By Alan Ramsey
The pantomime of Nope-a-Dope and Mr Shortly still has a week to run in our national Parliament (at least for the time being) in what the ABC pretends is the Killing Season. It's a grabby title I suspect is borrowed from historian Patrick Weller's biography on Kevin Rudd last year, where Weller tells readers: "Rudd had long identified the last [parliamentary] Caucus meeting of the year in early December, the political killing season, as the best occasion for a challenge..."
This, however, had nothing to do with Julia Gillard and her conspirators. What Rudd was dealing with was his proposed challenge in December 2006 to Kim Beazley's Labor leadership, a challenge that toppled Beazley on December 4 and which saw Rudd become prime minister a year later, bringing with him, to his cost, Melbourne's Mrs Stringbag as his deputy.
Illustration: Glen le Lievre
Thus the only winter political killings I'm aware of, apart from what Gillard and Rudd did to each other five years apart, was the Hawke government's third election victory on July 11, 1987 – 86 seats to 62 – its first and only defeat of a John Howard-led Coalition; and Labor's greatest ever win, under John Curtin, on August 21 of wartime 1943, where the ALP doubled its seats in the lower house and swept up all [at the time] 19 Senate seats.
Six years ago, in the latter half of the second year (2009) of the Rudd government's first (and only) term, Kevin07 had no spine to go early – to take advantage of political circumstances and spring his own double dissolution a year early on an opponent in no shape to fight an election.
Yet every other first-term federal government in the 70 years since World War Two, including the Menzies new Liberal-Country Party coalition in 1949, Australia's first, each called a mid-term election during its first term. There were only five – three Labor and two Coalition - and all five won.
The Rudd government was the timid exception. Its leader refused to take the gamble, despite minimal risk.
Rudd would not consider an election in the latter months of 2009, when the Liberals were in chaos over its leadership, the Godwin Grech debacle, Tony Abbott's one-vote defeat of Malcolm Turnbull, and before the Copenhagen climate change conference; nor was he any less obdurate during the early months of 2010. Rudd thought voters had a right to expect their governments to go full term. Stubborn to the end, which he had no idea was coming so soon.
Then it was too late, and Mrs Stringbag and her allies – including Mr Shortly and Rudd's fellow Queenslander and Treasurer, Wayne Swan, none of whom told him until the very last what they were doing to oust him before an election could thwart them – had him so by the short hairs that Rudd capitulated and would not even force the issue to a vote of his party room.
And those first-term governments with more bottle than Our Kevin's?
Five only – the Menzies government, which ousted the Chifley Labor government in 1949, called a double dissolution election in 1951 which it won comfortably and at the same time gained control of a previously hostile Senate.
The Whitlam Labor government, elected in December, 1972, called a double dissolution in May 1974 after the Coalition-DLP majority threatened to block supply in the Senate. Labor's victory, although narrow, gave it the numbers in an historic joint session of Parliament to pass legislation introducing Medicare, greater voter equality in Federal electorates, and Aboriginal land rights.
Three years later, after the turmoil of Labor's 1975 vice-regal dismissal, endorsed massively by voters, it was Malcolm Fraser and his new Coalition which called yet another double dissolution in September 1977, and this time voters gave a despairing Whitlam and his troops an even greater hiding.
Hawke Labor came to power in March, 1983, took voters back to the ballot box in December 1984, and although its house majority was halved, the double dissolution brought the Senate election timetable into sync with the lower House.
Five labor victories on the trot across 13 years ended in March 1996 when Labor under Paul Keating was thumped unmercifully by John Howard's coalition.
Two and half years later, although having promised during the 1996 campaign that GST taxation would "never ever" be part of Liberal Party policy, Howard in 1998 asked voters to endorse such a tax in yet another mid-term election. His government lost 19 seats but Howard's swollen majority was fat enough to comfortably withstand the loss, and the GST we'd been told would "never, ever" arrive, did just that in 1999, a bare three years later.
That brings us back to Rudd's administration after its November, 2007 ending of John Howard's 11 years of prime ministerial pomp, circumstance and, when thought necessary, blatant deceit.
Paul Kelly in his book, Triumph and Demise, as does Weller in his biography, Kevin Rudd – Twice Prime Minister, detail the efforts of Rudd's cabinet colleague John Faulkner to get Rudd to move on an early election in the latter months of 2009 – and the sooner the better!
Kelly quotes Faulkner as telling him: ""We needed to go at the earliest possible opportunity. History shows this, from the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke experience. But not Kevin, oh no. I said at the time, 'I fear I am part of the greatest strategic f--- up ever made by a Labor government,' words to that effect. I could see the writing on the wall for us not taking the opportunity of an early election we could win. It was an impassioned plea."
Tony Abbott can now show he's not a complete mug, too.