Lenore Taylor, political editor

theguardian.com, Saturday 14 September 2013

This generation of Labor politicians cannot say it gave its chance at government its best shot

Labor gave voters in 2013 no real choice. Photograph: DAVID GRAY/REUTERS

Driving around the suburbs after an election I often wonder how it would feel to be the person who plastered their smiling face on the now slightly lopsided signs all over their own neighbourhood, in their own friends’ front yards, by the sides of the roads they drive each day, only to be told by their own community that their services as a politician were not wanted.

As a reporter I have watched leaders who can’t quite believe their vision has been rejected, most memorably in 1996, when after his concession speech at the Bankstown Leagues Club, having campaigned under the party’s one word slogan: “Leadership”, Paul Keating spoke to a few of us as he tried to process what had occurred. He said, disbelievingly, that the brick veneers of the outer Sydney seat of Macquarie had voted against him. What were they thinking?

But the trauma of the Labor party in 2013 is far more profound because it knows it actually gave the voters no real choice. Government comes maybe once – perhaps twice – in most politicians’ careers and this generation cannot say it gave government its best shot. It can claim policy achievements, lots of them, but it has to admit political dysfunction ultimately overwhelmed it all. For Labor, the pain of loss is intensified by something much sharper: regret.

In her essay written for Guardian Australia, Julia Gillard expresses that pain and regret with a directness politicians usually avoid. She doesn’t use any of the normal lines about tough times endured with the support of her family, and coming out a stronger person. She describes emotions similar to bereavement, emotions that hit with physical force, admits “a sense of being unfulfilled”, at times a sense of pride, and at other times, the most corrosive feeling of all: regret.

The leadership battle between Gillard and Kevin Rudd that has paralysed Labor for three years has been unlike the other epic leadership battles of recent years – Hawke v Keating, Howard v Costello – because it wasn’t just about who would be a better leader or whether it was time for generational change. It was a battle in which each side viewed the other as utterly illegitimate, and posing an existential threat to the movement.

To the Rudd camp, Gillard was installed at the behest of factional warlords who did not like the fact that Rudd resisted switching policy according to the findings of the latest focus group, and failed to deliver the popularity that justified the change.

To the Gillard camp, Rudd always put his own thwarted ambition above the interests of the party and was prepared to destroy Labor in a bid to get his job back.

Because each side was convinced that it was acting to defend the very future of the party, it became by definition almost a fight to the death. And a party that sees itself as in part illegitimate cannot possibly portray legitimacy to the voters.

Grief and loss can be either galvanising or debilitating. Gillard and Rudd are both ostensibly arguing for the former — for the party to rediscover its sense of purpose and draw a line under the rancour of the past. Gillard’s essay is a passionate argument for her party to be proud of what it did and find purpose to fight on. But she couldn’t resist, to some extent, apportioning blame and re-prosecuting past mistakes. Only the new leader can really make sure Labor does not take the latter path.

Julia Gillard's essay reveals the regret that sharpens Labor's pain | World news | theguardian.com