THE FEDERAL Labor Party made a mistake on Monday, but probably not a huge one. Kim Beazley was the best person to take the party to the next election, and was likely to have won it. But Kevin Rudd is unlikely to be the disaster Mark Latham was. On the other hand, there is a chance Monday's outcome will lead to disaster.
Newspapers this week contain lots of mentions of fresh starts, energy, party renewal and the third way. This is good for Labor, and one of the benefits of any leadership change. The timing is also excellent: a year is probably not long enough to lose the Rudd-gloss. John Howard made best use of his year 1995-96; Latham squandered the same in 2004.
But come election time, the questions driving swinging voters will not be whether this charismatic Opposition stands for everything they believe in and sets their pulse racing. It will be: is it time for a change and, if it is, does the alternative seem competent and, perhaps, a little interesting? Do they have a few good, low-risk, ideas? Will they make a mess of things? Interest rates will again play a part, and the shadow treasury position will be vital.
In short: a boring Opposition is OK, but a risky one is not.
A few days before the 2003 caucus vote that installed Latham as federal Labor leader, I posted, on my little website, estimates of the chances each prospective Labor leader had of taking their party to victory the following year. Unlike most, I believed Simon Crean, if he kept the job, stood a fair chance of defeating John Howard - one in three. Beazley, I reckoned, would have two chances in three of winning an election and Rudd almost as much three in five. Latham I gave one chance in 11 because his every utterance showed he had no idea about what makes people change their vote. He wanted to out-Howard Howard.
Throughout the next 10 months I stuck to my prediction that, come polling day, Latham would take his party backwards, which was what happened. Pardon my trumpet-blowing, but comparisons can be illuminating and we are now in the identical position in the three-year cycle.
Beazley was the Labor Party's best chance for 2007, with Rudd the next most likely. You wouldn't know it from the almost criminally incompetent journalistic coverage, but opinion polls over the last six months pointed to a federal Labor victory.
Some people point to Beazley's two election defeats as reasons to downgrade him, but I see the opposite: a leader who nearly won elections at stages in the political cycle when an Opposition has no business being competitive. This Government, after 11 years, is vulnerable. Labor has changed horses, but it could be much worse.
Rudd has political nous: he knows that he needs to bang away at the Government, eat into its authority, build his own capital, occupy the middle ground while differentiating, attract, be a bit interesting, perhaps alluring, but above all be safe. But Rudd's problem may be the new leadership arrangements: it has been little commented on how unstable these appear to be.
Jenny Macklin, deputy to Crean, Latham and then Beazley, was no dazzling media performer but she was a hard-working policy wonk who didn't aspire to the top job. The most recent ambitious Opposition deputies, Peter Costello and Crean, kept their heads down and did not publicly muscle in on the leadership (while in Opposition, at least).
Kevin Rudd was not in the job three hours on Monday when Crean, Julia Gillard's chief backer, began gnawing at his authority, publicly explaining that this was not a traditional leadership model but a two-person team. Gillard, too, has indicated she will not be like previous deputies, insisting quite remarkably, that "she and Kevin" will make the important decisions together.
What might happen if, next year, surveys appear that indicate Rudd's limelight-hogging deputy is more popular than he is? More importantly, Gillard seems, politically, rather like Latham. The branch members' favourite, highly intelligent, hard-working but seeming to possess a totally unreal view of electoral behaviour. As Latham advocated "muscling up", Gillard has spoken of engaging Howard in the "culture wars". Like Latham, she wants to give the place a good shake-up.
She believes in engaging the PM in hand to hand combat on his turf and as with Latham, this would satisfy the front row and perhaps even the electorate at one level but would bomb at the ballot-box.
The tussle over whether Labor has a one or two-headed leadership could be one of the most interesting spectacles over the next year and one crucial for the party's fortunes.
Peter Brent is publisher of mumble.com.au