Australia dumps its leader for a redhead

August 2, 2016

Updated on Jun. 30, 2010 · 3:07 AM EDT

By Neil McMahon

SYDNEY, Australia — Perhaps President George H.W. Bush put it best, during his state visit in 1992: “You have a wonderfully vigorous political climate,” Bush told lawmakers in Canberra, the Australian capital. “And I see this rough and tumble that goes forth like this, and I thank God for the presidential system at home.”

Vigorous turned into bloodthirsty this week when, in a stunning upset, deputy prime minister Julia Gillard displaced her boss, Kevin Rudd, from the party leadership — and thus, his elected office — in a loyalty ballot initiated by the prime minister himself.

The "unprecedented political assassination of the prime minister" is how one conservative opposition member described Gillard’s swift and stunning decapitation of Rudd in the Labor Party ouster.

While hardly the first time an Australian prime minister from the center-left Labor party has been dumped during his term, it was a particularly brutal demise.

A “clinically planned” hit, screamed a headline from the staid Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Bush had been speaking after the dumping of another once-popular Labor prime minister, Bob Hawke, in 1991. Like their British counterparts, with whom they share the Westminster system, Australian leaders serve not at the pleasure of the voters but at the behest of their party colleagues. One lost party vote and you’re gone.

For Rudd, the end came so fast he was reduced to "blubbing," as he put it, at his post-spill press conference.

Gillard, who had been viewed widely as a loyal deputy prime minister, looked equally as shellshocked.

"First woman, maybe first redhead," she mused, when asked her thoughts on the significance of becoming the nation's first female prime minister. "We'll allow others to delve into the history and I'll allow you to contemplate which was more unlikely in the modern age.

"I didn't set out to crash my head on any glass ceilings. I set out to keep my feet on the floor and to be there walking the streets, talking to Australians about what's the right thing for this nation."

Australia has had 26 previous prime ministers — mostly middle-class married white men. Gillard breaks that mould emphatically: a foreign-born (she is the Welsh-born daughter of working-class migrants), unmarried, childless woman of 48 whose nominal political home is the far left. She’s an atheist, whereas Rudd thanked God in his parting speech.

While far from typical, Gillard is nonetheless very popular, polls suggest, and that is the main factor in her sudden rise. It was her popularity in the party and among voters that, when set against Rudd’s astonishing fall from favor — his approval rating dropped to 45 percent in May from an unprecedented high of 70 percent when elected — clinched the leadership.

As leading newspaper analyst Peter Hartcher put it, there is nothing more to Rudd’s decline than bad polls. “Rudd was not assassinated over any great policy question,” Hartcher noted.

Rudd had been blamed for his government's falling popularity, with recent opinion polls showing Labor support swinging to the anti-war Australian Greens party. Outside NATO, Australia is the largest military contributor to the war in Afghanistan of any country, but the government has ruled out any further increases since it sent an additional 450 troops a year ago.

Many observers wonder what Labor was thinking when dumping a leader on the basis of a handful of bad results. Even though recent polls were shaky, they were not catastrophic. Most believe Rudd would have squeaked to victory had he called an election this year, when it is due. Besides, as Rudd’s deputy, Gillard had a hand in every major decision the government had made.

Hartcher’s assessment: “Labor has done exactly what Julia Gillard had been warning supporters against doing for months — it used up a perfectly electable leader prematurely … What a waste.”

It is the latest chapter in a period of disconcerting political instability.

Gillard is the nation’s third prime minister in three years, after Rudd and the man he defeated at the ballot box, John Howard. The conservative Liberal Party opposition is in measurable disarray — Tony Abbott is its third leader since Howard fell in late 2007. The unlikely cause of all that upheaval? The climate change issue, which has bedeviled leaders on both sides.

Howard was a global warming cynic. The Australian voters, it turns out, are not.

And now the issue has claimed Rudd, a turn of events unthinkable even six months ago — when he seemed to be cruising for re-election, with fervent support for climate change action as a trump card. With polls showing strong public support, Rudd once declared it “the greatest moral challenge of our time.” That statement will haunt him forever.

Spooked by opposition obstruction, Rudd went to water, putting his carbon emissions trading scheme on the backburner. From then on, his support tanked and never recovered.

His scrapping of childcare and home insulation schemes and a toughening of the government's stance on asylum seekers — didn't help matters.

Gillard remained the loyal deputy, until Wednesday — when Labor powerbrokers urged her to make her move. Already furious that Rudd was privately questioning her loyalty, she and the prime minister locked themselves away for a long, tense meeting that ended late at night with Gillard declaring she would challenge for the top job. Rudd came out defiant, vowing to fight — but by then, Labor's ruthless kingmakers had signed his death warrant, rounding up overwhelming support for a leadership change. In the end, Labor lawmakers deserted Rudd so completely that he surrendered without a fight.

So everything has changed, and nothing has changed: Analysts agree this was all about atmospherics and cosmetics, not policy. Gillard says she will push forward on climate change, but action won’t happen quickly — the Rudd stance.

On the other major issue hurting the government — a row with mining companies over a plan to tax them at a rate of 40 percent from 2012 — Gillard indicated readiness to compromise, which Rudd seemed certain to do anyway.

Rudd had adopted the tax plan — which would see more of the huge profits generated by Australia's long resources boom in the hands of ordinary Australians — as his new signature reform issue. But the move backfired when he found himself in open warfare with the mining companies — at least one of whom, Xstrata, scrapped investment projects worth $6.6 billion — and perceived as unable to negotiate an acceptable peace.

On her first day in office, Gillard moved to bandage the wounds swiftly, pulling a government-funded advertising campaign in support of the tax, convincing the mining industry to ditch its anti-tax ads and promising fresh talks on the levy.

Rudd's curse was that people had stopped listening to him — a problem Gillard, with her steely charm and commanding — albeit nasal — speaking voice, doesn’t appear to have.

Stunned by events, Australians are certainly taking notice. There is a sense of excitement at the election contest to come, and no small amount of pride that, at last, a woman is in charge.

Not that the new prime minister will be counting on her popularity to protect her — Rudd's fatal mistake, it seems.

Australian politics is no place for the faint-hearted, and as another former Labor leader, Mark Latham, warned after the spill: "She'll be the next one for the knife … she needs to watch her back.”

The morning after her victory, Gillard received a congratulatory call from Barack Obama, during which she assured him the country's military commitment to Afghanistan would not change. She would likely have found the diplomatic niceties of the call a welcome respite from the political brutality she’s been immersed in and from the policy challenges ahead.