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June 27, 2013
The Labor caucus has ended the civil war between Gillard and Rudd by dumping Gillard and going with Rudd in the hope that he can avert the electoral disaster the polls consistently forecast. It was the prospect of both losing more than 30 seats in the House of Representatives and of Abbott winning control of the Senate that pushed the Gillard loyalists to a reluctant embrace with a man they neither liked nor trusted.
The preconditions for Labor to avert electoral disaster requires re-uniting a fractured party, re-connecting with a hostile electorate and countering the powerful and relentless body blows from the LNP's scare campaign. Since it has to be done in a couple of months, it is probably too little too late. What we are seeing is the death throes of the Labor government. The bloodletting will take place after the election.
David Rowe
Maybe the ugly sexism that has been directed at Gillard will subside with all the Labor carnage and wreckage. Maybe Australians will begin to acknowledge that the 43rd Parliament has been a successful working Parliament.
Maybe there will also be some acknowledgement that the Rudd Gillard government successfully navigated the global financial crisis and that the Gillard Government, despite its neo-liberal mode of governance, has also been a reformist centre-left government (eg., broadband access, disability support education, carbon pricing and protecting the environment).
What has been made clear from these events is that the political reporting and commentary on the Gillard Government and the Rudd-Gillard leadership contest indicates that the role of the Canberra Media Gallery has been one of actively shaping events.
This is done by the mechanism of:
the various factional players align themselves with various pundits and journalists, feeding them strategic information to pursue private agendas. Indeed, the distinction between political players and political pundits is now thinner than ever before, as media insiders and political insiders work in very similar ways.
The Gallery, of course denies this, by saying that they are merely reporting on events.
The denial is not persuasive. This is because we see the priorities and practices of commercial media, the consistent manipulation of images and quotes to fit a predetermined narrative, the ability to manufacture drama out of the tiniest sliver of on-camera tension, their indifference to the policy debate, the concentration on polls, of personalities, and the horse race narrative of Julia versus Kevin, the complete and utter disregard for truth or accurate representation and the construction of the public as consumers not citizens.
If these political events highlight how the media has effectively abandoned its role as the fourth estate, then they also show that the ALP's labourist kind of social democratic party with its deeply conservative trade union bureaucracy has little left to offer. It is pretty close to exhausted: the trade union base has withered; the decline in membership is dramatic; and it has lost a large chunk of its electoral Left flank to the Greens and its right flank to the Coalition. It increasingly has to rely ever more on preferences.
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So the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. Can Rudd possibly reverse all the harm of the past three years cause by the civil war over the control of the ALP?