Fishburn Hedges

24.06.2010

In a startling day in Australian politics yesterday, Kevin Rudd the Labor Prime Minister resigned before he was set to lose a leadership challenge to his deputy.  The question is did the Australian Labor Party see what had happened when the British Labour Party failed to follow through on a number of attempted coups against Gordon Brown and instead limped to electoral defeat, and decided they didn’t want to suffer the same fate.

The parallels are very compelling.

Firstly, Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown are close politically and personally, indeed Kevin Rudd did a video piece praising Brown for the Labour Party conference last year.  Both former Prime Ministers are viewed as solid if uninspiring who were safe while their poll ratings were high, yet both suffered spectacular drops in public support putting them under pressure.  Both of them had long coveted the top post in politics before eventually getting it and acted erratically in their desperation to hold on.  Finally and poignantly they both left office having been amongst the shortest serving premiers in history and believing they never received the credit they deserved for saving their respective economies from the worst effects of the global economic crisis.

It is also interesting to note that Rudd and Brown both had women deputies who had suffered attacks at the hands of conservative commentators and politicians.  The key difference was that while Brown had clearly assisted Harriet Harman in securing her post and she was never viewed as a potential alternative Prime Minister, Julia Gillard had her own powerbase within the Australian Labor Party and was always seen as a future leader in waiting.

In June 2009 when James Purnell resigned and attempted a coup against Gordon Brown he said he was doing it because he felt that Brown had lost his way and become an electoral liability to the Labour government, words that were echoed by Julia Gillard when she decided to challenge Kevin Rudd for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. 

Ultimately Purnell’s attempted coup failed when other cabinet ministers refused to back him and Brown led his party to defeat at the recent general election.  We will not know until October whether Gillard’s and the Australian Labor Party’s ruthlessness will be rewarded at the ballot box, where ironically she will face a Coalition led by a charismatic Oxford University educated leader!