Since the context has steadily worsened for Labor and now Gillard has run out of time. These hopes were soon dashed - it seemed at the time by the unpopularity of the carbon tax.
Once the tax passed and its minimal effects were apparent, many hoped for a Labor recovery. They could point to the American example: US president Barack Obama recovered from the initial unpopularity of his healthcare reforms. The legacy of the election campaign has also cast a shadow over Gillard.
Paul Keating and John Howard both struggled in the polls in their last terms but both could point to their record of victory against the odds in and respectively.
This helped them sustain the loyalty of their backbench. Gillard has not been able to point to a previous example of success. It now seems that even traditionally safe Labor seats in ethnic suburbs of the major cities are at risk. Keating and Howard also faced a more divided opposition. Unlike the period of the split, which occurred in opposition and guaranteed many more years of it, the party has endured these divisions while holding office, and the enmities have, for the most part, grown from ego rather than ideology.
If the events of the past few days are to have any meaning, they need to be seen in the context of what has happened to the Government since early There was no acknowledgement that she had lost the confidence of most of her colleagues because of her own performance.
Notably, it was the advisers who had made the big mistakes. Her mistake had been to follow their advice. Gillard had been a brilliant deputy to Rudd, an earthy foil to his high-flown nerdishness.
Nor did she have the benefit of a deputy who could perform as well as she had. Indeed, in Wayne Swan she had one of the least effective communicators modern politics has seen. It has become a mantra for Labor and its supporters to bemoan the fact it does not get the credit it deserves for its handling of the economy. The media gets the blame which, to a degree, it should. Should he not shoulder most of the responsibility? There is something to all of them. She definitely was the target of vicious, sexist attacks.
The media was quick to turn on her and some elements were relentless in their dismissive attitude. The opposition treated her time as prime minister as one unbroken crisis. And Rudd did undermine Gillard.
The leaks against her during her first weeks as leader either came from Rudd or people sympathetic to him and they hurt her. She confounded rather than connected. She was, in turns, too loyal and then too ruthless. The tempo of project Julia was ragged. She could not nurture a fractured government back to functionality. She did not command the caucus, the cabinet, the voters. She became a solo act, shrinking before our eyes.
Of course she would say her failure to reassure was an unnatural condition imposed on her by her enemies — the people who made it their business to keep her in tumult, to make sure her feet never touched solid ground. Abbott was utterly pitiless, forgiving his own severity and minimising it before highlighting hers. The hung parliament and its freewheeling characters were a backing track of instability.
Rudd would not accept defeat, no matter how many times she outflanked him and won. He remained on the field, resolutely on the moral high ground, camped out in luxury, plotting and scripting revenge of the nerds while she dragged Labor behind her in a singular act of will that was as terrifying as it was admirable. She would point in her defence to the toxicity of the media cycle.
Before she could unpack her bags in the official residence the news cycle fragmented, chasing its own increasingly desperate shadow. Media outlets seemed to lose their will and their capacity to cover complexity, seemed to lack the courage to stand still. Gillard watched as her prime ministership was transformed into a soap opera.
Heads she lost. Tails she lost. Commentators she had declined to flatter and court and appoint keepers of her personal mythology elevated rivals and critics at her expense, recording their laments in minute detail, playing gleeful stenographers to the disaffected. Her disintegration became grist to the hourly mill, a habit that the media could not kick.
And then she would point to those haters. The culture warriors who resisted the progressive threat on principle. The type of Australians who could not accept a lady in the Lodge — and certainly not an unconventional one, with a sub-optimal boyfriend, no husband, no children, no God, no instinct to defer. Her steady prevailing, without flourish, without self-indulgence, without self-pity only gave fresh succour to their hatred.
Who knew there were so many of them, lurking and fulminating in their self-righteous loathing? Stuffing her in chaff bags. Peeping through her window. Dinosaurs in a last desperate act of fire-breathing, consuming her and themselves — a bizarre and terrible immolation.
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