Join the conversation on The Punch's Twitter account @ThePunchHQ or at our Facebook page.Malcolm Mackerras says a switch to Kevin Rudd won't save Labor at the election
Paul Toohey
News Limited Network
June 19, 2013 9:04AM
VETERAN political analyst Malcolm Mackerras says if Labor were to switch to Kevin Rudd in coming days, his famous swing-predicting pendulum would not budge one iota in Labor's favour.
Some recent polling suggests Rudd could give Labor a 50-50 chance against the Coalition. Mackerras says the polls are wrong.
"They're asking people to imagine a situation that won't occur," he says. "The support for Rudd will melt once the Liberal Party gets going. It will melt to the point they won't do better under Rudd than they will under Gillard."
Mackerras says the rout is coming, whoever leads Labor. He says nothing can be done to save the Australian Labor Party, and it's not because voters like Tony Abbott.
The calamity was set in stone on September 7, 2010, when two NSW independents, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, both from strong conservative seats, backed Julia Gillard.
Oakeshott's excruciating 17-minute camera-hogging decision to support Gillard in forming a 76-74 seat minority government destroyed any chance the public would ever accept her legitimacy as leader.
People didn't like two independents deciding their government.
"People have never seen Gillard as an elected Prime Minister," says Mackerras. "That's the cross she's had to bear. I think the so-called faceless men didn't see this."
The other crucial error, says Mackerras, is that the party never explained why they replaced Rudd.
"They didn't like to say why they'd done it, because they weren't in the business of tipping s -t over Rudd," says Mackerras. "They were hoping he'd cooperate and go off and become Foreign Minister. They were hoping he wouldn't sabotage, which is not how it worked out.
"Rudd didn't accept his position. He was hopeful that the Labor Party would recognise what to him was an obvious truth - his view was he had made the Labor Party the governing party.
"The Labor Party view was the party had made him Prime Minister."
When Rudd challenged Gillard in February 2012, he was beaten decisively. At that point, Mackerras says, Rudd realised he would never be Prime Minister again.
Mackerras argues when Rudd didn't challenge, in March this year, all Rudd was doing was creating chaos. And he claims Rudd would not accept being drafted by his party during this parliamentary fortnight.
"The reason is that Rudd doesn't want to be Prime Minister," says Mackerras. "He's exacting his revenge. Gillard will take the party to a rout of Whitlam-ite proportions, and he will say, 'I led them to a great victory in 2007, and these idiots replaced me.' certainly seems that way...
"He wants to gloat at Gillard's expense. There's no point in him being Prime Minister now, because he will suffer the rout that Gillard will suffer." yep
He says any initial Rudd bounce would collapse once the Coalition began rolling out ads which reminded people how Rudd lost the support of his party, and identified him as behind the dismantling of John Howard's asylum policies. so true...
The Mackerras Pendulum, which currently shows that the Coalition would win by 103 seats to Labor's 45, with two independents, Andrew Wilkie and Bob Katter, would remain unchanged all the way to September 14.
Mackerras had no admiration for Gillard when she seized power, but came to respect her for taking on difficult policies, such as the Clean Energy Future legislation, the Arrangement with Malaysia, the Murray-Darling settlement, the NDIS and Gonski.
The point is not whether people approved of the policies, he says; it's that Gillard made hard choices. Rudd did not. Actually Gillard betrayed a great many people and has lied and treated them with disrespect ever since.
Mackerras says Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations played well, but it wasn't hard. "It was a cinch," he says. "He signed up to Kyoto; that was easy. He made seven (key) bad decisions, the worst of which was to dismantle the Pacific solution. It was his worst decision, but it was easy."
Mackerras says most people in the ALP wanted the Pacific solution abolished, so it was painless for Rudd. Since then there has been a reluctant consensus that Howard's policies worked.
"The criticism I'm willing to make against Gillard is that there's no evidence at all that she ever dissented from any of Rudd's decisions," he says.
"All I know is that Gillard will get kicked out big time, or if they're stupid enough to reappoint Rudd he'll be kicked out big time, and Abbott will become Prime Minister not because people want Abbott but because they detest Gillard."
Asked whether Rudd could be of use to Gillard's re-election campaign, Mackerras says: "Nominally, he's doing it, supporting people in difficult seats."
But what if he were to actually speak Gillard's name, and ask people to support her? "He won't do that," says Mackerras. "No one will believe him. He wants Gillard to lead them to the debacle. That's my interpretation."
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