With all due respect

Occasionally, press gallery journalists will show that they are even more dumb and/or sneaky in avoiding their central responsibility of telling us how we are governed.

Soon after taking office, Tony Abbott hired a TV cameraman so he could shoot his own flattering footage and have it sent directly to newsrooms, bypassing the press gallery. Now he has hired a stills cameraman, and Stephanie Peatling acts all surprised and sad.

It was not uncommon for the weekend television news to have only Mr Abbott's weekly video message, recorded by his staff and distributed on a Sunday, to use in bulletins.

They have plenty of options for the use of images, and of stories, other than those provided to them by the PM's office. They use those images because they're lazy. They don't check what Abbott says against sources of actual truth, which is a pretty good definition of journalistic failure. TV news ratings reflect this failure as, just because dopey news editors want to show the pap pumped at them from Canberra, viewers aren't obliged to watch it. Peatling's attempt to drum up sympathy for poor news editors just emphasises their failures rather than excusing them.

Peatling refers to a staged black-and-white picture of NSW Premier Mike Baird and his wife, which is similar to the staged pictures that former US President John F. Kennedy and his wife half a century ago. There have been many developments that have buffeted the Australian (and US) media and politics in recent years, and people like Peatling and those who employ her can be forgiven to some extent for not reacting quickly and deftly to all of these. For Baird to use a media-management technique from more than fifty years ago, and to have such a technique stump the Australian media, is laughable.

This, however, is the clincher:

Previously, media photographers were relied upon to take the pictures, which would then be selected by editors and placed in newspapers according to what a range of people judged to be the best image to illustrate a story.

Whenever journalists lapse into the passive voice they are up to no good, and this is another example. By "a range of people", Peatling means groupthink victims in an editorial team.

To give one recent example: a few days before the government introduced legislation that would imprison investigative journalists and their sources, "a range of people" decided that the image that best illustrated "the story" was one of the Prime Minister eating an onion. These people still control vast media resources and can direct journalists cover any number of stories - but they all decided the onion-eater image was the one that best prepared us for the coming of that legislation.

The sorts of people who make decisions like that are the sorts of people who hire Stephanie Peatling - people like Peter Hartcher. Now they're being ambushed by political media strategies that are half a century old. This is beyond risible, like being run over by a glacier.

Now, politicians can readily bypass that filter.

Really, was there ever a filter there? Whose interests did it serve? Was it just a make-work scheme for "a range of people"?

"It's one thing to go down the United States president path," Mr Kelly said. "But you have to ask yourself where it ends."

Every modern election campaign is 'presidential' and borrows to different degrees from techniques used in the US. This is hardly the novel, unexpected development Peatling and her source trying to make it out to be.

Tony Abbott has been a media operative since leaving the priesthood, and has worked out how to play the press gallery better than almost anyone who has occupied the Prime Ministership. He pulls stunts, he stonewalls, and they can't get enough. Now he's replacing them, sending audio, video and script direct into newsrooms.

He's doing it slowly enough - if he got called on it he'd backtrack and get the gallery to forgive him, and then when they were all busy he'd do it again. This is how Abbott works. The very people who should see this coming most clearly are completely surprised. And the beautiful thing - for Abbott - is that they don't even blame him.

Mr Abbott's office was contacted for comment but did not respond.

Bloody staffers!

Traditional media organisations want the government to send its competitors to prison. The government is happy to oblige, in return for not being criticised. And they are engaging in this dirty little arrangement in the name of freedom.

Successive governments have moved to restrict our freedoms over recent years. Occasionally journalists notice, after a while. Often they regard opposition to such measures as the work of hysterics and cranks. The restriction of freedoms under the Abbott government has been noticeable for how long it took the press gallery to notice them, and appreciate their severity. They still believe that internet users are a tiny minority of the population and a greater threat to traditional media than the laws themselves.

Only now, elements of the media from beyond the press gallery - media head offices, the MEAA, universities, and non-press-gallery journalists - have started to become involved. They realise the gravity of these laws was not conveyed by those on the ground, at the scene, the ones with all that Canberra savvy, whose job it is to tell us how we are governed.

What Laurie Oakes is doing here is not standing up for freedom, and rallying his readership. He is admitting to colossal professional failure. Restrictive legislation passed through parliament under his very nose and he just watched it go by. Now, he's doing a deal with the government to protect his EXCLUSIVEs but which does nothing to protect - let alone inform - anyone outside the parliament or the press gallery. This is a sneaky, ridiculous commercial deal at the expense of the rights and freedoms of all Australians.

... the Government has been alarmed by the strength of criticism from media of the Data Retention Bill it wants passed before Parliament rises in a fortnight. Bosses, journalists, even the Press Council, are up in arms, not only over this measure, but also over aspects of two earlier pieces of national security legislation that interfere with the ability of the media to hold government to account.

That legislation has passed, and as Oakes pointed out two other pieces of legislation also passed; journalists in the press gallery, employed for the sole purpose of monitoring what politicians are up to, missed its significance (see the onion-eater example above). There might have been a time when a united, concentrated effort might have stopped legislation like that in its tracks. That time has passed. Oakes is chronicling, and embodying, its decline.

In the decade following World War II, Australian governments tried drastic measures to impose order on issues that were too big for them. The Chifley government tried to nationalise the banks and the Menzies government tried to ban the Communist Party. Both measures were opposed by the media and thrown out by the courts. It remains to be seen whether this mass surveillance legislation is unconstitutional, but the response from the media hasn't been as ferocious as Oakes pretends.

The Press Council is concerned the laws would crush investigative journalism.

Stephen Conroy suggested the Press Council had more power over journalists and their employers than it does. He was portrayed as Stalin for suggesting measures that are trifling by comparison to actual legislation passed by the Abbott government. The media outlet that did that is the one that employed Oakes when Conroy was a minister, and which employs him still.

“These legitimate concerns cannot be addressed effectively short of exempting journalists and media organisations,” says president David Weisbrot.

The media union is adamant journalists’ metadata must be exempted from the law. That’s what media bosses want, too, though they have a fallback position based on new safeguards being implemented in Britain.

That would prevent access to the metadata of journalists or media organisations without a judicial warrant. There would be a code including — according to the explanatory notes of the British Bill — “provision to protect the public interest in the confidentiality of journalistic sources”.

There are two things to be said here.

First: the journalists' union, the MEAA, represents not only investigative journalists but also non-investigative journalists in the press gallery. The failure of the press gallery to raise the alarm, to explain to the public why an attack on their interests is an attack upon us all (as the banks did to their staff and customers in the 1940s) has put their investigative colleagues in the firing line, which is against the interests of media consumers, citizens and taxpayers. They need unity and discipline, but eventually they will need to acknowledge that the whole thing has become necessary only because the press gallery were asleep on the job.

Second: all Australians deserve freedom, not just those employed by the organisations that employ members of the press gallery.

Oakes and all those people on committees with him stand ready to sell everyone down the river so long as he and his get a little more wriggle-room, at the hands of "public interest guardians" who are hired and fired by the Prime Minister just like Peatling's photographer buddy.

In their meetings this week, the government team boasted of concessions in the new Data Retention Bill ... whenever an authorisation is issued for access to information about a journalist’s sources, the Ombudsman (or, where ASIO is involved, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security) will receive a copy.

So?

Memories of the grief Conroy brought down on his head would undoubtedly make Abbott sit up and take notice.

Is that your considered judgment, Laurie, the fruit of a half-century of intimate knowledge of this country's politics and media? Pffft.

It has been said that Malcolm Turnbull began his working life in service to Kerry Packer and ends it in service to Murdoch; the same can be said of Oakes, who has not been a trusted source of political news for at least half a decade.

As a student, Kevin Rudd cleaned Oakes' house, and when Rudd was Prime Minister Oakes used all his gravitas and media pull to insist Rudd's government was fine, when it was tanking. The downfall of Kevin Rudd in 2010 undid the old media model whereby journos gave favourable coverage to preferred politicians; that preferred coverage meant the public were bewildered when Rudd failed so publicly, and when people like Oakes could neither predict it nor explain why it happened.

When [$] Chris Wallace insisted "Oakes goes where the story takes him, however it affects friend or foe", she wrote falsely and must assume that we have been paying as little attention to twenty-first century political journalism as she has.

With all due respect, the government is playing a wider game with regard to the information it releases to those it governs, and the role of the traditional media within that. Those who work in the traditional media, particularly those who observe politicians and legislative procedures up close, have no excuse for not being awake to that, and to do more than they did to head off this predicament.

What media offered politicians was a relationship with the community that machine politicians lacked; now the absence of that relationship, that conduit, has been exposed. Laurie Oakes and Stephanie Peatling both do the more-in-sorrow-than-anger pantomime, but their surprise and lack of preparation is pathetic.

The press gallery can no longer tell us much about how we are governed, or even very much about by whom. The press gallery, by its own admission, is worthless. It seems better to preserve the empty charade than to work toward something better.

When Rudd disappears

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where -" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

"- so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.

"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question.

- Lewis Carroll Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Kevin Rudd will leave politics when the media stop listening to him en masse. He will not go when this or that commentator says he must. He would not go if a clear or even overwhelming majority of the refashioned Labor caucus begs him to go. When the Canberra press gallery stops listening to him, he will have to find other avenues to get his message out, and that will involve him leaving politics.

All any politician wants is to be quoted in the media (except Jaymes Diaz, perhaps, which is why he hasn't been elected as a politician). Over the past three years Rudd and Tony Abbott achieved that without having much to say. There was the Gillard government, churning out detailed policies over, well, everything across the gamut of federal government really; Rudd and Abbott ignored them and insisted that they could do better. They didn't need to offer any proof because the press gallery took them at their word.

Imagine what it must have been like in the press gallery just a few weeks ago: see the poor beleaguered scribes staggering under a weight of detailed policy documents issued by a reforming government. All of a sudden one looks up and squeals: "Look everyone, it's Joel Fitzgibbon!". Nek minnit poor Joel is running away, professing his loyalty to the ALP and its leader, while the press gallery pursues him like the opening scene from A Hard Day's Night. Hysteria and ill-considered blather in the politico-media complex makes Rudd possible. Once that dies away, or changes focus, the environment that nurtures Rudd becomes hostile to him.

What's changed? Today's slow-media assault suggests that anyone from the ALP who wants to go on about their party's leadership for old time's sake will still get a good run. I was astonished at how cliche-stonkered and generally badly written this was, and it was by no means the worst of the commentary on this subject. So long as this continues, the idea that Rudd might simply opt out is the product of people who don't understand politics and have no business commentating on it.

Labor people have no more control over the press gallery now than they did when in office: they can't force them to ignore Rudd. People who follow politics closely can stop reading stories about Rudd, but press gallery journos care nothing for what people actually pick up on (this is poorly measured by clickthrough rates). One day the press gallery will decide that Rudd is no longer a story.

You won't see them run stories like that because they have no capacity for self-reflection: banal campaigns are the parties' fault, or even your fault; never than that of journalists, toward whom campaigning is tailored. Rudd was elected leader last June at the very point when the press gallery had started to 'play down' the prospect that he might challenge at all.

Leaving aside recent history (post-Keating) in the federal ALP, and final years of the Democrats (where, befitting a party of ex-teachers, Everyone Must Have A Turn), most leaders depart when defeated. Malcolm Fraser was the last party leader to have a problem with ex-leaders hanging around. In the late 1970s he gave John Gorton and Billy McMahon GCMG knighthoods. Gorton took the hint and was gone within weeks. McMahon didn't, leaving at the worst possible time (the 1982 by-election for McMahon's seat of Lowe was a harbinger of defeat for Fraser's government).

Rudd won't leave because his party want him to, and nor would his timing be influenced by his party's best interests. Labor have to consider whether a by-election loss would be worse than having Rudd stick around.

When and if the press gallery brush aside Rudd and his minions, and run stories that relate in no way to what they say, do, think, or want, then he will be extinguished politically and, in a way perhaps, personally.

When Rudd leaves politics it will take the press gallery by surprise. Even Peter Hartcher has deserted him and is unconvincingly currying favour with a new government that doesn't need him. The gallery will have no right to be surprised, and they will lose credibility for being caught out on a matter which is eminently forseeable and which 'insiders' exist to get across; there will be the usual excuses about "24 hour news cycle" (which rarely affects the press gallery anyway) or whatever. Basically insider journalism is little more than a make-work scheme for 'insiders' and not nearly as valuable (or even as valid) as they would like to believe.

All in good time

... "Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had intended you to be
The next Prime Minister but three:
The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:
The Middle Class was quite prepared.
But as it is! ... My language fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales!"

- Hillaire Belloc Lord Lundy

Why is the Coalition level-pegging with Labor? Why aren't they streets ahead by now? By this point they should be cruising to victory, not bluffing and winging it and hoping that the press don't notice like they have every day since Howard lost office.

The very idea that Abbott should be level-pegging with a visibly tired Rudd, after almost four years of politico-media busywork and the full support of the Murdoch press (which drags the centre-seeking ABC and Fairfax into a lukewarm pro-Abbott position) is a pathetic outcome for the Coalition. It's been a long time since even the most cliche-ridden journo has hailed Abbott as "the greatest opposition leader ever". He doesn't have cut-through, not even after three-and-a-bit years of uncritical media every day.

Labor has not been smashed like Whitlam was in 1975, nor Keating in '96. Mind you, it hasn't come roaring back like an institutionalised version of Rudd's own Will To Power - but that's nothing to do with Abbott.

There had been a long flat buzz for Abbott, and only then because stories about him were the only positive stories coming out of Canberra for a long time. There had been a short buzz for Rudd because he delivered them from being ignored by Gillard, and it lasted until Murdoch jerked them back into line. Insofar as either had been tangible, both are now gone. The strong polls for Abbott have always been very, very soft, and those of us who said so were pooh-poohed by people who take polls seriously.

Abbott has infuriated Labor voters with his sleazy antics in western Sydney, and whimpering at Rudd to shut up. This is dog-whistling to his silly base, the only kind of politicking he knows how to do, rather than winning over the unconvinced. Nobody who voted Labor or independent in 2010 will vote Coalition on the basis of Abbott's carry-on. The fact that it does not even occur to Liberal strategists that this is a problem shows how heavily they rely upon the largely inapplicable American model, where the uncommitted and disengaged do not vote.

No politician in Australian history has enjoyed such uncritically positive coverage. None has so little to show for it. Shut up? Only those with nothing to say should say nothing.

The whole idea of paid parental leave is to stuff the mouths of women who are unsure about Abbott with cash. People who've had children, and who paid attention (unlike Abbott, who shot through as soon as the hard work needed to be done on that front) know that birth and soon afterwards isn't the period when kids are expensive. If you're serious about supporting families you have to vote against a badly thought out policy imposed on the Coalition not once but twice. It was a dud policy the first time, it is a dud policy now, it deals with a non-problem politically and in the community, and it is not an authentic product of the Coalition parties' own processes.

On one level it is understandable that the Coalition would avoid policy commitments. Labor had two policy wonks in leadership positions, Gillard and Swan; one too many in the top two roles, but two more than the entire Coalition frontbench. Then again, you can't claim that the incumbents are the worst government ever while offering less in every area:

• Whatever the shortcomings of the Rudd-Gillard governments in healthcare, Abbott's sole differentiating policy - hospital boards - will do nothing to help;
• If you believe our telecommunications system needs more and better wireless, how will steel cabinets in every street and an unsustainable reliance on copper help? Offering less than "the worst government in Australia's history" makes no sense; and
• In immigration the government has pretty much negated the Coalition's push, leaving Morrison appealing only to trigger-happy weirdos in a doomed quest for differentiation. You've been wedged, and you can't even tell.

What flexibility you gain by fobbing off calls for scrutiny, you lose in making the case for solid constancy of purpose. When you're fundamentally unserious people, like Abbott and Hockey are, you need all the solidity and constancy of purpose you can get. "All in good time" promises only complacency at a time when we must be alert to opportunities and threats. They can't afford to leave things to the last minute, which is what they've done - again.

In this contest the hare has ground to a halt and winking to his supporters, mistaking their urgings-on with cheers, while the dull tortoise plods on. An uninspiring government faces re-election because its opponent has offered such a weak challenge.

My review of 'The Stalking of Julia Gillard'

You can read my review of The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne Walsh here at the King's Tribune, where they take such good care of it.

Since Wednesday night

Setting aside the familiar travesty at Lang Park, what happened on Wednesday night was that Labor MPs stampeded against two big issues that they had feared and avoided until then. They had feared the power of right-wing union bosses over their preselections, and they had feared having Rudd return to re-impose his micromanaging/dithering style of governance. What also happened was that they caved before the media embargo against Gillard (of which more in another article yet to be published) in the hope that Rudd might enable some coverage of actual government policy, and with it a case for re-election that was denied to them under the anti-Gillard embargo.

Over the period 2007-10, Kevin Rudd irritated a lot of people in caucus through backflips and backdowns publicly, and in private snubbing and bawling-out and other forms of rudeness. People in caucus complained but ultimately did nothing. Only when this behaviour came to alarm a few union leaders was action taken against Rudd: they phoned members of caucus over the evening of 23 June 2010 and told them that they were to vote for Gillard, which they did. The lesson in sheer power terms was clear: powerful people step up and act while powerless people sit around and whinge.

In the first week of the election campaign, Tony Abbott's campaign to become Prime Minister stalled over his inability to sound convincing when talking about workplace relations (a mistake he has compounded this year, with his no-mark workplace relations policy that Eric Abetz all but disowned in a debate with Shorten at the National Press Club). Rudd leaked to Laurie Oakes and Labor people haven't forgiven him for that. In the period since, Rudd knew that the union leaders hadn't shifted: that's why he was belted last March and dodged the challenge earlier this year. It was still fair to regard those guys as the drivers of caucus.

The unions haven't rolled out a supportive campaign for the ALP like they did in 2007; this doesn't mean the ALP needs to trash the unions but they are entitled to wonder what they are getting in return for being lorded over. Now that the ALP's preselections for the coming election have all been settled, and there is nothing to lose, why not ignore the small number of union leaders who won't help you and can't touch you? After the election you can rebuild those fences if you need to.

As to Rudd's micromanaging/dithering style, its persistence is unclear from this angle (and do you reckon journos will pick it up this time? Fool me once, etc.). If this style has changed, it will be a value-add brought by latecomers to Team Rudd like Crean, Wong, and Shorten, rather than thick-and-thin loyalists like Chris Bowen or Bruce Hawker insisting that Rudd has "changed" in some undefinable way. If they don't win the election it doesn't matter; if they do, they had better work out some arrangement whereby Rudd's staff is imposed upon him or something, but then if they had done that after 2007 they would be in a different position today.

The idea that the micromanaging/dithering style is fixed in place is fascinating only to those who give Tony Abbott the benefit of the doubt. On and since Wednesday night we learned, again, that Abbott can't deal with foreseeable events. He was caught out when Gillard replaced Rudd in 2010. He was caught out when Gillard thrashed Rudd in March 2012. The Coalition look like the little pigs from the fable who built their houses from straw and sticks, unaware that the wolf could even do the huff-and-puff until the wreckage literally and undeniably lay strewn around them.

Abbott claims to have learned the lessons from Hewson's time in 1990-93, but I don't think he has: when Labor replaced Hawke with Keating in 1991 the Coalition's game changed, but their tactics never accommodated the new and fiercer opponent. Only last week the Coalition said that Rudd had been "assassinated" in 2010, a stupid line for a country where the practice is almost unknown. Rudd seems to have been de-assassinated in a way that simply isn't possible for John Newman or Donald Mackay.

Eventually, the Coalition will come up with a line of attack against Rudd. It will almost certainly involve a lot of crocodile tears about poor Julia Gillard. If Abbott really was "the best Opposition Leader ever", or even a good one, he would have shifted seamlessly to counter Rudd so that Labor appeared to flounder no matter who led them. Rudd has, as David Jackmanson points out as AusVotes2013, anticipated the Coalition attack and pretty much blunted it already.

Since Wednesday the Liberals held a US-style rally starring the prissy Bruce Billson and the repellent Sophie Mirabella (prediction: neither will be re-elected). They introduced John Howard, who became cranky in referring to Rudd - 2007 all over again. If you believe Howard embodied, or even led, an era in which Australia was comfortable and relaxed, then you should only wheel him out in public when he's feeling that way. Mr Comfortable and Relaxed was never convincing as an attack dog. The two Labor leaders who beat him (Hawke and Rudd) knew that a serene leaderlike pose was the best way to counter his attacks. Howard saw off three Labor leaders (Keating, Crean, and Latham) who made him look calm and avuncular by contrast, and another (Beazley) who was not so much calm as complacent. Cranky Howard is worse for the Liberals than no Howard at all. Cranky Howard looks like he is driving Abbott behind the scenes, as though Abbott isn't his own man - however true that is, it's a perception for which the Liberals can't afford to offer more support.

Since Wednesday night we learned that the consensus of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery is not only meaningless, but actually works against telling us how we are governed. At the start of this month people like Barrie Cassidy confidently asserted that the Rudd challenge was really on, drawing on the full depth and breadth of their experience and credibility to make the Big Call. They simply assumed that their credibility had remained intact after three years of log-rolling and jabbering on this subject. Then they said that the steam was coming off any (imagined) Rudd challenge - at the very point when caucus members like Penny Wong and Bob Carr were actually telling Prime Minister Gillard that they would not be voting for her. This was worse than the usual dreary beat-up. What the press gallery reported was the direct opposite of what was happening.

There is quite the debate in journo circles about how far you go to protect your sources, and almost all journalists agree that it is better to tell your audience less than the full truth in order to protect your sources. In this case, however, we already know who the press gallery use as their pro-Rudd sources: any MP who quit or was sacked over the past three years (or overlooked, in the case of Doug "mind mah tea" Cameron). We know now that their sources have led to press gallery journalists reporting the opposite of the truth - insisting that there was a challenge when there wasn't, and vice versa - to the point where the press gallery consensus simply can no longer be trusted as a source of information about federal politics.

Pampered journos such as those in the press gallery go to industry events where they are regaled with tales of danger by other journalists who dodge writs from Sydney property developers, bullets from Mexican drug gangs or rocket-propelled grenades from Western Asian fundamentalists. They think they have something in common with those people, but they don't. Look at the English-language news outlets from North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Iran - note the skirting of major political issues within those jurisdictions, the simple recitation of government announcements and quotes without verification or context, lots of passive voice, and the assumption that the official PR-heavy activities of the great and good are all there is to 'politics'. That's the type of journalism with which Australian press gallery journalism is most closely aligned - not the derring-do, truth-at-all-costs work that attracts gullible people to fundraising dinners.

On Wednesday night Bob Carr claimed that a number of asylum-seekers who come to Australia by boat are "economic migrants" (like my Scottish forebears in the 1830s, presumably). It's clear that detention is an idea that has to be tried and failed before it will be abandoned. I don't know how many more people will have to be drowned at sea or banged up in the various detention centres before that will happen, in the same way that it wasn't clear that 43 is the number of Australian servicemen who had to die in Afghanistan (and may there be no more).

Mandatory offshore detention will work for Labor at this election because it is the middle ground between the do-nothing/laissez-faire option, and the creepy cruelty offered by Scott Morrison and the Coalition. Beyond that, it is a policy that can't work either to reduce the flow of asylum-seekers to Australia, or to process asylum claims in a more systematic way. Despite having failed, it cannot be abandoned straight away but abandoned it will be eventually; along with the high-minded criticism that it is cruel and inhumane and in breach of our international obligations, this policy will come to attract the contempt that is due to all impractical, pointless, expensive, window-dressing policy measures.

I miss Julia Gillard and I still think she could have turned it around and beaten Abbott, and could would should might have been a better Prime Minister than she had been. The polls do not disprove this. I suppose nothing will prove or disprove it, but this is my blog and that is what I reckon.

We haven't seen a policy wonk like her in the Prime Ministership since Deakin. Australian Labor is still playing catch-up since it failed to rethink its purpose to the extent that other social-democrat governments did in the 1930s and '40s, but Julia Gillard has brought them almost up to date. I'm fairly unsentimental when it comes to Labor as a delivery mechanism for policy outcomes, but I stand in awe of the sheer love in this piece, and with it the notion that progress is meant to be made, set back, reassessed and moved forward again, whether at the general political and policy level or at the lives of particular little girls and their family.

The appalling sexism that was piled onto Gillard particularly (but not only) toward the end of her Prime Ministership has brought sexism and gender issues into the centre of public debate like nothing else had, or perhaps ever could have. The scrutiny of the Gillard government's cuts to welfare payments for single parents is almost unprecedented for its breadth, prevalence and quality across both traditional and social media. The debate over sexism in the military is no longer a litany of isolated incidents as it was under previous governments, but a systematic one demanding to be addressed at the highest level. Serious analysis from a gender perspective has arrived at the centre of how we understand the national debate rather than being a perennial but fringe issue. Rudd's promise to increase the number of female ministers will only increase the applicability of gender analysis on government; expect more feminist breakdowns of the budget and other issues on which gender perspectives had touched only in passing.

Since Wednesday night much has changed, but much abides. The press gallery has failed the nation, its employers, and the politicians who sustain them; it has no future in its current form. The Coalition is left with, as the masterful Piping Shrike observes, "an unpopular leader ... with policies that the electorate doesn’t especially like", and too late to change either much. Labor wants to be both reformist and risk-averse: good luck with that, but then that seems to be what the country wants too. We are a have-your-cake-and-eat-it kind of people.

Ruling in, ruling out

'Cause the high heel he used to be has been ground down
And he listens for the footsteps that would follow him around ...

- Elvis Costello Man out of time

What is Kevin Rudd up to? He has realised the guerrilla-campaign of opposition-within-government is a lonely place to be (with only the likes of Joel Fitzgibbon for company, true loneliness would be the better option). Rudd has learned the lesson that Malcolm Turnbull learnt and applied within his party: that if you're a team player your shortcomings will be covered up, while your light can outshine lesser lights even when yours is dimmed and theirs is at full wattage. Over the past two days or so Rudd has done what nobody expected him to do: join the team, fight for the team, rule out taking over the team.

Prime Minister Gillard invested a lot in keeping the Australian-manufactured vehicle industry going, in terms of personal credibility and in terms of money: public money, billions of dollars of it, which was ringfenced against budget cuts. When Ford announced that they would cease manufacturing in this country Gillard made an appropriate but impersonal statement, and has committed to greater job retraining and placement services than other redundant workers get.

She reiterated in her calm, lawyerly way that the whole idea of throwing money at the vehicle industry was about the workers, and that they remained her focus after they had ceased to matter to Ford management. Visiting Geelong today, Rudd said it punchier and better. He's not trying to one-up the Prime Minister, he is compensating for what everyone agrees is one of her weaknesses (in areas other than education or disability care, it would seem): an ability to get to the point, stick to it and hammer it home, so that you don't forget who owns this issue and who you need to vote for if you think it's important too.

I think Kevin Rudd has had his go, and have been strongly critical of him over three years now. I remain unconvinced that his ability to manage people and information has improved one bit and nobody takes any word of oily old-school Ruddsters like Hawker to the contrary. Of course Rudd talks about great-power rivalry; all ex-PMs do that, but not even the most addled nostalgist is talking about SHOCK FRASER/KEATING LEADERSHIP TILT SHOCK. Now that Rudd's on the team, doing the right thing, it's incumbent upon critics to identify and support constructive behaviour: well done, Mr Rudd.

"Gillard-haters"* like Drag0nista and Leigh Sales are clearly upset. They'd be fine if Rudd was undermining Gillard; they'd be fine if Rudd went to ground, and rendered himself politically inert. Both fit the Abbott's-inevitable-Gillard's-doomed Narrative. Because he's done neither, they play word games with him: do you rule out ... are you leaving the door open for ... Rudd knew in 2007 that playing along with such bullshit is worth nothing in terms of votes. Abbott knows it now, and plays journos like trout on the rare occasions that a) they actually confront him and b) he doesn't walk away.

The only thing to do when confronted with that is to shirtfront the interviewer for asking pissant questions, which is what Rudd did this week and what the Prime Minister should do more often.

It doesn't matter if you trash a broadcast media interviewer, they'll still beg to have you back: they have no choice. Only those seeking to hustle their way out of obscurity believe otherwise, but the big guns know you don't cop that from a journo. The journo isn't eliciting information of value by the ruling in/ruling out thing. What they are doing is getting the jollies and the sensation of power that a child gets when offering food to a puppy and then jerking it away at the last minute, laughing, and then offering the morsel again. Old dogs know you can take a bit of skin off the cherub without being put down, and improve the relationship quite considerably over the long term.

Rudd is one politician who has certainly lost a lot of power, but the broadcasters/MSM have lost more power than he has. Nobody who doesn't know suck-up-spit-down Sales personally is going to feel for her after being outmanoeuvered by someone The Narrative regards as a political corpse.

Fitzgibbon looks like a prize fuckwit for courting publicity at his party's expense, and even those of us with no love for the ALP as an organisation see this clearly. To be fair, however, this is also true of the entire, almost entirely worthless Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery. Yet again the media turned their back on the market that will maintain or kill their jobs in order to pursue a nobody: the unspeakable in pursuit of the implausible.

God forbid that anything at all should hang upon sad-sacks Alan Griffin and Daryl Melham for tossing in the towel. Once again, Rudd has left his so-called supporters within caucus in the cold. He's done it before - pretty much every time he ran for the leadership, except 2006 and after '07 when he had enough largesse to distribute to friend and foe alike - but every time he ran and lost his supporters wondered why they bothered.

I remember when Daryl Melham's career ended, sometime in the '90s  after an interview with Kerry O'Brien. The Liberals have been targeting his seat for twenty years, one of the longest courtships in Australian politics. If they win no other seat, let Banks be the crown-of-thorns for Loughnane-Abbott. Griffin has gone from newbie to burnt-out husk without any intervening achievement, a bit like most careers in politics or political journalism really.

The Murdoch journos can't believe the Labor leadership thing really is over. The basic facts of Australian politics are clearly different to what they told us, what they demanded we pay them to tell us: Julia Gillard was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2010, she was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2011, she was Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2012, she is Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2013, and no amount of increasingly strident Narrative is convincing that she won't be Prime Minister was Prime Minister in June 2014, or '15.

Having Rudd as leader in this election was essential to the Liberal psyche.

The Liberals who survived the 2007 election mostly accepted the people's decision, and began casting about for a post-Howard future. They thought Costello would lead them there and they were wrong. There was a hard core of people like Bronwyn Bishop who simply refused, Tea Party style, to accept that an actual majority of actual Australian voters elected a Labor government. They thought that Rudd had swindled them, and every time he backed down and watered down the positions with which he beat Howard he fed that perception. Nelson was their compromise candidate: nobody wanted Abbott after his performance at the election yet they were afraid Turnbull would rush them into some strange future of a republic, education, hi-tech and fine arts, of the sort that Keating had tried to foist onto Labor.

Turnbull got up when Nelson could go on no longer and he assuaged the most basic fears of the organised Liberal Right, directed from beyond Canberra. When Turnbull failed too they put Abbott in, as they wanted all along because they could control him as he presented a face to the press gallery that it found appealing (and the public will swallow whatever the press gallery feeds them, apparently).

Abbott needs to face Rudd and beat him. Only then can the Howard continuum be restored and maintained. That's why Abbott looked crestfallen when Gillard trounced Rudd last year, and why the Liberals didn't laugh when Rudd refused to challenge earlier this year (the key union bosses remained behind Gillard; had they shifted, they'd have told their people in caucus to vote for Rudd, and Rudd would now be PM. Rudd knew they hadn't shifted and wasn't obliged to commit political suicide).

The role of the press gallery and their broadcast media colleagues in leadership transitions over the past seven years is an anachronism, a homage to an image of the press and its role within Parliament that no longer applies. The parties' relationship to the media in leadership transitions used to be intimate: they would watch collaborators gather and disperse. They could point to evidence contradicting those who would "play down leadership tensions".

Now their position can be likened to [another analogy that compares grown journalists to children!] the schoolyard bullying tactic whereby taller children take the property of a smaller child and throw it back and forth above the owner's feebly grasping hands. The difference is, though, that the child whose property is being used as a plaything knows what's going on; after seven long years, no press gallery journalist - no newbie with fresh perspective, no old hand who's seen it all - none of them have twigged to the way leadership challenges actually happen.

Seven years. Six leadership changes in that time. Two elections, and another coming up. None of them have twigged to the way leadership challenges actually happen.

Now that you understand the difference between how leadership challenges actually work, and how they are reported by the press gallery and others in the broadcast media (or if you will, MSM), you can see the level of self-delusion from this tribune of the Conventional Wisdom:

That could have been written at any point in the last three years, and would have been no more valid then than it is now. It's not even informative, failing as journalism at every level other than the ovine everyone else is doing it. Looking to the caucus to find out what's going on with the leadership is like looking for Lasseter's Reef in the carpark of the Rooty Hill RSL: it just ain't there.

Leadership changes have been carefully managed affairs for the past seven years: in that time Labor has changed leaders twice, the Liberals three times, and in every case the fix has been in long before the press gallery even got wind of it. Even the Greens notified the MSM only after the Brown-Milne-WhishWilson deal was done.

That journalist is wasting her time running the same non-story she's run for three years, the same non-story the press gallery ran about Howard and Costello before that. You can be a veteran press gallery journalist in this country with a resume consisting of nothing but bullshit.

No amount of MSM wishin'-and-hopin'- that the realities of the past seven years might be different this time will make it so. Party leadership changes are just not decided in Canberra. Pollies will wring their hands over a dud leader but won't move without being told by people who put and keep them there - people who aren't in Canberra and who rarely talk to journos anyway. This is one of the many changes that affects the way that the broadcast media does its job which has nothing whatsoever to do with the dreaded Internet.

The ABC's Mark Colvin insisted at the Sydney Writers' Festival that journalists were the victim of an imaginary construct called "the 24 hour news cycle", and on Twitter this week he claimed that it explains this. It doesn't. Neither Morrison nor Fitzgibbon had anything new or interesting to say and only the most skittish and idiotic sheep would contend otherwise.

The press gallery in Canberra doesn't operate on anything like a "24 hour news cycle". The one exception to that was the night of 23-24 June 2010, a leadership transition brought on by people who cared nothing for the comfortable routines of traditional media.

The fact that Prime Minister Gillard is the first occupant of that office since McMahon who has not courted the media before securing it explains why she gets unrelentingly negative coverage, and why her policy-lite opponent is excused for not facing up to economic and social realities of the nation he would govern. The press gallery is denying us the information we need to make a decision other than that which would bring about a government that they - and their construction of 'we' - would want.

It is perfectly appropriate to laugh at the sheer effrontery of journalists caught off-guard when a press release is issued at 4.30pm on a Friday. Have you ever had something crop up at work when you thought a day was nearing its end? I have, so have most people, and journalists should keep that in mind when they chew up airtime/space with their bellyaching.

If a government is truly gone you don't need to get as shrieky as the broadcast media is (and some of the more gullible bloggers are) now. Look at the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger coverage of the doomed Howard federal government - or even the she's-quite-nice-really coverage of NSW's Kenneally government in 2011, a government that actually did die of shame. If you really do believe the polls and the backroom consultants who insist it's all over then the absence of such coverage about Gillard is suspicious.

Rudd is courting the same audience that he courted in 2006: the lumpen public (nobody you know, just those randoms 'in the field' of a poll); and the heads of the ALP's most powerful unions, whom he won over in '06 and lost in '10 and clearly hopes to win again. By neither sulking nor abasing himself, he is doing what they have told him is necessary and unavoidable: those who fight for Labor when their prospects seem darkest have a future, while those who simply jeer or walk away might not be welcomed back.

Maybe Rudd will feint again between now and September and glory in the title of the only Federal Labor MP north of Sussex Street. Maybe he'll turn on Gillard again when Abbott is having a dead-cat bounce. Drag0nista is right when she uses Rudd's words that a leopard never changes its spots - that may be so, but a leopard can be de-clawed and -fanged, and boxed into a small enclosure. I've seen it happen and so have most Australians, assuming their experiences of leopards is similar to mine.

The point here is that none of the Conventional Wisdom surfers and Narrative-mongers predicted Rudd would support the leader who replaced him. It might well be fleeting, and to some it's infuriating, but you can't deny it's happened or that it might recur. Having thus failed your analysis of what might happen in a new light is pretty much moot. You just can't trust the press gallery (like other essentially conservative people who exist in a matrix of cliches) to differentiate a passing fad from a structural shift, and report it to you.

Those yet-unreleased Liberal policies would want to be real doozies, instantly and firmly embraced by a grateful nation that truly believes Abbott and Hockey and their support acts really can and will deliver Australia from what ails it under Rudd and Gillard. Yep, click your ruby-red slippers together and believe, believe, believe.


* News Ltd columnist Miranda Devine used to claim that anyone who criticised the Howard government for any reason was a "Howard hater". In that sense, Drag0nista can be said to be a "Gillard hater". When I wrote that I thought I was being terribly wry. Oh well.

A thousand deaths

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

- Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act II Sc I

Having been elected as Prime Minister in 2007, Kevin Rudd would wake up most mornings and see that News Limited broadcast media outlets would bag one or more of his policies, whereupon he would dither and eventually drop that policy. When he dropped his government's policy to address climate change in the face of News Ltd hostility, people began to wonder what, if anything, he would stand up for - and he was pushed out of his job.

If he had been re-elected by the ALP, he would have done that again. He would have cringed beneath the cosh of News Ltd again, and again, and again. No amount of smarm or negotiation by Rudd or anyone else will or can overcome this.

News Ltd really want Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. Abbott wrote for News Ltd as a student, he wrote for them as an adult before entering Parliament, and in his memoirs Peter Costello affected surprise when Abbott would set aside actual governing and shadow cabinet work in order to write for News Ltd. Costello has known Abbott for decades and worked with him over many years in the Howard government, but to affect surprise at this relationship diminishes Costello. Abbott was a News Ltd man before he married and became a birth-father; he was a News Ltd man before he was a Liberal, let alone an MP. News Ltd is second only in importance to Roman Catholicism in understanding who Tony Abbott is and what Tony Abbott means.

Labor people of a bygone age who could barely comprehend what corporate power even was flung the accusation at Menzies, that he was a tool of the Collins Street business elite; Billy McMahon headed the legal team that acted for what was then the Bank of New South Wales against the Chifley Government's attempts to nationalise it. Neither of those men, no Liberal/UAP/Free Trade/Protectionist leader nor any other party leader I can think of, was so covered in any one corporation's pocket-lint as Abbott is vis-a-vis News Ltd.

Against that, Stephen Conroy's Crean-like charge into the maw of overwhelming opposition should be seen as understandable - even commendable in some crazy way. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. The Greens were generous in crafting a narrative for the government, a skill it has lacked and a sign of considerable goodwill from a rising party that can afford to be generous. The idea that the Labor-News Ltd relationship could get any worse is absurd, but not half as funny as the idea that Kevin From Queensland is the one who can set things right.

Rudd's spinelessness is now obvious to those who keened for his return, those who embarrassed themselves by leaking and conniving in his favour when he wouldn't put himself out for them. The spate of resignations is the implosion of the dream that Rudd was bigger than he is, or was. It has revealed a number of things about important people at a crucial time.

Chris Bowen once said that he would smash the business model of people-smugglers. The business model he has smashed most successfully was by resigning, those of the also-not-illegal models of Chris Uhlmann, Peter Hartcher, and all the other journalists who bet their professional lives on the attitude that if you can't say something nice about the Prime Minister, come and talk to me.

Julia Gillard is the 27th Prime Minister of Australia. All the other 26 had members of their backbench, and even their ministry, who hated them. If journo experience counts for anything this fact should inform coverage of the incumbent. This is not a special plea to go easy on her, it's an expression of disappointment that reality does not inform reporting.

No press gallery journalist had more than forty separate members of caucus come to them and say they were backing Rudd, nor anything like that number. They all claim there really was a groundswell, they all claim caucus dissent was real, but in reality it was just the same old whingers - Fitzgibbon, Kim Carr, Bowen, Husic and the rest - getting more and more carried away with themselves. Every press gallery journalist who made any claim to an authoritative check of the numbers has been deliberately and repeatedly untruthful. Rudd never had the numbers at any point since 2010 and any journalist who said otherwise deserves to be sacked. They simply believed what the old fabulists told them, passing it forward rather than pushing back.

This big lie on the part of the Canberra press gallery coincided with a call for journalists to cultivate the trust of their audience, in the face of evidence that Australians distrusted journalists more than any citizens of any other developed country. In a fragmenting media landscape that relationship of trust is everything. Media diversity is pointless if it only means more ignorant people lying to you.

Which mining company will engage Martin Ferguson in post-ministerial consultancy? To ask such a question is both to see the importance of good journalism, and its lack. Remember how Mark Arbib said that he was resigning for the sake of his family, and how all the journalists believed him? Walkleys all round, and have one yourself.

The second smashed-business-model belongs to Abbott, still insisting that the division in the ALP will continue even as the anti-Gillard Labor movement collapsed. Only a distant observer would look at Abbott's words and say: he would say that, wouldn't he. To be a member of the Canberra press gallery is to lack the perspective and the perspicacity to say such a thing, to be unable to do anything but take Abbott at his word. Note how only Julie Bishop, similarly doomed, is trotting out this line; the smarter Liberals know that gig is up. It was as pathetic as those Liberals from last century who kept insisting that Whitlam or Hawke were communists. Those who aren't capable of developing a new direction are at least being canny by being quiet.

The business model of the Prime Minister has not been smashed. What the press gallery and the Opposition insist is a "shambles" would have been represented as a triumph for any other leader: the challenger chickened out and his supporters fled. At those press conferences where Ferguson, Bowen et al departed it was hard to hear the lamentation of their women, but the effect was the same. Gillard is freer than she has been at any stage of her Prime Ministership, less able to blame others for her failures but in a position where fewer are committed to her failure than at any time in half-a-dozen years. This would be a triumph for any other leader; the grudging admissions that she's tough (particularly, it must be said, from female journalists) is a start in changing the Narrative.

The Prime Minister was right to sack Crean for his rogue intervention. She would be wrong not to bring him back later in some important capacity, unless he makes a goose of himself in the meantime.

The broadcast media were wrong to misreport the apology to victims of forced adoptions. That will be more important to more people into the future than the occasion when some leeches were salted off the backside of the Gillard government. They should have reported it - a moment of national greatness and magnanimity - as the story against which the leadership pretensions of Rudd and Abbott could be contrasted. Those are the people with scars, who are shattered, who have undergone bloodletting - not some leaky pollies dragged screaming from the lolly shop.

Journalists should have seen Abbott's speech on that august occasion as final, incontrovertible proof that he is emotionally disabled; a captive of institutions that are not big enough to apologise either, and in no sense a co-Prime Minister let alone the inevitable successor.

The Royal Commission into institutionalised child abuse is doomed unless Abbott is defeated. His lip-service in establishing it counts for nothing.

Not since John Howard was drafted to the Liberal leadership in 1995 has any governing-party leader been less encumbered than Julia Gillard is now. The fact that Gillard can start pointing to achievements as a pattern for a future where Abbott hasn't even got his policy settings right shows the Coalition (and the press gallery) have been wrong-footed again - just like they were when Gillard thrashed Rudd last year.

Making a fist of it

It might feel good
it might sound a little somethin'
but damn the game if it don't mean nothin'
what is game who got game
where's the game in life behind the game behind the game
I got game
she's got game
we got game
they got game
he got game
it might feel good
or sound a little somethin'
but fuck the game if it ain't saying nothin'

- Public Enemy He Got Game

A senior political correspondent can't tell when he's being gamed:

One of the many intriguing aspects of the slush fund scandal that was revived against Julia Gillard this week is that the opposition had almost nothing to do with it.

In the annals of scandal-based attempts to embarrass or pressure prime ministers, this makes it as rare as a blue diamond, but nowhere near as attractive.

The opposition was not hawking to the press a dirt file on Gillard. It did not promote the story or brief reporters on the key questions to pursue. It did not use question time, not even once, to pressure her on the matter. These are the time-honoured hallmarks of an opposition-led assault; they were missing this week.

Oh, please.

And when Abbott was intimately involved in undermining the Pauline Hanson support movement, and lying about his involvement, Hartcher would not have dug for the real story: he'd have been satisfied with the surface appearances and left it at that.

Had Hartcher been a White House correspondent in 1972, the official denial of any involvement in the break-in the Democrat party headquarters in the Watergate building would have seen the story end there.

Tony Abbott did egg the media on by repeatedly telling reporters, when asked, that the Prime Minister had questions to answer. But he did not specify any, even when invited to. He was a bystander enjoying the spectacle and cheering it on, but not a participant.

Abbott has the most to gain from the political destruction of Julia Gillard. Had the Prime Minister faltered there was a real prospect that he would have been in the Lodge by Christmas.

As the putative Prime Minister, Abbott could have demonstrated some much-sought-after statesmanship by declaring the Slater & Gordon allegations to be some sort of internal Labor kerfuffle and refusing to discuss it. Had this happened, the press gallery would have rounded on those who really are peddling the story (Hartcher used to get feeds directly from Kevin Rudd when the latter was on the ascendant, and this story has that old-time's-sake feel about it), and dusted off their Gillard leadership stories once again. The fact that Abbott, like Rudd, neither put up nor shut up looks weak; they look like those appalling football spectators who love on-field scraps more than the game itself.

There are some obvious questions for Gillard here. Did she know about his alleged fraud? Did she knowingly abet theft in any way?

Thanks to ABC24, I saw the press conference where those questions were put to and answered by Gillard.

I do not know if Hartcher was there (maybe he was busy, y'know it was just before Question Time) but it does not reflect well on Hartcher for him to put those questions:

• If Hartcher knew those questions were asked and answered, it's craven and dishonest to put them to readers of his article; and even worse
• If Hartcher didn't know those questions were asked and answered, his reputation as a journalist is on the line.

Even more damaging is Hartcher's sad attempt at the smart-arse thinking that passes for political tactics these days:

It looked like a perfect opportunity for the opposition to embarrass Gillard because it reminds the public of the intimate relations between Labor and the union movement, because it reminds the public of union corruption, and because it allows the opposition a new way to accentuate the old theme of Gillard's trustworthiness.

There is clearly no interest in the Labor-union links and union corruption, otherwise this would be a hotter story for the MSM than it would appear to be. Abbott has pretty much negated the untrustworthiness thing with whether or not he read the BHP announcement over Olympic Dam. Clearly, Hartcher's musings come from outside the Abbott brains trust; from people who think they can second-guess them.

Why pass up the chance? There are three reasons that the opposition chose to sit this one out.

Yes there are, but they aren't the ones cited by Hartcher:

1. The Coalition have an unrelentingly short-term focus. If they can knock Gillard out with a single blow, they're interested; but to do any in-depth forensic digging (like John Howard did over the Loans Affair in 1974-75) is all too hard;
2. The Wilson-Gillard thing has already claimed the career of Glenn Milne, whom John Howard wanted as his press secretary, later the most pro-Coalition member of the press gallery; now apparently picking coins out of Canberra gutters. That's why Josh Frydenberg dodged the questions-to-be-answered question when they was put to him on ABC Breakfast; and
3. They've seen what Gillard is like when she's full of fight, and they can't cope. As with all big beasts, you don't wound Julia Gillard; you knock her off quickly and cleanly or you put the gun down and drive on.

Maybe Hartcher might have been at that press conference after all:

So how did the Prime Minister arrive at the point on Thursday of icily declaring that "I have determined that I will deal with these issues", "given we have got to a stage where false and defamatory material is now being recycled in The Australian newspaper," and taking questions from the press gallery until the questions were exhausted.

Umm, was it The Australian newspaper, perhaps?

The watershed moment was when a member of Gillard's own caucus, Robert McClelland, stood in the House on June 21 ... he committed an act of political bastardry against his leader.

Why the two-month lag between then and Thursday? A gun political correspondent could tell us that, but there's nothing here. Surely McClelland learned the lesson of going off half-cocked in February.

A former industrial lawyer with the old Builders Labourers Federation ... Nowicki and Blewitt are hunting for documents.

Would you lump them in with those misogynists and nutjobs we've heard so much about lately? Why is it OK to make the Federal Opposition and the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery put up or shut up, but these guys can come out with anything as and when they feel like it?

With an entire ecosystem of anti-Gillard activists, dedicated promoters of the Wilson scandal like Nowicki and Blewitt, a split and bitter Labor caucus, and the anti-Gillard agenda of The Australian, this affair is not going to fade away.

If there are no issues of substance to be raised, why shouldn't it fade away? If it does not fade away, it is an indictment of pretty much the entire Australian media. We saw how it pissed away its credibility over Howard-Costello, Rudd-Gillard, Thomson-Jackson and Ashby-Slipper. You'd think these guys would quit while they're behind, but you can't do fearless foot-in-door journalism when your foot is in your mouth and the door is closed.

Indeed, Gillard has now turbocharged this affair. She has elevated it to a legitimate subject of prime ministerial scrutiny.

No, Peter; as with the Rudd Government, she's buried it. There is no new material, champ, and even if there is he sources are so discredited they may as well not bother.

Hartcher has been a Canberra correspondent for twenty years, no longer an up-and-comer but not an Oakes-Kelly doyen, either. Consider the dire financial position of Fairfax against its expensively-maintained non-AFR team at the Canberra press gallery:

• Hartcher has been there half as long as Grattan and is her logical successor, but Fairfax can't pay out her entitlements and stay solvent;
• Phil Coorey has a sinecure as correspondent to the Labor Right;
• Misha Schubert has already gone;
• Maley and Murphy are expendable and each is almost certainly paid less than Peter Hartcher.

If you're playing a game and you've failed to work out who is being gamed, maybe the player being gamed is you. Why should we listen to you about matters that you clearly can't fully explain or understand?

Update: Bushfire Bill on the press gallery, comment 4468.

Gillard and the Labor leadership

I've had this post under development for days, mainly because I have wanted to stay out of internal Labor politics. On one level the Gillard-Rudd contest is an extension of all of those "W(h)ither Labor?" treatises you can find elsewhere on the Web, and off it, by people who've committed to the Labor cause sufficiently to have the right to speak on this. I don't have that right, and (probably because I'm not Labor-through-and-through) it bores me. This post shows why Gillard is the better option Australia has for Prime Minister.

Gillard has an agenda that opens more possibilities than it closes and she has the skill to carry it off. The whole idea that she can't sell anything is vanishing before our eyes as the feisty, no-nonsense do-er and fighter comes out from behind the front of that droning lawyer.

Gillard always had a shifty persona so long as everything she said was always about what she was going to do, rather than concrete examples of what she was doing or had done. With the uncertainties of a hung parliament, differences (vast gulfs?) opened up between what she said she was gunna do and what actually happened. Nobody likes a gunna. The topics she has campaigned on - carbon pricing in particular - has been remote from people.

Aside from individuals within caucus who have personal grudges against her, the whole anti-Gillard push on within the ALP now assumes that the pattern of the past year must continue into the next. This idea assumes that she's the first Prime Minister to ever suffer such abysmal polling (ignoring the fact that Howard and Keating had similar satisfaction levels at about the same point in their terms that Gillard is experiencing now). This is unforgivable for experienced members of the press gallery, all the more so the louder they trumpet their nous, and their insider contacts and experience.

Examples of this include Peter Hartcher, and the one-man press-gallery tribute act you have when Graham Young is unavailable, Malcolm Farnsworth. Hartcher-Farnsworth have basically written the same article. By citing polling data about the past year and even digging up the odd historical flourish from 1939, they assume a historical gravitas they don't have and assert a right to impose that lagging-indicator data forward onto a very different year, which is not supported by the different challenges of the year ahead. From that, they gravely intone that Gillard is finished and the sooner Labor turns back to Rudd the better for them.

Rudd's performance Friday morning, trying to whip up the sort of storm that blew away Malcolm Turnbull from the Liberal leadership in 2009, revealed for the first time what all those Labor insiders say about him being unhinged. No amount of bagging by Crean, Swan or anyone else so damned Rudd as his own words. If what happened in 2010 was a 'coup', his family wouldn't have been standing with him: they'd be dead or imprisoned, because that's what happens in coups. Anyone who'd told Therese Rein that they liked/trusted Kevin, even if they were just making polite conversation, would be in a similar position. If Rudd has said something like that in the heat of the moment in June 2010 it would have been forgivable, but having been involved in the events of Libya and Syria and being aware of other events of that nature - after all that, to still insist that he was the victim of a coup shows he lacks the perspective necessary to hold high office.

Rudd came roaring back with a doozy Friday afternoon though, but the sort of performance that blew your socks off in 2006 is foreseeable six years later. You can appreciate it on a whole different level once you realise that Rudd's fits of ability to combine competence and passion, where he not only states a case and can see it through, are as rare and delicate and doomed like some striking butterfly.

Nobody likes a gunna, but 2012 is the year when there will be more, not less, of this persona: education as both the coping mechanism for economic change for adults, and as the embodiment of faith in and care for children. This is why Rudd wants to be PM now, why he can't and won't wait for the dish to be served cold later in the year or even next. The backroom negotiations have been done - yes, by Gillard - and she has set a pattern whereby legislated outcomes bear a strong resemblance to what she stated up front was going to happen. It is entirely possible that the carbon price compensation will be received with the same degree of appreciation that Rudd's $900 was a few years ago - and Rudd would rather he was there handing out the cheques, rather than Gillard.

If people get some appreciation that it's Gillard who came through with what Rudd promised, it would be unfair to dump her in favour of a showboating man who talked and talked and didn't deliver because he thought it was all about him. If that realisation takes hold, Rudd is finished. If Labor dumped Gillard in favour of Rudd at some future stage, and Rudd turned out to be less than the saviour he promised, that romanticised image of Australia's first woman Prime Minister would take hold. Women who can't bear Tony Abbott would reconsider voting Coalition if the ALP turns out to be as bad or worse, which they would be if they dumped Gillard at the very time when the hard work was done and the benefits started flowing.

Both Rudd and Gillard are imperfect, but who are you going to back to change? Rudd's supporters say you'd have to be a mug not to have learned anything, but there's no real proof that he has. Rudd's going to smash the factions while deferring to them to choose his ministry - yeah, right. It's Gillard who grows on the job while Rudd only seemed to buckle.

I stand by what I said a couple of weeks ago in terms of media being players rather than just reporters, a bit like arsonists calling the fire brigade. I fully endorse this piece by Tim Dunlop and note that Lenore Taylor has borne out the conflicted role of the politico-media complex here:

The past few days in politics have been like the penultimate scene in a police drama. The main characters have finally come clean with the truth they have been withholding all this time, and the selfless reasons they did not confess it sooner.

The truth, and what a relief it is to finally hear it, is that they acted in defence of the nation. They didn't knife Kevin Rudd that winter night because his "good government had lost its way" after all - hah! we never did believe that malarky - but because they were saving us from an erratic, disdainful, dithering, egomaniac presiding over a paralysed government.

Here Taylor is claiming that she's hearing this for the first time. Let the record show that she dutifully reported what she knew to be "malarky" without letting her readers in on this. A few paragraphs later we see what we might call "the Real Lenore":

In September 2010, soon after the election, I set out to discover exactly what had gone wrong during the Rudd government, speaking to scores of ministers, advisers and senior public servants.

The picture that emerged is entirely consistent with the things ministers are saying on the record now.

I underwent a similar search at that time, but because all I had to go on was the mainstream media it left me none the wiser. Thanks for telling us, Lenore, particularly those of us who follow these events more closely than most and are the sorts of consumers your employers would most hope to attract and retain. Thanks for all those articles in 2010 and 2011 quoting all those unnamed sources as to what a continuous balls-up life was like in the Rudd Government. If the Opposition had that insight into all that wasted effort, time, and money, they probably wouldn't be the Opposition any more (and we'd be no better governed). After this past month journalists can stop pretending that they're above quoting unnamed sources, and that they have an excuse for not telling us what they knew back then: there is no reason at all why all of those stories relying on anonymous sources couldn't have been written and published in 2010. We've all been had by the press gallery - stuff the lot of them.

One man knows what mugs the press gallery are better than most: Tony Abbott. His statement on foreign affairs is not only the foreign policy you have when you don't have a foreign policy, but the policy statement you try on when there is no Minister for Foreign Affairs to shoot it down. Read it and imagine what Rudd or Stephen Smith or Gareth Evans would have done with piffle like that: "Jakarta-centred", I ask you. This is what happens when a political party assumes they're cruising into government with no serious opposition or scrutiny. How many years do you think it would take people like Lenore Taylor to look into the blank face of the alternative government and wonder what's going on behind it?

Rudd fans are wrong to assume that their man can or should reap the rewards for work he was incapable of performing when he had a majority and considerable goodwill behind him; Albanese's position is just sentimentality from a jobs-for-life age. I accept what Piping Shrike says about the meltdown of factionalism but it's Gillard who negotiates that fluid situation while anyone can just call them "fuckers" and assume the problem will go away. Gillard should win because she's done the work and should reap the rewards - and is more likely to pass on those rewards to her party, and the nation beyond. God help us all if we again become dependent on the whims of one man dumped so determinedly by those who worked most closely with him, who'll come in and reap the work of others and turn it to 'custard' - just like Gillard used to be accused of doing before she started to achieve something beyond the job itself.