Whether there will be a leadership coup against Julia Gillard, by Kevin Rudd or anyone else, I have no idea. But journalists are not making up reports of poor party morale and despair. Heavy defeat six months hence now seems inevitable.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
When luck and momentum are against you, adversity piles up. Power, authority and legitimacy are drifting away from Gillard's government, but also from her administration.
The small ''g'' government - the bureaucracy - has not suddenly ceased to be neutral or professional; nor is it already sidling up to its future Liberal and National party ministers. But the modern administration can smell death a good deal better and a good deal more quickly than most. All are now imagining how they will be responding to the next government's needs, and briefing themselves on just what those needs are.
The Canberra Times has carried a number of reports recently about how ministerial offices are showing increased signs of hesitancy, indecision, paralysis of will and uncertainty about the future. Even in its death throes Labor is not seeking help, but looking for others to blame.
It can hardly be a surprise that able and ambitious bureaucrats are taking extra care about being apolitical, and manifest a little less enthusiasm for government stunts and whacko ideas. All the more so when some of the minder class seems to think that the poor odour of government is a consequence of poor administration, rather than poor philosophy, management and sense of direction - matters now directed almost entirely from Capital Hill - indeed, as often as not, from the prime minister's private office.
Meanwhile, the pratfalls, paralysis and constant speculation - each feeding on the other - mean the engine of government is slowing, and the bureaucracy is shifting away from being an academy of ideas. Those waiting at the counter for their benefits will notice no difference. But those serving ministers are finding them increasingly distracted, peevish, and inclined to blame and criticise, increasingly interested not in the boring business of routine administration, or in long-term planning, but on gimmicks that might help this government get out of its hole.
This is a time very similar to that described by then secretary of Treasury, Ken Henry, in a speech to Treasury officers six months before Howard lost power. It had not been a speech that Henry had expected to see leaked, and he was frank and cynical, though not in the partisan sense for which he was accused.
He had congratulated officers on a few achievements, but reflected, sombrely, that Treasury had been bypassed in a few recent Howard government announcements, particularly on water reform and climate change. He did not say, but did not have to, that this had not been because Treasury had lost arguments on the merits, but because Howard had consciously excluded them from the debate.
''All of us would wish we had been listened to more attentively over the past several years in both these areas,'' Henry said. ''There is no doubt that policy outcomes would have been far superior had our views been more influential.''
He warned that Treasury could not necessarily expect to be listened to or to win arguments as a matter of course. It had to have the best arguments, and to put them well. It had to be there when the arguments were taking place. Treasury officers had to remember good policy was about making choices - and putting extra resources, or people, or money into one area was usually at the expense of withdrawing it elsewhere.
''In a pre-election period, we need to be particularly vigilant in balancing our duty to be responsive to our ministers with the need to be non-partisan, non-political in the advice we provide,'' he said. ''Divisions will be under pressure to respond to the growing number of policy proposals . . . at this time there is a greater than usual risk of the development of policy proposals that are, frankly, bad.
''More so than at other times, we need to be mindful of the high opportunity cost of proposed policy actions, to advocate sound and wellbeing-enhancing policy actions - capacity-building measures, better functioning markets, less system complexity and greater fiscal discipline - and to educate others on the full implications of policy interventions in the current economic circumstances,'' he said, adding that ''both the probability and the cost of policy error in the current circumstances are high.''
Henry was not talking of a caretaker period. He was simply talking about a political cycle - a point which is, right now, at about the same time out from a vote. In 2007, and today, there was a whiff about the party in power - though the stench about Howard was minuscule compared with that about Labor now.
The sense of doom is compounded by Gillard's seeming inability to make the luck run her way. She is not in control of the agenda, or even of her own party. Abbott and his team are outgunning Labor, and Labor's line of attack - which is pretty much confined to monstering Abbott and warning of disasters he will cause - is not being pressed successfully, chiefly because of the ineptness of the salespeople. It cannot be for lack of resources, for never in the history of federation has a governing party had as many well-paid partisan attack people on the public payroll. This is not a government with a communications problem, but a government with no message to communicate.
The disaster-in-waiting is not a consequence of Gillard's having announced the election date, which was, more or less, the date expected anyway. Nor is it a function of the so-called perpetual election campaign. In fact the opposition is marking time, content to watch Gillard and her government implode.
But the working environment - and trust between ministers and departments - is made worse by the virtual certainty that a good deal of the political news over the next six months is going to be very bad for Labor - particularly in NSW. The Obeid-Macdonald message will run and run, and in the process more figures from the NSW Right, including figures who have been very close to Julia Gillard will have their reputations further ruined, if that is possible. What is in prospect is not only the further contamination of the ''federal Labor brand'' by the stench from the NSW Labor brand, but the identification of means by which some of the more corrupt players corrupted and poisoned federal as well as state processes. The interests of Eddie Obeid and his faction in dominating decision-making and preselections, and in bullying those they had chosen, was not confined to state seats. Nor was the rorting of unions - such as the Health Services Union - focused only to self-enrichment: it was equally concerned with seats in Parliament.
The NSW implosion is not an unhappy coincidence. Gillard has contributed by her own close involvement in the factional system, and by the way that she let her ambition fall hostage to just the NSW, Queensland and Victorian right-wing power brokers that the electorate will be gunning for. Neither as Prime Minister nor before has Gillard given any serious support to fundamental party reform; nor will the cosmetic changes being advocated by organisers hoping to repackage themselves as reformers make any difference. It is doubtful that reaching back into the past, or into the future, can prevent Labor's fate, but it may make the scale of it less certain.
Jack Waterford is Editor-at-Large
