By Shaun Carney
Gillard took the helm saying the government had lost its way. Six months on it's still looking for the map and compass.
THIS year is ending on a politically apposite note for the Gillard government, with two crises folding together, concertina-like. The Prime Minister began her leave last weekend with the WikiLeaks saga corroding Labor's support base. Then a people-smuggler's boat smashed to pieces on Christmas Island, leaving at least 30 dead. That was it for Julia Gillard's holiday.
It's been like that all the way through 2010 for the Labor Party. The difficult, unresolved issues kept piling up against each other - climate change, health reform, the mining tax, Kevin Rudd's leadership, the change of leader, asylum seekers, the loss of a parliamentary majority at the election. What a stinker of a year for the government, the most tumultuous in Australian politics since 1975, which saw the Dismissal and the fall of the Whitlam government.
Ominously for the ALP, the period within living memory that 2010 most resembles is the 12-month period that preceded 1975. In 1974, Gough Whitlam opted for a snap election and, while his government just managed to be re-elected, the result was close and made Parliament more difficult to manage. Labor's grip on power was loosened and its sense of authority fatally undermined.
In politics, as in life, there are two types of bad luck: the bad luck that just happens and the bad luck you make for yourself. A lot of Labor's contemporary misfortune has been self-created and it doesn't seem to be able to break the habit of making a challenging situation worse.
Two weeks ago, Gillard described the recent activities of the WikiLeaks website as illegal, a comment she was still trying to explain yesterday after the Federal Police declared there had been no breach of Australian law. And on Thursday, in her first considered statement in response to the Christmas Island drownings, she encouraged a debate on asylum seeker policy. ''I'm all for open, frank, national conversation, I'm all for policy discussions and debate,'' she said.
If that comment seemed familiar, it was - in July, two weeks after she took over as Prime Minister, she said when announcing the prospect of an East Timor processing centre: ''I've got no truck with constraining debate on the big questions. I'm for frank, open, honest, national conversation. So let's have a frank, open, honest, national conversation about the issues of border protection and asylum seekers.''
During the election campaign the following month, the Liberals under Tony Abbott ran hard on a promise to ''Stop the Boats''. By rights, the campaign should have been the time when that conversation was had. With the election having been decided, is there any genuine need for the issue to be debated any more?
In the end, the role of a prime minister is to lead. In a liberal democracy, a prime minister should be willing to foster debate - and just as willing to declare that the time for debate is over.
In the face of a tragedy such as the Christmas Island deaths, a nation stops and pauses. The nation's leader steps in at that point to set the nation on a course, not to leave the navigation up to those with the loudest voices and the most belligerent postures.
This is the fundamental problem for the federal government thrown up by the events of 2010. If the government is to get back to governing effectively, it will have to re-establish its authority. Just how does it do this? It holds office by relying on the support of three independents and a Greens MP. If it does have a mandate, it is incredibly thin.
But the problem and the challenge run much deeper. This government has to find a way to get out from under the signal event of its life - the removal of Rudd as prime minister.
When Gillard resorts to the call for a ''conversation'' on an issue that has been near the top of the national political agenda for a decade, it is a signal not just to voters but to the political world that the government is uncertain of itself. It is also yet another demonstration that on complex issues such as border protection, the leadership continues to apply a false dichotomy to the society - one where the populace is split between bogans and eggheads, with no one in between - and attempts to placate both elements simultaneously.
This happens because Labor is still caught by the paralysis that gripped it prior to Rudd's ouster on June 24. The public knows this. It is why voters failed to hand the government a lower house majority in the August election, and why Labor has struggled to get beyond 50 per cent support in the opinion polls.
The electorate sees both the government and the opposition spinning their wheels, and has been reluctant to opt for one over the other. Given that every government is living on borrowed time, this situation can, in the long run, only assist the opposition at the expense of the government.
Cast your mind back to the week before last Christmas to see just how far Labor has fallen in 2010. The emissions trading scheme had swallowed up Malcolm Turnbull's leadership and led to Abbott's ascendancy. The Coalition had resorted to appealing to its base - a defensive posture. Labor was well ahead in the polls and had guided the country through the worst of the global financial crisis.
Six months later, by failing to stay true to his commitments on climate change policy and adhering to an absurd addiction to media exposure, Rudd had crippled his own leadership within the electorate and within the caucus. Labor's only option was to dump him, but that emergency measure has left behind a problematic legacy: a jittery sensibility that could take the government years to lose, if it gets that chance.
Under Rudd, the government became risk-averse. Under Gillard, that has not changed in ways that are readily evident. On Monday, she will have had six months as Prime Minister - half of one of Labor's worst years. Labor did secure a second term in 2010, but when Gillard deposed Rudd in June she said the government had lost its way. It's still looking for the map and the compass.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.