By ABC's Jonathan Green Thursday 4 December 2014
Photo: Politics can have eerie resonances and circularity. (AAP: Alan Porritt)
There was little quarter given when the country turned against Kevin Rudd. That same sense of simple crisis is lacking for the moment in the reporting of the Abbott Government, but will that continue? Jonathan Green writes.
What's my name, for a pick of the board...
I am an Australian Prime Minister.
At a critical point in my first term, my popularity was in decline, and my party's stocks were falling with it. Two-party-preferred polling showed a clear advantage - 53 per cent to 47 per cent - to my opponents.
My detractors - internal and external - pointed to a tendency for authority to be centralised in my office.
They complained about diminished access, of the micromanagement of policy and personnel.
Some say I became too focused on media management and sloganeering at the expense of real policy vision.
Key aspects of my legislative agenda were hamstrung by an obstructionist Senate.
If you answered Kevin Rudd, well done.
If you answered Tony Abbott, you're right too.
Politics can have eerie resonances and circularity.
This week's Newspoll delivered the latest instalment in a continuing saga of bad data for the Abbott Government, the Prime Minister's personal popularity hitting a five-month low and the Government's two-party preferred vote trailing the Labor Party 46-54 per cent.
Other polling tells a similar story, with this week's Essential poll delivering the sobering 2PP margin of 53-47 per cent, the reverse of the polling figures published by Fairfax in June 2010 that spelt the beginning of the end for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
If there is a critical difference it is that Rudd's polling showed a sharp and unsettling decline, while Abbott's continues what seems to be a trend of endemic unpopularity.
That can hardly be a consolation to the Government, its supporters or its backbench.
The echoes of recent political history are coming thick and fast. This week's "reset" press conference from the Prime Minister brought still-fresh memories of similar stand and deliver testimony from Julia Gillard. The bid to reframe the Abbott political personality, and redefine the quest of his government, might almost have been a "real Julia" reprise.
A saving grace? That the Abbott Government enjoys a significantly more supportive relationship with the mainstream political commentarial, a commentarial that, faced with that collapse in Kevin Rudd's popularity, threw the rhetorical switch to "chaos" and "dysfunction", famously reporting vested political interest as fact, and self-serving rumour as palpable instability and plot.
There was little quarter given when the country turned against Rudd, with, as the polls suggest, an antipathy that equals the distaste it now harbours for Tony Abbott. Even Fairfax reported the mid-June polls of 2010 with a tart "Labor faces wipe-out".
That sense of destructive certainty, of simple crisis is lacking for the moment in the reporting of the Abbott Government.
There seems to be a suspension of belief around the potential consequence of the current polling, a sense, that probably can't linger all that far into next year, that the Government has time enough to rebuild and refocus, time enough to pave over the gulf of confidence and trust that seems to have opened between it and its public.
A more hostile media mainstream, one without the ideological empathy much of the popular and politically influential media has for conservative politics, might invest more in creating a sense of unstable vulnerability; political instability and crisis being good box office, after all. Even as things stand, leading members of the torytariat have rounded on the Government's performance, throwing their hands up in something between despair and increasing anxiety.
For Tony Abbott there may be more than polling parallels between his awkward position and the faltering, then suddenly terminal, situation that Kevin Rudd faced in June 2010.
Rudd also suffered a similar undermining of authority thanks to a combination of an uncooperative Senate and his own fragile sense of policy conviction.
Conventional wisdom has it that Rudd may well have fared better had he taken his CPRS to a double dissolution when the project faltered in September 2009. That his push for cross chamber compromise would eventually lead to the election of Tony Abbott as opposition leader is a little ironic relish.
Again there is talk of double dissolution - something the Government should "man up" and push for according to the Abbott government's suddenly keenest accuser in the press, Karl Stefanovic.
The idea has friends in more conventionally political activist quarters, with the Australian's Adam Creighton going hard late last week:
The government must end its pointless pussy-footing with the Senate and announce it plans to ask the Governor-General for a double dissolution in the New Year. For its own sake and Australia's, the Coalition should next week present the Senate with bills to reform Medicare, welfare and universities, and dare the red chamber to begin arming the government with the constitutional triggers it needs to prematurely end the terms of a throng of new senators, members, and perhaps the Abbott government itself.
A sense of urgent need is growing around the Government as the year ends, its budget unresolved, its key education reform package rejected, and the economy grinding to what is either a halt or a faltering and unprepossessing transformation from the easy affluence of resources.
In the midst of it all we have a Senate taking the unpardonable step of exercising its democratic right, an element of modern Australian politics that probably reflects a true sense of the public's uneasy and fractious political temper ... and its growing sense that unfettered two-party power turns inevitably to self-centred pure-power politics and demands both a check and a balance.
It's a sign our politics is changing, and that the electorate is watchful ... a situation that won't be resolved by an angry and frustrated rush to the Hastings.
As it is, a double dissolution election, with its trimmed Senate quotas, would likely deepen this unseemly outbreak of democratic diversity.
Maybe Rudd was right to try a negotiation to bridge the great divide. It's probably an opportunity lost to Abbott through his own hostile antagonism in opposition, a situation that must, by now, have some in his party wondering if there is a way forward under the current management.
Change might well come quickly. The lesson from the Rudd moment is that political transformation can be abrupt to the point of being inexplicable, but no less fatal for it.
The political pace has only quickened since.
On the evidence of the Victorian election result - a poll mediated not in the old media mainstream but in the quicksilver of social networks and a very modern sense of winnable, questioning loyalty - the political cycle is running on overdrive.
First term prime ministers might fall as readily as first term state premiers.
And yet Tony Abbott's enduring purchase on personal power might be guaranteed by a combination of those two examples, of Rudd and Victoria: moments in our recent political past united by the significant lessons that timidity is no substitute for the bold confidence of resolute policy conviction, and that leadership change breeds the impression of disunity and the near certainty of voter contempt.
The alternative will require imagination and no small amount of humility and quiet persistence: the reset you're having when you're not having a reset.
Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
