to the information defensively. Rudd emerged from the whole thing as an empty windbag, a leader with no will. The great moral challenge of our time, having received no rhetorical commitment throughout the crucial year of 2009, looked like it was being discarded.
The government might have survived this alone, but too many Rudd initiatives were also on the scrap heap. FuelWatch and GroceryWatch had also been junked. There also was the fact of a series of rises in the cash rate and home mortgage repayments, eating into many household budgets.
The awful, and massive, challenge the ALP faces is this: it must now disentangle the mess of grievances and disillusionment that lurk within the supporters it has clearly lost, or it is in danger of losing. It will be a monumental task.
On Sunday, Rudd knew the Nielsen poll, due to be published in The Age the next day, would be very bad. That's why he offered himself to the ABC's Monday morning AM program: so that his reaction could run alongside the morning's news of the poll result. He outlined Labor's achievements on health, industrial relations and the economy, and did the obvious thing of "warning" voters that Tony Abbott was a real prospect of becoming prime minister.
But that's the easy bit. More words won't cut it. In 1998 and 2001, Howard revived his government's fortunes in the months leading up to elections through targeted and extensive spending on specific groups of voters in marginal seats. In 2001 he also had Tampa and September 11, driving voters back into the arms of the Coalition.
Rudd does not have that sort of money to spend and it's not clear that either he or the Labor Party's federal machine have the political skills to work out who to target and how to win them back. He faces an extremely grim winter.
Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.