@CrabbTwitsard @annabelcrabb Abbott has nothing to fear, but nothing to fear itself

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Annabel Crabb

There was a moment in Question Time yesterday that was rather telling.

The Prime Minister was in the middle of explaining her proposal to amend the Migration Act. The Opposition was in fits of laughter. For a brief moment - hardly any time at all, really - Julia Gillard adopted the international signal for "I give up".

Arms spread wide, palms and eyes faced heavenward, it was a mute appeal to a deity on whose existence the PM has taken a famously conservative wager.

It was a momentary lapse. Within milliseconds, the Prime Minister had resumed her argument. But her audience was jubilantly impervious.

Two days ago, Julia Gillard threw down an ultimatum to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott: Give me the power to process asylum seekers offshore, or else wear the consequences - either when boats arrive in the coming weeks, or when you are yourself prime minister, and find yourself unable to send people to your own island destination.

Her challenge was an appeal to reason. Not to mention an attempt to "wedge" a political party with claims to have invented offshore processing.

But neither seems to have worked.

Coalition MPs appear increasingly determined to junk the Prime Minister's amendments, and hang the consequences. An air of brash defiance prevails.

Mr Abbott declares that he is not obliged to rescue bad policies devised by bad governments. The best account I could elicit yesterday from Coalition folk was that if they needed help in the future to enact their own border protection policies, they would worry about it when the time comes and not before.
For a party otherwise so committed to stopping the boats, the Coalition was unusually ebullient yesterday at the distinct prospect of their continued arrivals.

And when the Prime Minister was asked a question about the November visit to Australia of the United States president, her answer was interrupted within seconds by the shadow immigration minister, asking her loudly whether she still expected to be prime minister by then.
The rest of the PM's answer was largely obscured by Opposition heckling.

It's difficult enough to come to terms with the fact that a Labor Government, seeking to exile asylum seekers without appeal to a country in which refugees are routinely beaten, is being challenged from the left by a Coalition which claims a nagging concern about human rights.

It's even weirder still to hear a Coalition backbench so overconfident that it would snigger its way through the announcement of a US presidential visit, when 10 years ago it would have considered proscribing anti-US sniggerers as a terrorist group, no questions asked.

As she sat down, Ms Gillard remarked tightly that it was a "disgrace" that the Obama visit had begun in circumstances of such disrespect. She was seen, afterwards, to engage in a rare and markedly hostile exchange with Mr Abbott across the dispatch box, and later on - after Question Time was over - Mr Abbott asked for extra time to declare, most solemnly, his warm support for the presidential visit.
It's hard to locate much angst at all within the Coalition about the Government's ultimatum on asylum seekers. Parts of the Coalition are simply opposed to rescuing the Government. Parts are simply opposed to the Malaysian agreement, and are more relaxed about expressing this opposition than members of Labor's Left. Either way, it adds up to a fairly safe majority for refusing the Government what it wants. And a recipe for dangerous levels of hubris.

One of Australia's most popular political commentators, Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer.


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@slowtv Power Without Responsibility. Robert Manne and Eric Beecher

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Renowned essayist and public intellectual Robert Manne discusses his new Quarterly Essay on The Australian with Eric Beecher (Crikey). Entitled Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation, the essay investigates what happens when one newspaper becomes a central political actor, and how this affects public debate in Australia. Presented by the 2011 Melbourne Writers Festival. 



 
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@themonthly The United States of Chris Mitchell: The Power of Rupert Murdoch and the Australian’s Editor-in-Chief

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Sally Neighbour

Arrogant bastard. Cowboy. Total ratbag. Best editor I’ve ever worked for. An insecure genius. A very complex person.

Talk to any journalist, commentator, politician or public figure in Australia, and it seems they all have a view of Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of the Australian newspaper, now widely regarded as the most influential news outlet in the country – one that polarises readers and infuriates targets with its relentless crusading journalism.

Visionary. Zealot. Grenade thrower. The last of the great newspaper men. Arch Machiavellian brute – this from Mitchell himself, delivered tongue-in-cheek, and for the purpose of denying it.

If there is one thing his detractors and admirers largely agree on, though, it is that Mitchell has styled himself as the most powerful media executive in the land and transformed Rupert Murdoch’s flagship into a journal whose political impact far outweighs its modest circulation of 130,000 on a weekday.

“The biggest story in politics at the moment is the relationship between News Limited and the government,” a veteran Canberra-watcher says. According to a News Limited insider, “Mitchell has inculcated a view [at the newspaper] that they are there not only to critique and oversee the government, [but also that] it is their role to dictate policy shifts, that they are the true Opposition.” An angry cabinet minister fumed recently, “The Oz doesn’t report the policy issues. It just reports that big business is shitting on the government, and Abbott is shitting on the government, it reports politics in any way that shits on the government, day after day.” Whether it’s climate change, asylum seekers, industrial relations, the schools building program or the National Broadband Network: “It’s just ‘let’s shit on the government’, every single fucking day.”

Chris Mitchell once told a colleague, “You have to understand – this is a dictatorship and I am the dictator.”

So who is the strongman at the helm of Australia’s national broadsheet? And have he and his paper overreached the proper role of the fourth estate in holding governments to account?

*

It’s Tuesday morning and a brisk news day at 2 Holt Street, Surry Hills. Senior editorial staff have assembled for the morning news conference where section editors run through the story list for the next day’s ‘book’, as the daily paper is known in journalese. “Dead Digger”, the twenty-seventh Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan; Julia Gillard visiting Indigenous communities in Alice Springs; the Reserve Bank board meeting on interest rates; Treasurer Wayne Swan to address the National Press Club on the carbon tax. There’s a “cow package”, on the gruesome slaughter of Australian cattle in Indonesia. An Australian kelpie has won the San Diego dog surfing competition, and a butcher’s son from Melbourne is being called the new Frank Sinatra.

Deputy Editor Michelle Gunn smiles contentedly: “We’ve got a small but perfectly formed book.”

As he has done each day for the past nine years, Chris Mitchell presides over the gathering, a conspicuous figure with his overgrown buzz cut and bulky frame in trademark shirt, tie and knitted jumper, exuding stern authority. A reporter who once mistakenly referred to someone else as editor-in-chief found Mitchell’s business card on her desk the next day with a note: “There is only one editor-in-chief in this building and it is me.”

“There is no doubt on the Australian who runs the place,” says Gunn. “Chris is a very strong editor-in-chief and a very strong leader. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

According to Mitchell, it simply comes down to longevity. “I’ve been a working journo since I was 17. I’ve never had a day when I wasn’t a working journo. I think one reason I’m able to work such long hours, decade in and decade out, is that I started so young. I’ve spent 20 years as an editor, which gives me a fairly big advantage over my rivals.”

It’s 11 am and Mitchell has read eight morning newspapers and listened to three hours of ABC Radio news and current affairs. (Despite the Australian’s regular lambasting of the national broadcaster, he admits to being a fan.) He is across the minutiae of every story. One minute he’s quoting details from the 1993 Oslo peace accords or the world economic crash of 1981; the next, he’s comparing today’s story on a champion surfer’s drug problem with that of ‘Occy’ (Mark Occhilupo) when he won the surfing World Title in 1999, or recalling the tears shed by Bob Hawke on the plight of Indigenous Australians. “Now here we are 21 years later and nothing much has happened,” Mitchell remarks. He refers to “Julia”, “Tony” and “Kevin”; he seems to be on first-name terms with everyone. He assigns reporters, briefs the leader-writers, even frames the question the Canberra bureau will ask Wayne Swan.

“It is Chris’s newspaper,” agrees editor Clive Mathieson, who took the role in April when Paul Whittaker moved to the Daily Telegraph. “Chris quite clearly sets the direction of the paper. There’s very little ambiguity in what he expects. A suggestion from Chris is not really a suggestion, a suggestion from Chris is really an instruction.”

The view that it’s “Chris’s paper” is echoed by John Hartigan, chief executive of News Limited. “With good editors, the newspaper is almost a mirror on their own personality. It reflects their own values. You can form a very strong picture of them simply by reading the newspaper.” Talk to Mitchell’s colleagues and it’s clear he inspires an intense tribal loyalty among many of them.

“It’s a remarkable newsroom to work in under him because there’s so much energy about it,” says Gunn. “It’s having stories that the nation talks about – that’s how you measure your success, the number of stories you break and the influence those stories have. And that’s the mark of his success. It’s intoxicating.”

His critics enjoy saying the Australian is like a cult and Mitchell surrounds himself with yes-men. It’s truer to say he surrounds himself with talented, dedicated journalists who either share or are willing to reflect his vision for the paper and work their guts out for it, while the others leave, are ignored, frozen out or languish on the back pages.

“If he likes you there’s no nicer place to be than at the Australian,” says one. “If he doesn’t like you it can be a very lonely place.”

*

A very complex person. That much is for sure. One colleague calls him “the United States of Mitchell”, alluding to the American sitcom about a lovable, psychotic housewife with multiple personalities and a dysfunctional family. His looks – the alarming hair, the physical bulk – are deceiving. “You look at him and think he’s a thug, but he’s not. He’s actually super well-read and he’s eloquent,” says a former staffer. A good friend, the author and columnist Ross Fitzgerald, says Mitchell “is deeply interested in the interplay of ideas and the life of the mind”.

He likes opera, Russian novels and re-runs of A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve. He says his favourite books as a teenager were The Idiot by Dostoyevsky and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. He listens to Mozart, the Cowboy Junkies, The Clash and hip-hop. He surfs at Manly on weekends. He’s a revhead, whose car collection has included a Mercedes V8 and a 1961 E-type Roadster. Former Murdoch editor Bruce Guthrie recalls Mitchell in a souped-up BMW weaving in and out of traffic “at phenomenal speed” on his way to Surry Hills. “He loves speed. I think he loves a bit of danger. He lives life at a kind of high throttle.”

Like his paper, Mitchell is a deeply polarising individual, loved and hated in about equal measure. He is funny, warm, charming and disarmingly candid. He is rude, overbearing, vindictive and is said to often reduce staff to tears. Some reporters complain of constant interference: “An editor will come and say ‘Chris wants this’ and it’s understood that, no matter how crazy or unreasonable it is, it has to be done,” says one. Others, such as investigative reporter Hedley Thomas (winner of five Walkley Awards), insist they’ve never been told what to write, and bristle at the suggestion. “It is really fucking offensive, this notion that we are robots and automatons of Chris, and we just salute and say ‘OK, that’s the target, let’s go and kill it.’ That is an outrageous suggestion,” says Thomas, an admirer of Mitchell’s fearless aggression.

“Chris is definitely a very strong, campaigning, activist editor and that is one of his great strengths. He is a natural contrarian, an antagonist [and] a stirrer. And he encourages his journalists to be sceptical, to question the status quo and the orthodoxy to make sure they’re not being spun.”

Mitchell relishes a fight. Journalist Elisabeth Wynhausen, who was sacked by him in 2009, wrote in her book The Short Goodbye: “He was a tireless strategist whose best and worst instincts were filtered through the same tendency to turn almost any subject into an excuse for an argument with a bunch of imagined enemies. He treated the paper like the spoils of war, routinely using its pages to campaign against people who had ever dared to take him on.”

Yet even his harshest critics refer to his “genius”.

“The reason Mitchell can set so much of the tone of the political debate is because his instincts as a journalist over the past ten years have been so strong on issues that matter,” says David Marr, Fairfax writer, author and former host of Media Watch, which has sparred with the Australian for years. “And when he gets his teeth stuck into something, he doesn’t let go. That’s a remarkable talent.”

Mitchell’s hallmark, says Marr, is that: “Everything about the Oz is so personal; the targets are personal, the passions are personal, sometimes viciously personal. Part of the genius of the operation is to personalise everything so you have targets.”

*

To understand Chris Mitchell and his newspaper, there are two things you need to know.

First, he’s a Queenslander. Perhaps more than anything, this informs his – and the paper’s – distinctive take on Australian life. While some discern a chip on the shoulder, others divine a profound connect with ‘real’, mainstream Australian values – the values at “the heart of the nation”, as the Australian’s masthead sloganeers, which is code for everywhere except the latte-sipping, left-leaning, Fairfax-reading, ABC-watching, tree-hugging inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

“A lot of my views of life are coloured by not being from Sydney or Melbourne. I think the paper tries hard not to be a latte paper for Sydney or Melbourne,” Mitchell says. The paper’s circulation is highest in Queensland, with daily sales there in the high 30,000s.

His Queensland roots also explain Mitchell’s friendship with Kevin Rudd, described by a mutual acquaintance as “one of the most diabolically fascinating relationships in politics”, which, in turn, illuminates the Australian’s fraught relationship with the Gillard government. More on that later.

The second thing you need to know about Mitchell is his family history. His mother was a German bank worker from Hamburg; her father was conscripted into Hitler’s army, and the family fled Europe after the war. She ended up in the Bonegilla migrant camp, near Albury Wodonga, where she met Mitchell’s father, a trainee Catholic priest who abandoned his vocation when they fell in love. Bob Mitchell drowned during a family holiday at Wisemans Ferry four days before Christmas 1964, a tragedy witnessed by eight-year-old Chris and his little sister. After that they moved to Brisbane to live with an aunt.

“He was quite devastated when his father died,” says a childhood friend, John Buckby. “Maybe there’s still a little gap in him because of that. You never really get it fulfilled.”

Not one to readily share personal reminiscences, Mitchell has little to say about this time, beyond: “Mum was a foreigner so I think I took on the role of the man of the house at a pretty early age.” It’s left to those around him to make sense of it.

Fitzgerald offers this: “One key to Chris’s attitude to the world politically and economically is that his mum, Christa, left Bremen in 1954, acutely aware of the totalitarian nature of communist regimes, and his mother is a very important person in his life.” At the risk of over-simplifying, a former workmate suggests his mother’s experience fed “a political hard-right ‘escaping the Iron Curtain’-type worldview that’s deeply embedded in his psyche”.

Fitzgerald believes that “another key is the absent father”, suggesting this imbued in the young Mitchell “the desire to prove himself”.

After attending a local Catholic primary, Mitchell was sent to the Marist Brothers at Ashgrove in Brisbane and then the Franciscan friars of Padua College. Buckby recalls his friend being sick with anxiety before exams. “He used to be so dedicated with what he was doing at school, he’d be ill … just with nerves [because] he wanted to do the right thing for his family and get the right results to go forward and achieve.” Mitchell’s intense focus made him an excellent archer, while Buckby preferred rugby. “While I was packing down in the front row, he was shooting arrows into targets.” At the same time, Mitchell was assuming the role of breadwinner. He painted houses, mowed lawns, washed cars and, at 14, got a job chopping chickens at KFC.

He almost ended up on a different career path after having his front teeth knocked out when he jumped in to defend his mate Buckby in a schoolyard fight; the dentist who fixed his teeth persuaded him to apply for a scholarship to dental school, which he got. It was his mum who suggested journalism instead.

So, at 17, Mitchell joined the now-defunct afternoon tabloid the Brisbane Telegraph as a cadet. He was there six years before moving to the Townsville Bulletin, where he worked as night editor and completed a BA at James Cook University. He would later begin a master’s degree, majoring in history, which he didn’t complete.

“He is just a voracious consumer of information, he’s like a sponge, he just soaks it up,” says journalist Deborah Cassrels, who was Mitchell’s partner for 20 years until 2004, and with whom he has two children. “And he seems to have a pretty photographic memory. I think that’s how he does it, really. He arms himself with information, which is the most valuable asset you can have in that job. The information he’s able to store and retain is formidable. That obsessiveness to every day be on top of the information and to follow up the slightest little thing. It’s like an armour.”

Someone who’s known him for decades says of Mitchell: “He likes to be in control. That’s probably what drives him, I think, that need to be in control.”

A conspicuous feature of Mitchell’s career is that he has worked in an editing role for all but the first six of his 38 years as a journalist. Overwhelmingly, his role and experience have been not in reporting but in shaping and fashioning – controlling – the news. One staffer recalls him saying, “News is whatever the editor says it is.” Even as a junior sub he was very hands-on. “You would live in terror he would get hold of your copy because things would happen to it,” the same reporter recounts. The term “bastardisation of copy” has also been used.

By the time he started at the Australian in 1984, after stints at the Daily Telegraph and the Australian Financial Review, Mitchell was a master of newspaper production. A colleague from those days, Laura Tingle, says: “It’s a very production-driven newspaper, the Oz. From the first days when Rupert would ship it out on planes, production came first, the nuances of writing second. So anyone in production always had a good hold on the place.” Mitchell’s hold tightened when, at the age of 35, he was promoted to the post of editor under editor-in-chief Paul Kelly in 1992.

But it was on his return to Queensland in the mid ’90s that Mitchell made his mark. Murdoch’s son and heir apparent Lachlan had been dispatched to Brisbane as general manager of Queensland Newspapers to learn the newspaper trade, and needed an energetic new editor to drag the Courier Mail out of the doldrums.

Reporter Tony Koch, another five-time Walkley winner, was there when Mitchell got the job. “We had had the Fitzgerald Inquiry [into police corruption] and Fitzgerald had got stuck into the media including the Courier Mail [because] the media hadn’t been doing their watchdog role, and this was the reason the government had been allowed to slip into corrupt practices, because the media was insipid. Anyway, Mitchell took that to heart,” Koch recalls.

Mitchell threw resources at investigative journalism and hard-hitting reporting of Indigenous affairs. “He certainly operated without fear or favour, he wasn’t physically or intellectually intimidated by anybody,” says Koch. “He really turned the spotlight on the violence and grog and lack of medical care. His stuff on Indigenous issues was really pioneering.” Hedley Thomas recalls Mitchell running hard on a story about a sex-abuse scandal at Brisbane Grammar, where his son was a student. “Chris must have been under enormous pressure at the time to back off on the story, to soft-pedal it and accept the school’s line.” Instead, says Thomas, “the story got bigger and bigger. He just didn’t back off.”

Mitchell made a point of hiring women, though some thought he personified the paper’s “boofy, cowboy, blokey culture”. He was high-handed and cavalier. A senior writer who questioned what he was doing recalls Mitchell didn’t talk to him for three years afterwards.

Usually his news sense was spot on but he inclined toward wild hunches. Koch remembers a colleague complaining, “I got another shit sandwich from Mitchell. I just wish he’d give me one with some bread on it.” The most infamous ‘shit sandwich’ was the Courier Mail’s 1996 ‘exclusive’ about the historian Manning Clark. A journalist who was there recounts how the story came about.

“[An editor] came to me one day and said Chris would like me to do a piece on Manning Clark, and he told me why and I was horrified … He told me there was evidence that Manning Clark had close communist connections and had been awarded a Lenin medal or something.” The journalist regarded it as nonsense and refused to do it but the eight-page special duly appeared under someone else’s by-line, reporting that Clark had been awarded “the Soviet Union’s highest honour, the Order of Lenin”, making him “a member of the Communist world’s elite” and a presumed “agent of influence”. The first edition called him a spy.

The story was wrong, as revealed by David Marr in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Press Council, which found its publication unjustified. “It was the silliest scoop of the last 50 years,” says Marr. “It was a story so stupid, so baseless, so exaggerated, so bizarre, that only a man of Mitchell’s energy and genius could have survived it.”

Mitchell’s survival and ever upward trajectory at News Limited is owed in no small part to the patronage and support of his proprietor.

“Rupert loves him,” says a former Murdoch confidant, who names Mitchell and Melbourne Herald Sun boss Peter Blunden as the two editors the big man most values in Australia. Hartigan says Murdoch regards the Australian as one of the best newspapers in the world and Mitchell as “one of the most outstanding contemporary editors”. Lachlan Murdoch calls him “brilliant”.

Former Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie, who was famously sacked by Murdoch in 2008 and who successfully sued for unfair dismissal, calls Mitchell “a Murdoch man through and through”. As for what makes a Murdoch man, Murdoch himself told Esquire magazine in 2008: “There may be more brilliant people wandering outside sometimes, [but] you have to favor the people that are prepared and ready to give themselves to you.” Guthrie, in his book Man Bites Murdoch, writes:



Within the News empire, talent is one thing but absolute dedication to Murdoch’s worldview and various causes is another. And it’s far more important than talent … [Murdoch] cares little about university degrees, excuses workplace indiscretions and will even forgive egregious journalistic errors. Deep down he knows that the culprits will be even more indebted to him: they are his forever.



Guthrie likens News to the mafia. “It’s a family, it’s Mafioso, you’re a made guy. You’ve proven yourself by giving yourself to Rupert and signing on for the whole deal, and then you’re made, you’re part of the family.”

Mitchell and Murdoch share a view of themselves as outsiders whose job it is to poke the establishment in the eye. Guthrie says Mitchell “second guesses Rupert Murdoch more than anyone I know in that organisation. You could see him, on almost anything, running through his mind ‘what would Rupert think?’ That’s why he’s survived so long. And clearly he’s got Rupert’s backing, which trumps everything. Everything.”

*

Chris Mitchell learned early on in Queensland that with the role of editor comes power and political sway. A reporter whose desk was near his office at the Courier recalls a stream of politicians traipsing in and out. “He’s an editor who likes to be involved and mix it with the power players,” says Tony Koch. One parliamentarian who knows him calls Mitchell “a frustrated politician”. Another close associate says it’s not about party politics for Mitchell: “It’s about power.”

Among the politicians who beat a path to his door at the Courier was an aspiring soon-to-be Labor MP, Kevin Rudd. At the time he was known around the traps as ‘Doctor Death’ for his cutbacks to the public service while running the cabinet office under Premier Wayne Goss. In 1996 Rudd had stood for the Queensland seat of Griffith, but lost. He was keen to boost his profile and courted media contacts assiduously. Mitchell got him writing for the Courier.

The two men had a lot in common. Both Queenslanders and sons of Catholics, they had attended the same Marist Brothers school, and both had lost their fathers at an early age, Rudd senior having perished after a car accident when Kevin was 11 years old. Mitchell has said this was one thing that caused them to bond. They were both highly intelligent, well-read, egotistical, driven, controlling, opinionated and bloody-minded. Some say narcissistic. “They both thought they were the smartest people in the world,” a mutual acquaintance says. They shared family lunches and dinners and visits to Rudd’s beach house near Noosa. They cultivated each other in a friendship that was both personal and deeply political.

“Kevin’s a very controlling character,” says Mitchell. “I’m aware throughout my relationship with him there have been times when I’ve used him and there’ve been times he’s used me, but that’s the nature of the relationship between media and politics.”

By the time Mitchell took over as editor-in-chief at the Australian in 2002, Rudd’s star was also ascendant. He had won Griffith on his second tilt four years before and been appointed foreign affairs spokesman in Kim Beazley’s shadow cabinet. John Howard was in his seventh year as prime minister.

On ideology and economics, the Howard government and News Limited were broadly aligned. The Australian’s politics are avowedly Centre-Right: pro markets, mining, industry and business; anti big government, high taxation, central planning and regulation. Howard noted in 2006 that the paper had been “broadly supportive, generously so” of his economic and industrial relations reforms. The Australian had endorsed Howard at three consecutive elections in 1998, 2001 and 2004. This is not to say his government always got an easy run. Howard and his ministers complained bitterly, including to Rupert Murdoch, about the Australian’s coverage of a range of stories including the Australian Wheat Board’s kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, which the paper pursued vigorously in tandem with Rudd.

Mitchell’s friendship with Rudd was cemented in 2006, when Mitchell married his second wife, Queensland journalist Christine Jackman. Jackman was also close to Rudd, whom she had known as a reporter at the Courier Mail and later in the Canberra press gallery. Kevin and Thérèse Rein were guests at the couple’s wedding and Rudd accepted Jackman’s invitation to be godfather to the first of their two sons.

Later that year the Australian’s polling, which showed Rudd and Julia Gillard were the most popular team for Labor, helped Rudd topple Kim Beazley and take over as leader of the Opposition. The national broadsheet threw its editorial weight behind the aspiring future PM.

“The Oz was incredibly important to Rudd,” says a former close colleague. “It was the single most important paper in building Kevin Rudd’s perceived influence.” Did that make Mitchell a king-maker? “He would have felt like that in 2006, and rightly so.”

Everyone has a theory about why Mitchell and Rudd fell out. Each thought he could do the other’s job. Both thought they could run the country better. Rudd refused to give News Limited privileged access so Mitchell was mad. Mitchell refused to go easy on the government so Rudd was mad. All of these are true. What’s most true is that the same qualities that had drawn them together soon had them locked in a death-roll.

The first cracks in the relationship appeared in the lead-up to the 2007 election, when the Australian slammed Labor’s plans to dismantle the Howard government’s WorkChoices IR reforms, the paper’s political supremo, Paul Kelly, opining: “With this policy, Rudd forfeits any chance of being a serious rival to John Howard on economic policy.”

Despite this, Mitchell persuaded Murdoch to endorse Rudd for PM in 2007. “He [Murdoch] was in my office and I spoke to him about it [and] said it was time for a change of government. It seemed to me the man who had the agenda for the next three years was Kevin Rudd.” With the Australian’s endorsement, in November 2007 Rudd sailed into power. But if he expected an easy ride, he would be sorely disappointed.

As Mitchell tells it: “I think he was stung that I didn’t fall in behind him because we were mates. But I said to him at the beginning, I’m just going to cover it how I see it. I have to.”

Mitchell’s supporters back the assertion that he won’t let a friendship get in the way of a story. One cites the example of former Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty, who was deservedly castigated by the Australian over the botched terrorism investigation of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef in 2007. “Keelty thought they were mates, but he [Mitchell] absolutely fucked him. There’s nobody he wouldn’t do it to. That’s a measure of his integrity.” He means it as a compliment.

The honeymoon between Rudd and Mitchell ended seven months into Rudd’s prime ministership with a front-page exposé in the Australian headlined ‘Captain Chaos: Inside Rudd’s Office’.

“It was the first counterweight to everyone being in love with Kevin,” says Mitchell. “And Kevin took it very hard because he was pretty keen that people not twig to this narrative that he was a pretty gruelling task master.” A source close to the story says Rudd did his best to stop it. “Rudd put huge pressure on Chris with phone calls day and night. Chris didn’t buckle. He was rock solid.” Later Rudd snubbed Mitchell at a function, while the PM’s staff took to referring to “the fucking pricks at the Oz”. Mitchell says Rudd started “a barrage of complaints to the company”.

This was like a red rag to Mitchell. “If we’re under siege, I’ll take a more strident line. My nature is that I’ll just dig in at those times.” He adds: “Prime ministers are wily bastards. They’ll do anything they can to shut down newspaper editors.”

As the global financial crisis deepened, the Australian kept up a scathing critique of the government’s efforts. Rudd’s interventionism was inimical to News Limited’s ‘markets rule’ philosophy, and the paper ran hard on the government’s unlimited guarantee of bank deposits and its $42 billion economic stimulus package, which spawned the Pink Batts home-insulation fiasco and the troubled schools building program. Rudd complained bitterly to others in the press gallery, “Why are they doing this to me? These are people I know – why would they do this to me?”

In a sign of how hard Rudd tried to win over News Limited, in August 2008 and again in March 2009 the PM took his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner to Holt Street to brief Mitchell and his colleagues on the government’s program.

“He was basically saying, I’m really doing some brilliant stuff here and you should be acknowledging it,” says one of those present, who recalls Rudd’s ministers seeming “a bit bemused and puzzled” about why they were there. Later, over lunch at Kirribilli House, Rudd chewed out the Australian’s editor Paul Whittaker over the paper’s criticism of his bank guarantee, telling him, “your story was wrong – W-R-O-N-G – and you should have bloody well apologised,” according to a witness.

In the midst all of this came the Australian’s controversial scoop on a private phone call between Rudd and US President George Bush. It took place one evening in October 2008. Rudd had been at a Business Council of Australia dinner in Sydney. Afterwards, Mitchell and the editor of the Weekend Australian, Nick Cater, called in for drinks at Kirribilli House. Mitchell says it was a “kiss and make up night” to try to smooth over the rift.

Cater had gone home and Mitchell was there alone with Rudd and one of his staff when Bush rang to discuss the GFC. Rudd took the call in his study with the phone on loudspeaker, while Mitchell waited in the room next door, apparently within earshot. Two weeks later the Australian reported that Rudd had been “stunned” when Bush asked him, “What’s the G-20?” (referring to the group of 20 industrialised and emerging economies). The story of Bush’s supposed gaffe provoked a political and diplomatic storm. Mitchell says to this day that Rudd “had no issues with the story”. However, Rudd has insisted repeatedly that Bush “made no such remarks”. The day after the phone call Bush was due to attend a G-20 ministerial meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington. “He knew perfectly well what the G-20 was,” says a senior Australian government source.

The crises besetting the Rudd government coincided with a personal crisis for Mitchell, the bitter break-up of his two-year marriage to Christine Jackman. By some accounts the marriage split exacerbated the rift between the two men because Rudd was still close to Jackman, who had written a book, Inside Kevin 07, about the 2007 election.

“Kevin’s version is when his marriage split up it became daggers drawn. He said it became quite poisonous,” recounts a colleague of Rudd’s.

Mitchell denies their personal issues affected the Australian’s coverage. “My coverage of Kevin was never driven by personal friendship or personal animus. I genuinely believed we covered the Rudd government on its merits.”

Paul Kelly agrees. “As far as I know our coverage of the Rudd government was driven by policy. It seems to me the paper backed Kevin strongly where we felt he was right and criticised him when we felt he was wrong. It is hardly surprising our coverage ended up critical since we were following one of the most astonishing political declines in our history that saw caucus pull the plug [on Rudd].”

On all these issues, Rudd would say only this: “I’ve always had a pretty good working relationship with Chris Mitchell, as I have with most editors in this country. Obviously there are ups and downs in any relationship. Sometimes you agree, sometimes you disagree, sometimes you disagree fundamentally. But that’s life in politics and the media in Australia and it’s not likely to change in the future either.”

After another year of relentlessly chronicling the government’s failings, chiefly the Pink Batts and Building the Education Revolution (BER) programs, Mitchell surprised everyone by naming Rudd the paper’s Australian of the Year in 2010 for his handling of the GFC. Rudd was so angry he refused to pose for a photo and told a friend he assumed the catch was “then we have the licence to kick the shit out of you for the rest of the year.” “It was the height of bloody hypocrisy,” says a Rudd supporter, “to have Kevin lauded in the Australian for his management of the GFC and then to say systematically that the BER, the whole purpose of which was to keep people in jobs, was a program that was shot to pieces. You can’t have both.”

Some commentators speculated that News Corporation was trying to cosy up to the government ahead of decisions on new anti-siphoning rules and the Australia Network tender, which would affect the part Murdoch-owned Foxtel and Sky TV. Mitchell denies this. “I think there’s a misunderstanding of the amount of editorial independence here, which is a great deal. The truth is the editors call it as they see it. I have no interest in what is happening with Foxtel or the Australia Network.”

In any event, by autumn 2010 Rudd was in serious trouble on the other big issue of the day, climate change. The Copenhagen summit had flopped and the government’s emissions trading scheme had been blocked in the Senate. Rudd needed all the friends he could get – including Chris Mitchell.

“He rang me and asked me if I would come and have a chat,” Mitchell recounts. “We spoke for a few hours [about] the economy, the government, what was going well and what wasn’t, how to get the relationship with the paper back on track.” While Rudd would not comment on this, a former government staffer confirms there were “a series of attempts to make peace” because a hostile Mitchell was “definitely bad for Rudd”.

But the truce came too late for Rudd. His ETS backdown that April sent his popularity into a spin, and the government’s ham-fisted handling of the mining super profits tax sealed his fate. He might have survived had his arrogance not so alienated him from caucus. Even the editor-in-chief of the Australian couldn’t save him now – although Mitchell says he tried.

One night in mid May 2010 Mitchell was invited again for drinks at Kirribilli House, accompanied by the Australian’s political editor, Dennis Shanahan. Mitchell says he wanted to warn Rudd that the outcry over the mining tax could bring him down.

“I said, ‘Look, I think you should know that from what we are hearing you are in personal danger … We are picking up a lot of rumbling – you personally have to get this off the agenda as soon as possible.’”

Mitchell’s account is a startling reflection on the hubris of one – or maybe both – of these men. “I felt he [Rudd] didn’t really understand what was happening around him and that he was in grave danger. He was so aloof from the party, he didn’t have anyone to run numbers for him … The problem in running a very centralised and aloof kind of office is it’s very hard for people to knock on your door and tell you it’s going off the rails.”

I was intrigued that Mitchell told me this story (and made a point of saying he had checked with Rudd first), because it seems to illustrate more than anything that he relishes being at the centre of power. This echoes the view of a minister who knows him, who says Mitchell has ‘delusions of grandeur’ about his role in politics. Mitchell told me: “I wanted you to understand we had a reasonable relationship before he lost his job. I didn’t want it to seem the Australian is crowing about Kevin losing his job.”

The rest is history. Five weeks later Rudd was gone, replaced by Julia Gillard.

Mitchell is still defensive about his, and the Australian’s, role in Rudd’s downfall. “We didn’t kill Rudd. What killed Rudd was the backflip on the ETS, it destroyed his coven-ant with the electorate.” Still, he argues, “the government should have stuck with him. I thought they were crazy not to stick with him.”

Mitchell and Rudd are back on regular speaking terms, although they are no longer personal friends. The rapprochement must be unnerving news for Julia Gillard, whom Rudd is reported to be busy undermining. Mitchell believes if the polls don’t improve she may be rolled. “My view is that having been in opposition a long time and [only] four years in government, a lot of people would be resistant to going to an election they know they are going to lose.”

However, Rudd must know better by now than to expect any favours.

“I wish Kevin well, I hope he’s happy in life,” says Mitchell, “but, knowing him as well as I do, I think Kevin will never die.” Mitchell likens Rudd to the character played by Peter Sellers in the film The Party, a bumbling Indian actor who refuses to stop blowing on his bugle even after being shot dozens of times: “That’s Kevin, the one who never dies.” As for whether Rudd might stage a comeback: “I don’t think so. He probably does, but I would have thought it would be hard for that soufflé to rise twice.”

Rudd would not be drawn on Mitchell’s musings, although he did say he is a Peter Sellers fan but prefers his role as Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. “Look, they’re all pretty colourful comments,” he told me, “but if I started at this stage in life responding to personal criticisms, right or wrong, from Chris Mitchell or anybody else, I’d be doing very little else in life, so I won’t.”

*

On the wall in Mitchell’s office is a framed copy of page one of the first issue of the Australian, published by Rupert Murdoch on 15 July 1964, “price: sixpence”. It features the paper’s mission statement, quaintly headed “Good Day”:



Here is Australia’s first truly national newspaper. It is produced today because you want it; because the nation needs it. In these pages you will find the impartial information and the independent thinking that are essential to the further advance of our country […] We shall not hesitate to speak fearlessly. We shall criticize. We will not be influenced when there is public need for us to be outspoken.



Mitchell and his staff take this credo seriously. They refer to it often and cite it in their defence when criticised.

Mitchell has certainly delivered on the “new approach to national journalism”, also promised in this article of faith. While competitors such as Fairfax have flagged, the Australian has thrown resources into investigative journalism, quality writing and coverage of once-neglected issues, such as Indigenous affairs, water and education. At its best the paper is courageous, groundbreaking and incisive, as in its reporting of the Haneef case, the ‘children overboard’ affair in 2001 and the plight of Indigenous Australians. But Mitchell’s Australian is mired in contradictions.

It aspires to be a great newspaper – and often is – but makes itself smaller with petty attacks on its rivals. It demands good governance, but hectors governments into meek submission. It champions transparency and freedom of speech, but shouts down or smothers its critics. It calls itself “the heart of the nation”, but sometimes seems to have no heart. (In the only case of interference I have experienced while writing for the paper, I was told, after a feature I had written on asylum seekers was spiked, “we are not interested in the humanitarian aspects of people smuggling”.) And it derides other newspapers for “political pamphleteering” and “deceptive manipulation of public discourse”, bringing to mind, as one commentator noted, the words ‘pot’, ‘kettle’ and ‘black’.

“It’s the extent to which its news agenda is driven by its obsessions and campaigns that makes it such an odd newspaper and difficult to read,” says Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes, “because you’re constantly having to pick your way through stories that are hard, good journalism and stories that are agenda-driven nonsense.”

Mitchell and his paper are despised by some in Canberra. A senior source in the government accuses Mitchell of “a rolling reign of terror” and says: “He represents the worst aspects of the News Limited culture.”

The issue on which the Australian’s coverage has provoked the most furious dissension is global warming. Climate change campaigner and 1996 Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty privately described the paper’s reporting last year as “the most dishonest coverage” he had seen. The government’s outgoing climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, last month named the Australian while making a complaint about “the crudest and most distorted discussion of a major public policy issue” he could remember.

Mitchell asserts – and the editorials support this – that the Australian accepts the science that global warming is real and human-induced, and the paper endorsed the government’s carbon tax package released last month. Doherty says its coverage has improved but rails at the prominence still given to climate change sceptics. “They’ve printed the opinion of every scientific has-been and never-been who’s found a warm place under the fossil fuel industry’s umbrella.” He says the sceptics are “dogmatic and scientifically isolated [and] can’t possibly be across the complexity of what’s happening.”

There are those within News Limited who are deeply uncomfortable with the paper’s position. The manager of environment and climate change at News Limited, Dr Tony Wilkins, told colleagues last September he had cancelled his subscription to the Australian because of its coverage. Dr Wilkins described a front-page story in February last year about a Bondi surfer who said he hadn’t seen any change in sea levels as “the worst case of journalism I ever saw anywhere”.

Mitchell says his priority is ensuring all voices in the debate are heard. “I think where I get into trouble is that I publish opinions I don’t agree with [and] a lot of people on the strong advocacy side object to other views.” His environment reporter Graham Lloyd, who owns a property in the hippie haven of Nimbin and a rainforest conservation plot in the Amazon, agrees, saying: “The people who passionately subscribe to climate change are intolerant of any broader discussion about it.”

But there were two voices Mitchell was determined to silence when they piped up on the issue last year: that of his former, Walkley Award–winning rural reporter Asa Wahlquist and journalism lecturer Julie Posetti.

Wahlquist, who had recently left the Australian after 13 years following a diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome, was speaking at an academic conference in December when she described the job of writing on climate change for the Australian as “absolutely excruciating” and “torture”. Posetti tweeted Wahlquist’s comments but incorrectly reported Wahlquist as saying “in the lead-up to the election the Ed in Chief was increasingly telling me what to write.”

Mitchell fired off a furious email to Wahlquist: “Asa, I have NEVER spoken to you about climate change in my life and have never stood over you about ANY of your stories. Indeed, I have not spoken to you in at least eight years. And I have never stood over people writing stories in 19 years as an editor. If I do not have an apology in writing from you today you will see me in court. I promise, Chris.”

Wahlquist was stunned. “I was pretty frightened. I’ve stopped working because I’m ill. I’m unemployed, and I didn’t have the assets for a Supreme Court case.” Mitchell is still threatening to sue Posetti for defamation. “It was offensive, it was damaging to the paper,” he says. “I don’t believe she has a right to repeat a falsehood. This woman is a journalism lecturer. She’s meant to be preparing young minds to work for people like me.”

Posetti says this: “What kind of editor, invested in freedom of expression, threatens to sue for defamation over a fair report of a public proceeding and then mounts his case against an individual via screaming headlines in his own newspaper? I’ve never met Chris Mitchell but his campaign against me reinforced, in a personal way, my judgement of the Australian under his editorship as a derailed newspaper, prone to bullying.”

The incident strengthened the perception that Mitchell is thin-skinned. But Deborah Cassrels laughs at the suggestion. “No, it’s not that. He can’t help himself. He just likes to prove he’s right. He wants to stick the finger up and say, ‘There! You’re wrong and I’m right.’”

Mitchell’s aversion to criticism stops many people from speaking out. Of the 70 people I spoke to for this profile, two-thirds would talk only off the record. “You can’t be quoted in relation to Chris Mitchell. He’s so vindictive,” said one. “If you come out and bag him, you know he’ll use the newspaper to attack you,” said another. It’s disturbing that a man committed to freedom of speech and information can have such a stifling effect on public debate.

Some of his staff believe Mitchell’s unbridled aggression is damaging the brand. “We are no longer about reporting news. That doesn’t sell, because people can get their news from so many different places,” an insider remarks. “We are now in the business that conflict sells. I think that’s the business model that’s emerging.”

Others, such as Hedley Thomas, see this as a strength. “I think what Chris has worked out is that one of the keys to a successful newspaper is ongoing tension, and if there’s ongoing conflict – even conflict that embroils us and that we respond to – that’s good, it makes us more relevant. I think it’s actually a strategy, [being] part of an ongoing friction, tension and conflict.”

Don’t expect this to change, says Thomas. “The thing is you can’t kill Chris. I think the more you throw at him, the more he’ll say ‘OK, bring it on.’”

Bruce Guthrie says you’ve got to hand it to him. “Good newspapers know what they stand for. Chris Mitchell knows what the Australian stands for, his readers know what the Australian stands for, its opponents know what the Australian stands for. And in simple newspaper terms that’s a good place to be. Is it good for Australian society and political discourse? Possibly not, even probably not. But as an editor I sit back and admire what he has done, and that is to deliver day after day for his readership. That’s exactly what Rupert wants and that’s why he’s still got the job.”

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@themonthly Two Nations: The Case for a National Disability Insurance Scheme

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Anne Manne

On a Brisbane morning in April of this year, Lillian Andren rose long before dawn. Almost completely paralysed, getting to the public hearing of the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into disability care and support was no easy feat. Close to vomiting with pain, she made the arduous trek across town. Nothing, however, would have deterred Lillian from telling her story.

Seven years ago, while bathing in a private backyard pool, she was terribly injured when a 90 kilogram man accidentally fell on her. The muscles were stripped from her spine, leaving nerve signals but no muscles to translate them. At age 31, Lillian was told she would have to spend the rest of her days in a nursing home. Through grit, hard work at rehabilitation and sheer determination she finally made it back home.

In her decision to live independently, Lillian encountered new difficulties. The accident did not occur under circumstances that enabled her to sue for compensation, as she may have done had it occurred at a public baths. She could not apply to WorkCover because it did not happen at work. Her spine had not been severed so she did not qualify for any fully funded and comprehensive care package for spinal injuries. Her case simply fell through the cracks.

Lillian’s injuries make her incontinent. Initially she was offered help by government-funded carers for two showers per week. Now she gets three. As she explained at the hearing: “the delightful irony is, to receive that third shower per week I must have daily incontinence issues. So the system allows me to sit four days a week in my own urine to provide me three showers a week …”

In the sweltering Brisbane heat, she suffers profuse sweating, causing rashes, cysts and boils. Although she is mainly confined to bed, her care package only allows care workers to visit for 60 minutes per fortnight to change her sheets. Lillian told the commission: “I have begged for them to come at least once a week, to change my sheets once a week, but no.” She has no idea at what time of day the care workers might arrive to shower her. They come when it suits their timetable and refuse to be pinned down, which can be very stressful if, for example, Lillian needs to get to a doctor’s appointment. The agency changes the staff rosters all the time, so Lillian has no idea what stranger will come to help her with the most intimate bodily functions. They are paid to do only superficial ‘maintenance’ cleans, rather than a thorough job.

“My house is filthy … I now rarely allow visitors because I’m so ashamed of how my home looks … As someone with a spinal injury who rarely gets out except to doctor’s visits, I’m incredibly isolated by this.” Lillian says that for years bureaucrats have told her, “I really feel bad for you, but there’s nothing I can do.”

For Patricia Scott, the cool-headed economist heading the inquiry, this intelligent and articulate woman’s frank testimony was among the most harrowing of all the evidence she has heard in the course of her investigations.

*

Benjamin Disraeli wrote how nineteenth-century Britain was divided into “two nations” of rich and poor: “as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets”. In twenty-first century Australia, to be someone with a disability, or their carer, is to pass from one nation into another. Bill Shorten, the former parliamentary secretary for disability, called those with disabilities “eternal exiles” in our nation, saying they live “under the radar”.

Around 4.5 million Australians – or about one-fifth of the population – have a disability of some kind. Of these, 760,000 people under 65 years of age have a severe or profound disability, meaning they “always or sometimes need help with a core activity or task”. Half-a-million Australians are primary carers of a person with a disability – the equivalent of the population of Tasmania. A further 2.4 million, or 10% of the nation, are non-primary carers. Yet disability does not even rate an outer ministry.

Our country has never been wealthier, yet disability services are rationed tighter than petrol in Britain during the Blitz. Funding is a lottery. Very little goes to the person with a disability or their carer, while most is given to service providers who eke out the depleted resources. If these institutions are not funded to provide you with what you need, tough luck; if they are, join the queue. People battle for years through what one submission to the inquiry aptly called the “confusopoly” – the labyrinth of bureaucratic red tape you must navigate to gain even the most basic help. People are pitted against one another in a competitive system, a “misery olympics”.

Disability support is administered by the states, which simply do not have the tax base to pay for it. This results in a marked disparity in coverage. In Western Australia, about 85% of applications for high-level care support are rejected. A care package – which makes all the difference to surviving – may depend on something as arbitrary as what side of the street you live on. If you have an accident, make sure you reside on the NSW side of Boundary Road in Tweed Heads, for example. In NSW you can get full support for a disabling motor vehicle injury through that state’s no-fault Lifetime Care and Support Scheme; Queensland doesn’t have such a system.

The economics of disability are bleak. Nearly one-third of households involving a person with a disability live close to or below the poverty line, compared to one-tenth of Australians overall. As Bill Shorten pointed out in a speech made after the release of the 2009 report Shut Out: The Experience of People with Disabilities and their Families in Australia, a person with a disability is more likely to be unemployed and on income support, and to live in public housing or be renting. They are less likely to complete secondary education. Worrying numbers of people with an intellectual disability end up in jail. Children with additional needs require early intervention but don’t often get it. As their parents know, for each year such crucial help is missing, behavioural problems and educational deficits multiply.

Among carers depression is much more common than in the general community – around 50% probability rather than 6%. People with disabilities are still denied easy access to things most Australians take for granted: cinemas, playgrounds, swimming pools and public transport. You might think that, in a modern welfare state, basic essentials such as wheelchairs are fully funded and made immediately available by Medicare. But no, we do it the old-fashioned way. Charities still rattle tin cans on street corners. Kind passers-by drop in silver coins. Eventually there may be enough funds to buy another quadriplegic a wheelchair.

The government’s dour advisory body, the Productivity Commission, is not known for hyperbole. Yet in the Draft Report into Disability Care and Support, released in February, the commission condemned the system as “underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient”. Overall, the report estimates, our current funding for disability is about half of what is required – it needs to be doubled. No Australian currently has the financial protection each of us hopes we will never need.

The system of disability care is fundamentally broken. John Della Bosca, the former NSW minister for disability services and current campaign director for the National Disability and Carer Alliance, is blunt: “It needs a wrecking ball, and starting over.”

It needs a big idea.

*

In the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a big idea is just what we have. Every bit as ambitious and far-reaching a societal shift as Medicare and compulsory superannuation, it will cover some 360,000 people with a profound or severe disability. (A smaller, complementary National Injury Insurance Scheme will cover people who incur a catastrophic injury.) The NDIS will double existing funding, from around $6 billion to $12 billion. Importantly, it will scrap the old welfare model and install a new one of lifetime social insurance, whereby all taxpayers contribute. It will shift disability provision from the states to a single national body funded by the Commonwealth from general revenue.

Funding will be given directly to individuals with a disability, based on reasonable and necessary need, giving them crucial autonomy. They can cash out and administer their own care package, or use brokers provided by the system to organise one. While it may take time, ultimately service providers will compete for the disability dollar, giving choice, improving outcomes and stimulating innovation.

The NDIS will incorporate approaches from no-fault insurance schemes, such as the transport accident schemes in Victoria and NSW, where planning for a lifetime rather than a short-term crisis situation has proven both better for the recipient and more cost-effective. It will concentrate on early intervention. “Disability has access to absolute best practice in early intervention,” Della Bosca points out. He gives the example of children who can be helped by speech therapy in early primary school: “By nine or ten years old the speech impediment is serious and you have an education deficit, and maybe a behavioural problem. Problems snowball. By 15 you have a severe deficit, affecting their future working life. Then you might face paying $70,000 to $80,000 for institutional care. Had the child simply been given six months of intensive treatment all those years ago, none of this would have happened. If the intervention is timely, money is saved.”

In his role as minister for disability services, Della Bosca found this sort of equation replicated everywhere. Every day that passes without proper funding for early intervention is one more step away from the potential for independence in later life for a child with a disability.

The NDIS represents, then, in the words of one of its key architects, Bruce Bonyhady, a “paradigm shift”. Bonyhady, chairman of the Victorian disability service provider Yooralla, is a sober, considered man, with a quiet persistence and an analytical mind. He has been powerfully shaped not only by his time at Yooralla, but by his experience as a father of two boys with cerebral palsy. A seminal episode while working in the UK gave him insight into an alternate approach, as the British education system has a legal, statutory requirement to provide for a child’s needs. He also become interested in the work of Brian Howe, the former deputy prime minister in the Keating government, who has a strong interest in welfare provision. After Howe retired from politics, he took a Fulbright Scholarship to Germany to study Guenther Schmid’s work on European systems of social insurance. All this helped Bonyhady develop an intellectual framework for a system of lifetime care.

Equally important to the evolution of the NDIS was Bonyhady’s experience as an economist: he worked for seven years in Treasury. This father and service provider for people with a disability could understand more powerfully than most the unmet human need. But his time in the Treasury, says Bonyhady, convinced him that “it was the economic value system which was now dominant over the social.” No social justice issue, however compelling, would be successfully resolved until someone asked the crucial, tough-minded question: How much and who pays?

Bonyhady turned to John Walsh, a brilliant actuary for PricewaterhouseCoopers in NSW. Walsh knew the issue from the inside out. He had suffered a severe spinal injury as a young man while playing rugby league, which made him a quadriplegic. At the time Walsh had been studying mathematics and physics but was unable to go on to postgraduate work because of the lack of provision for people with a disability. A family physician suggested actuarial work. Walsh’s sharp mind and flair for numbers soon attracted attention. There was a woeful lack of statistics on disability so, when offered funding by a consortium of insurance companies, Walsh developed a database that led to the first Australian Registry of Spinal Cord Injury in 1990. He also made important contributions to the NSW Law Reform Commission in the mid 1980s, and developed an innovative insurance model that became the basis of the NSW Lifetime Care and Support scheme in 2006.

Bonyhady knew no one had done more to devise cost-effective schemes of insurance cover for catastrophic injury at the state level than John Walsh. Could he devise such a scheme for disability on a national level? The unflappable actuary set about the task.

By 2007, when Labor took office, the concept of the National Disability Insurance Scheme was starting to take shape. The 2020 Summit took up the idea enthusiastically. Kevin Rudd was sympathetic and behind the scenes Jenny Macklin gave crucial support. Important, too, was winning over Bill Shorten, the charismatic former union leader. As then parliamentary secretary for disability, he impressed with his empathy. Whatever cynics say about Shorten, few in the disability movement have anything but praise for him. Under his leadership the profile of disability was lifted from “the runt in the litter” of policy areas, as Bonyhady describes it, to near the top of the social policy agenda.

What Shorten said to Bonyhady, however, stopped him in his tracks. “Bruce, governments are just there to facilitate.” The former national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union knew a thing or two about getting the numbers. It was a big scheme with a big price tag. It needed an unstoppable head of steam coming from a grassroots movement, compelling government into action. Then and only then would politicians act.

And there lay a problem.

Since the ’90s the movement advocating for the rights of people with a disability had been fragmented. A tension had developed between carers, people with a disability and service providers. “I went away to work in health promotion,” says long-time community and disability activist Rhonda Galbally, “and when I looked back there was a split in the movement. During the next decade, it was the carer voice that was in the ascendancy.”

For a long time it was unclear what the movement might reunite over. The NDIS was a call to action, but could they get it together? Shorten pointed out to Bonyhady what solidarity could achieve. As a union official, he learnt that workers on building sites who concentrated on the 90% of issues they agreed upon, rather than the 10% they disagreed upon, were the successful ones; the others got nowhere.

Bruce Bonyhady turned to Rhonda Galbally for help. Galbally was a well-known social policy and health advocate with invaluable experience as a CEO in the government, business, philanthropic and community sectors. She also had something else – the kind of interpersonal warmth and skill for conciliation that would be sorely needed. And Galbally’s own story goes to the heart of the tension.

*

Rhonda Galbally was just 13 months old when she contracted polio. While still a baby in need of her mother, she was hospitalised for several years with only rare visits from her family. She remembers a “babyhood of abandonment, loss and pain,” and crying “animal screams” for “losing my mum” when she had stints in hospitals for pointless operations and forcible treatments stretching her affected limbs. Such practice for children with a disability was once commonplace. For many it was even worse. Some spent their entire childhood and adolescence institutionalised, being treated as human vegetables in St Nicholas Hospital, a notorious Melbourne home for severely disabled children. The hospital withheld antibiotics from children suffering pneumonia; the prevailing attitude was: ‘Better for everyone if they died.’

The disability rights movement was a late flowering of the civil rights movements of the ’60s and ’70s, one of the new frontiers of social justice. Deinstitutionalisation was a central part of this movement. It overturned the prevailing idea that people with a disability were objects of charity and the cruel assumptions that in an earlier era had made them the dark focus of the eugenics movement. The profound insight of philosopher Simone Weil was at the centre of the values inspiring those advocating change: “Respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.” The movement campaigned for the ideals and practices of equal opportunity. Yet embedded within it was something much deeper – the desire for recognition, the existential cry of every human being: see me, value me, respect me for who I am.

How much human hope was invested in the deinstitutionalisation of the late ’70s and early ’80s! It required a profound change in community attitudes. Galbally recalls how liberating it was to encounter the new term ‘person with a disability’, which places emphasis on the person first, and their differing needs in taking their rightful place amongst the citizenry second. Liberating, too, was the understanding that the impediments people with disabilities face are far more social than physical in origin.

Many of these barriers remain. When Galbally headed the government inquiry that produced the Shut Out report, it painfully revealed the existence of our two nations. Our society is designed for an exclusive, privileged club – citizens who are able-bodied.

Endless platitudes and feel-good phrases emanating from government departments – phrases such as ‘social inclusion’ – drizzle down on the heads of people with a disability. When as a person with a hearing impairment you can attend only ten cinemas around Australia because so few have provision for you; when your child is ejected from a childcare centre because they have special needs, meaning you can no longer work to provide for their care; when you are told that your disability means you are not a suitable recipient for a transplant organ but would make a suitable donor, thank you very much; when on a winter’s night you wait in your wheelchair at the bus stop watching buses whiz by carrying able-bodied people because not enough have ramps, you might be forgiven for feeling cynical about ‘social inclusion’. Indeed, one might go from feeling ‘shut in’ to ‘shut out’.

In history, timing can be everything. Deinstitutionalisation occurred at the same historical moment as the great leap forward into the free market neo-liberal age, and the feminist revolution. As the dollar was floated and tariffs lifted, cuts in government spending became the mantra. It became a sin to run a deficit and a virtue to have a surplus. We are currently one of the lowest taxing nations in the OECD, which means there is less money to allocate to essential social services for people with a disability and their families.

Moreover, the utterly humane move to close institutions was not a cheaper option. Just like a game of Chinese whispers, when disability rights activists cried “Freedom!” state treasurers translated this to mean “reduced costs”, and purred happily. Using the rhetoric of liberation, they shut down institutions such as St Nicholas Hospital but failed to institute new programs to replace them. Former live-in patients often ended up homeless or in prison.

Another justification for closing down institutions was the promotion of ‘care in the community’, which became a euphemism for care by unsupported families, most often women. By the ’90s the ‘shadow care economy’, rather than the government, was expected to pick up the tab for deinstitutionalisation. The old era had very clear assumptions about care; a married man worked and a housewife stayed at home. Along with her female kin, she was meant to do all the care work. Yet here, too, a revolution was underway. Women were now at work in ever increasing numbers. These family caregivers needed new labour market regulations, such as carer’s leave, to help them manage work and care. Yet, in the new economic order, such entitlements were not forthcoming.

Still today, many leave work indefinitely to care for a family member with a disability, eking out an existence on a carer’s allowance. Family bonds often fray or simply break under the strain. Extended families increasingly disperse, living in different states or countries, and are unavailable for extra support.

On all counts, deinstitutionalisation meant greatly increased care needs at a time when the private care workforce was diminishing. The result was an appalling care deficit. As a consequence, carers became as mad as hell.

*

Mad As Hell is a campaign led by two mothers of children with a disability, Sue O’Reilly and Fiona Porter. Earlier this year they sent a letter to the prime minister, offering her the chance to spend a day with them to “walk in our shoes”. They point out that the replacement value of informal care for the disability sector – provided by families of the shadow care economy – is $30.5 billion annually.

This invisible workforce is doing more than its fair share of the heavy lifting. If the NDIS was installed tomorrow, even with its $6 billion in additional funding, we would still need a massive care subsidy from families. They need support to do their essential work. At present there is a widespread shortage of beds in respite homes, which are a great asset to families who need a break. In South Australia recently all of the beds in respite houses across the state were taken by people relinquished to permanent care; that’s what can happen when families are exhausted and can no longer cope. “Not providing adequate support for carers now,” emphasises John Walsh, “requires increased dollars later … [Moreover] there is a ‘death spiral’ in the current system, with ageing carers unable to cope, giving up their adult children to expensive taxpayer-funded care, leading to reduced respite support and putting more strain on the remaining carers.”

As utterly compelling as the carer case is, talk of relinquishment is enough to send shivers through those who have been institutionalised. For people like Rhonda Galbally, separated from her parents at such a young age, it brings back terrible memories. Even more wounding is the way the media often takes up the caregiver case sympathetically and, in doing so, unthinkingly portrays those with a disability as a terrible burden. To have one’s existence depicted as a burden is to feel a blow struck at the very centre of one’s soul.

Yet standing back from the friction, one thing is striking. Both sides of the disability equation were being starved of the funds. The resulting tension was hardly surprising. The campaign for an NDIS recognised that common plight, and offered a remedy. Bruce Bonyhady’s call to Rhonda Galbally came at just the right moment. For some time, she had been on a new inward journey through psychotherapy. Her heart had moved to a different place from the angry one of the past, and she could “for the first time [see] my mother’s grief, pain and never-ending guilt. I was a mother myself, and maybe all those things made me able to see both sides.” A new empathy for the caregiver perspective emerged. The time was right for reconciliation, and to work constructively with disability service providers, too.

When Galbally drew people together – those with disabilities, their carers and service providers – for a discussion, in the hope of forming an alliance, the tension was palpable. To break the ice, Galbally suggested they go around the table and see what they could agree on. “When we got to dignity for people with disability, both sides agreed with heartfelt belief. We saw how much we shared. Tears welled up around the table. It was an incredibly moving experience.”

The outcome of that meeting was the National Disability and Carer Alliance. The alliance has demonstrated what unity can achieve. The public forum to launch the NDCA’s campaign for systemic change, Every Australian Counts, drew a large crowd of some 1200 people to the Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, as part of a National Disability and Carer Congress held on 2–3 May. There, Patricia Scott of the Productivity Commission joined Labor, Liberal and Greens politicians in backing an NDIS. For those who had seen the consequences of a fragile movement divided, it was a hard-won but precious political moment.

*

In her discussion of disability in Frontiers of Justice, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum points to the core failure in our practice of the democratic ideals of equal citizenship where politics only represents the interests of able-bodied, economically self-supporting citizens. It is surely a sign of our strange times that justice for people with a disability and their caregivers is put before a ‘Productivity Commission’, whose brief it is to make our nation more economically efficient. It is for this reason that I was initially sceptical of what such a commission might achieve.

Yet reading the transcripts is a moving experience. As the commissioners travelled around the country, in the careful and respectful way they listened to people, we see democracy at work. We hear the hitherto invisible voices of our two nations speak. We learn of a wife who forever grieves that she could barely respond to her dying husband in last months of his life because she was so exhausted by unsupported care, of a sister who gives up work and is about to lose her house in order to care for a sibling, of elderly parents terrified of what will happen to their severely disabled child when they die.

In encountering that shadow world of care, we see families unstintingly honouring love’s labour, while living achingly, unnecessarily difficult lives. We confront the painful mismatch between raw unmet human need and what our wealthy nation provides. The case for an NDIS becomes compelling. It must be the beginning of the road, however, not the endpoint, as the NDIS covers only the most severely affected. There are many other people impacted by disability, outlined in the Shut Out report, who urgently need the barriers to work and social participation removed. Any agency administering an NDIS must act as a powerful advocate for these people. But, surely, it is our most urgent social reform.

What chance is there for the NDIS succeeding? The NDIS is a proposition of unusual political deftness; a rarity in Australian politics. Embedded in the scheme are two powerful ideals more often in conflict than in harmony. One concerns the individual maximising opportunities in the marketplace, developing initiative and enterprise in a framework of economic prudence. The other centres on social justice, our capacity to stand together and utilise our nation’s wealth to develop a strong safety net in order to care for those in need.

The scheme appeals to our altruism, our desire to help our fellow Australians, but it also appeals to our self-interest. Currently we are all uninsured against disability. The NDIS would give security to all Australians, appealing to our natural caution. We like Medicare. We believe in home insurance, car insurance and private medical insurance. The NDIS is to be paid for out of existing general revenue, rather than a politically difficult new tax. That said, if we want better health, better education (to use Julia Gillard’s election slogan) and disability services, then politicians cannot forever behave like Santa Claus, handing out tax-cut gifts at every election. As Patricia Scott points out, the last round of tax cuts would have more than paid for the NDIS.

Perhaps all this is why a scheme with a big price tag has gained such unusual across-the-board political approval. Yet the politics of the NDIS remains finely poised. As yet uncommitted are Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Penny Wong. As successful as the campaign has been, “I don’t reckon we have got the key people to the table yet,” says one advocate ruefully. Bonyhady describes the current feeling in the National Disability and Carer Alliance as like being two goals up at quarter time in a football match – in front but still a way to go.

Every Labor government wants to leave a legacy of reform. What will Gillard’s legacy be? The NDIS represents an opportunity for the floundering Gillard. It is a truly significant reform, as significant as Medicare and compulsory superannuation, and one which goes to the heart of the Labor tradition. And, miraculously, Gillard could be the beneficiary of support from the Greens, independents and the Coalition on this issue. When the Productivity Commission presents its Final Report to the government at the end of July, any opposition from Tony Abbott will look heartless as well as hypocritical. If Gillard does nothing, she risks looking indecisive and lacking in compassion. It will be time to act boldly, take the initiative and shift onto the front foot. Labor has nothing left to lose.

*

While the Gillard government deliberates, Lillian Andren waits. She waits for the day the carers come to wash her, waits for the dignity that could be bestowed by a decent care system. Above all, Lillian waits for Australia to place justice for people like her and their carers at the centre of our nation’s heart.

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National Disability Insurance Scheme, Productivity Commission, Social Justice

 
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@themonthly Prime Minister, Interrupted: Why One Year After the Election Voters Still Don’t Know Who Gillard Is

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Annabel Crabb

In Australia, we engage with our political leaders in a way that is very particular to us, and to our democratic model. Compulsory voting obliges us to get involved directly every three years or so. So the kinds of inducements to pay attention that you see during political campaigns in the United States – rallies with bands and banners, and the quaintly infantilising riot of balloons – aren’t needed here. Thanks to section 245 (1) of the Australian Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, with its stentorian 1924 amendment: “It shall be the duty of every elector to vote at each election”, we’re obliged to beat our way through the pamphleteers, lamington-pedlars and ‘Building The Education Revolution’ placards anyway, regardless of our inclination to stay in bed.

In return for this triennial exertion, Australian voters implicitly demand a few standards. We don’t have the American horror of big government, so long as what is done in our name is done reasonably competently. We don’t need to know everything about the private lives of those in government but we need to know our leaders well enough to understand and intuit roughly where they’re going to fall on any given issue. We don’t need to like them. We can even tolerate it when they make decisions with which we disagree, so long as those decisions are roughly consistent with the mud-map character sketch we’ve filed away. We get to know our prime ministers just well enough to permit us comfortably to forget about them for much of the time. That’s the Australian model.

The mud maps of our most recent prime ministers might go as follows: John Howard – solid, middle-class type. Bit awkward. Social conservative, sticks to his guns. Strong. Kevin Rudd – hardworking. A bit nerdy. Modern family. Knows about foreign stuff. Labor, but not much into unions. Keen to do something about climate change.

But what does Julia Gillard’s story tell us? It’s an interrupted affair, and this is at the heart of her continued struggles as prime minister. Her life story, as it appears broadly to voters, looks a bit like this: Redhead. Political lifer. Pretty feisty. Likes football. Seems a capable deputy. Whoops! Is suddenly the prime minister.

And the period encapsulated by the “Whoops!” element of the above synopsis is precisely the period about which the prime minister can give us no further information. In June last year, the deputy prime minister became the prime minister, for reasons that were not immediately clear to most outside the Canberra area. Stories are important in politics. And the gap in this story is grievous.

How the gap developed is a tale in itself – a discouraging one, and scary too. Scary, because it involves (if what Rudd’s former ministers say privately is true) the disintegration of the processes by which the federal government makes the decisions that affect us all. Scary, because the men and women of the cabinet, to whom we entrust an awful lot, stood by and did nothing. Those men and women can’t and won’t tell that tale now. Can’t, because they fear aggravating their former prime minister, Kevin Rudd; won’t, because the whole episode reflects dreadfully on them all. And the finely balanced equation that keeps Julia Gillard in the Lodge – she is a woman constantly tensed in a multi-directional Mexican standoff, after all, one vote away from oblivion, unable to sack a minister or piss off a backbencher without threatening her own existence – gives Kevin Rudd immunity from prosecution too.

Think, for a moment, about the way changes in political leadership are ordinarily brought about. In the case of the last ousting of a serving prime minister – Bob Hawke – the event was telegraphed well in advance. The challenger moped, and needled, and agitated, and fulminated. Then made a lunge and failed. Then retreated and regrouped. Then struck again. By the time Keating actually unseated Bob Hawke in a caucus vote, the event was already the most exhaustively rehearsed and fantasised-about decapitation in Australian political history. Messy? Yes. But no one was taken by surprise. Julia Gillard’s assumption of command, on the other hand, was a moonlight affair; even the principal figure in this drama was a last-minute conscript. Some cabinet ministers found out about the coup from the television. Viewers who caught the ABC’s evening news on Wednesday, 23 June, at least had the chance to sleep on the idea of Rudd’s ousting. Those who didn’t woke to the breakfast news that it was all over bar the shouting.

Gillard’s explanation – that she had challenged because “a good government had lost its way” – seemed hilariously inadequate at the time. Her exhortation to the country to keep “moving forward” had all the urgency of a cop hustling rubbernecks from the scene of an especially messy homicide. “Moving forward, folks – come on, nothing to see here, move along …”

Now, a year after the election that brought her close enough to a parliamentary majority to get the rest of the way using her fingernails, the strange and precipitate circumstances that elevated the prime minister to the leadership hover over her still, like a murder of crows. How did she get here? And why?

“We can’t tell the story,” concludes one of her ministers. “One, because the structure is so fragile, and we need Kevin. Two, because the whole story doesn’t reflect well on the participants.”

So there is a gap at the centre of Julia Gillard’s identity as prime minister. It stunts her ability to talk to people, once her most natural gift. If she cannot be frank in her explanation of how she came to be here, how can she be trusted as a faithful correspondent on other matters of significance?

On the evening of 16 June, in Melbourne, pollster John Scales gathers first one small group of swinging voters, and then a second, to talk about how politics in Australia is working out for them just now. It’s nearly a year since Julia Gillard decided that a good government had lost its way, and issued the request for Australia to “move forward”.

But not everyone is moving forward.

“I don’t trust her, after what she did to Rudd.”

“She’s a puppet.”

“Shafting Rudd the way she did was appalling.”

“There is no direction”.

“She lied to us on the carbon tax.”

“People have to a large extent tuned out to Gillard, and they find her to a certain extent embarrassing,” is Scales’s assessment of the public mood. “There’s not much in the way of positives about her at all.”

One of the exercises Scales does with these groups is to ask them to divide a sheet of paper into two columns, and list down the left side all the things the government has done well. On the right side, they list the not-so-good things. “For some people, the left-hand column is just a blank,” Scales says. “Or, you find they’re reaching back to Rudd government stuff – the cash handouts or the pension increase. This is one of her major problems: People can’t find anything to argue for her. There’s not much people can point to that they [the government] have actually done.”

And, more deeply, there isn’t much recognition of the prime minister herself; her mud map is a blank, too.

“The only people I see who have any idea who Gillard is are people in the western suburbs of Melbourne,” says Scales. “But no one else can ever give me a description of what they think about Julia Gillard as a person. And that applies as much in the other suburban areas of Melbourne as it does in Perth, or anywhere else.”

“They were used to having someone – in Howard – whom they could recognise; they knew who he was. I know from many years of doing focus group research that they could always tell you who Howard was; Rudd, too.”

In leaders, Scales explains, people are looking for some reflection of themselves, some point of identification. “There has to be some mainstream family values ID there. That’s really the bulk of the electorate. There’s a big mass of people out there with fairly mainstream, middle-of-the-road values. And if they can’t recognise who this person is, as one of their own, that’s a problem.”

It would be easy to conclude, on that basis, that Gillard’s personal circumstances – she doesn’t have a mainstream family – are a big part of the roadblock standing between her and the Australian people. But Scales says it’s not that simple. “You get one or two [people] in every second group who will make references to that. It’s not the main thing driving them against Gillard. People just don’t understand who or what she is. They don’t have a frame of reference.” (Tony Abbott, it should be noted, has an entirely different sort of problem. “People know who he is,” says Scales, economically. “And that’s why they don’t like him.”)

So, unable to judge Gillard on her character or on her deeds as prime minister, voters define her by the deed that made her prime minister instead. And she’s not talking about that, so the impression of untrustworthiness goes unchallenged. Not only is it unchallenged, it’s strengthened into conviction by the other thing about Julia Gillard that everyone can readily recall – that she promised during the election campaign not to introduce a carbon tax but is now going ahead with one anyway. And still, the government seems to have difficulty in finishing things. It’s a nasty little equation.

It’s not that the prime minister and her advisers aren’t trying to do anything about this situation, but retro-fitting a prime minister with an identity is extremely tricky.

Kevin Rudd put significant work before the 2007 election into developing and projecting a public persona into which, cautiously, post-Howard Australia could snuggle with confidence: economic conservatism with a whiff of godliness, spruced up with a modern wife and a Chinese twist for the adventurous; sort of a bilingual crypto-Howard, sans tracksuit.

Julia Gillard, however, had barely settled on a haircut she was happy with when the knock came last year. This had worked OK for her in the role of deputy prime minister, or DPM, as Kevin Rudd called her up until 24 June 2010, when he started calling her other stuff. When you’re deputy prime minister, you tend to be mildly lionised for having any sort of personality at all.

But the difference between being deputy and being prime minister is like the difference between painting and sculpture. All of a sudden, people are reviewing your work from every possible angle. Julia Gillard gave plenty of boring speeches and robotic interviews as deputy prime minister, too, but only the interesting ones made it to the news; these days, every gesture and phrase is closely evaluated.

This hyper-scrutiny, additionally, makes any conscious attempt to alter one’s self-image look clunky and graceless. Witness the recent 60 Minutes joint interview with Gillard and her partner, Tim Mathieson, which was intended to be a warm look at the PM at home with her spouse but turned into an ordeal of knuckle-biting unwatchability, as host Charles Wooley archly cross-examined the pair about whether they actually loved each other, and teamed up with Mathieson to shut a giggling prime minister out of the Lodge’s backyard shed. Gillard throws out mixed messages, too: She’s an atheist who reveres the Bible. She forms a government with the assistance of the Greens and invites Bob Brown to help her write Australia’s carbon pricing policy, but then argues that the Greens have “no tradition of striking the balance required to deliver major reform”.

Prime ministers never like being asked about why they’re having trouble getting through to people but Gillard isn’t especially prickly on the topic, fortunately. “I think that that’s true,” she responds, equably, to my ventured suggestion that her silence on the manner of her assumption of the prime ministership is hampering her ability to communicate. “And I’m conscious of that. But it’s hard to explain all of that without being … you know … without being disrespectful to the efforts of the former government, which did achieve, even with all these fetters and constraints, did achieve all these remarkable things. And, more particularly, the efforts of the former prime minister. And even though it leaves a gap, I think it’s the better and more respectful course to create that gap than to do the alternative.”

She folds her hands calmly, and waits for another question. One of the oddest things about this government, for all its public talk of Labor’s proud tradition of tough reform, is the extent to which it publicly and privately references John Howard. I wish I had a dollar for every time a Labor minister or backbencher has explained to me over the last year the need to be “tough like Howard”. Or cast back to the GST debate for guidance on how best to deflect a populist scare campaign. The fact that such history buffs tend to overlook the trifling matter of who authored that particular populist scare campaign is a pretty good indication of how rootless Australian politics is just now.

Julia Gillard herself references him often.

“If you look back on John Howard’s first year there was endless amounts of carry-on about how stiff and awkward he was, and why he didn’t get something done about those eyebrows,” she reminded the Weekend Australian Magazine in a recent profile, when asked to reflect.

Now, sitting in his old office, Gillard explains: “I do think about some of the things he did in office, and my principal respect for John Howard, and it’s a characteristic I’d like to claim for myself, is that I think he’s a tremendously psychologically strong human being. You saw that in his durability, you saw that in his reaction to pressure and crisis, and you ultimately saw it the day after the 2007 election, where – guess what? He went out for a walk. He’s a tremendously psychologically strong human being, and I think I’m a very psychologically strong human being, not much buffeted by, you know, the environment that comes with this.”

“And then, in terms of work style, even though I haven’t gone on a journey to replicate his work style, people who have been around forever have said things to me like: ‘You’re a lot like Prime Minister Howard, he used to crash through a huge amount of paperwork on Saturday, put one day of the weekend aside to get all of the paperwork done, and you seem to be doing the same.’”

She smiles. “Having said that, there are tremendous differences. Cricket. Not married to Janette. Don’t have a Wallabies tracksuit. You know, and the list goes on.”

A week or so later, my call to John Howard’s Sydney office is rewarded; the former prime minister’s disembodied but still unmistakably brisk voice (he is travelling in the US) greets me when I answer my phone. After a good-natured bargaining session, we agree that his initial reaction, on being told Gillard identifies herself with him, will remain unreported. He is unwilling to offer an opinion on Gillard, whom he describes as “intelligent”, but maintains the view, argued in his memoir Lazarus Rising, that Labor made a “colossal blunder” in dismantling her predecessor. “I’ve got no time for Rudd, and I understand that he completely alienated his colleagues, and so on. The insiders understand all that. But the public – they voted for him. I think they’re still living under the shadow of that.”

*

The story Julia Gillard cannot tell is a long and complicated one, involving a party that spent so long in opposition that, by its tenth anniversary there in 2006, it was ready to enlist Kevin Rudd – a brilliant, disciplined, persistent workaholic whom barely anybody in the party could stand – to its leadership.

The Howard government had won outright control of the Senate at the 2004 election. On one hand, this was a shocking blow to Labor. But on the other, it relieved them of the obligation to tie themselves up in knots trying to amend government legislation in the Senate.

Newly unwedgeable and utterly sick of losing, the party signed up to the Rudd package; centralised power, discipline, regular anti-union jabs, the works. “We decided as a party that we were going to be absolutely ruthless,” says one minister. “We would have one voice, and we would not let Howard outmanoeuvre us again.” Driving the coherence of the party and its determination to prevail was an additional, existential threat: John Howard’s challenge to the union movement in WorkChoices.

Rudd convened Friday meetings of his “planning group”, which comprised him, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner. The rest of his shadow ministers found out about this arrangement only gradually. “By about April [of 2007] we worked out that it had been happening for months,” says one. During the election campaign, Rudd announced publicly – and without consulting his party – that in government he would seize for himself the right to appoint his choice of colleagues to the front bench.

This was a proposal, ironically enough, that had been advanced by Julia Gillard, in a speech in March of that year to the Sydney Institute. Gillard argued that the abolition of the old system – in which caucus “elected” its own front bench (a quaint term for the muscular factional hardscrabble for cabinet spots that had been a tradition since the Hawke years) – would constitute significant modernisation for the party. “To get there, to clear the factions out of the system, I think we need to send a message right from the top that change is required and the ministry or shadow ministry is not a creature of the factional system,” she said.

Keep in mind, Gillard herself was not unreservedly admired at the time. There yet festers, among caucus sourpusses, the theory that her enthusiastic advocacy of the ‘PM picks’ model might carry a sniff of Team Gillard interest; that her eclectic band of factionally marginalised friends and confidantes, such as the Victorian Brendan O’Connor and the Northern Territory–based Warren Snowdon, might not otherwise have made it as ministers. The prime minister is a woman who picks and sticks, and who presumably has not forgotten the days when another former close friend, Mark Latham, was unable to give her the job of shadow treasurer because he lacked the very same centralised powers of appointment for which she now is a continuingly stubborn advocate.

(“The Shadow Treasury has been a nightmare,” Latham recorded in his diary on 25 October 2004, conducting his front bench reshuffle after that year’s election loss. “Gillard is the best person for the job, our rising star, but her own people have vetoed her. The leaders of the Left have lined up, one by one, to blackball her: Faulkner, Evans and Combet, plus expected criticism from Macklin and Albanese. Gillard would be better off leaving those losers behind … I told Julia I couldn’t give it to her because I had run out of petrol after saving Crean. I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the rats in her own ranks.”)

The discipline and hard work paid off; Rudd was elected and duly appointed his cabinet. This was the beginning of the difficulty, argues Steve Hutchins, who has been a Labor Senator since 1998 but – defeated at the last election – is packing up his office when I visit. Hutchins has just used his final caucus meeting to argue against the prime minister choosing her front bench. The problem, as he sees it, is not who you get when the PM picks the cabinet. It’s the loss of accountability to the caucus. “I reckon we would have ended up with the same line-up,” he says. “But under the old system, everybody owned the front bench. At the moment, the front bench is wholly and solely the property of the leader.”

This has three major consequences, argues Hutchins. The first is a change in the functioning of the cabinet itself: “The system makes them sycophants.” The second is the behaviour of the leader, who tends to protect underperforming ministers because to acknowledge their underperformance would be to admit a personal error of judgement. And the third is the deterioration of the relationship between ministers and the caucus. “No matter how elevated we were [under the old system], we needed to respond to our caucus colleagues because she or he was going to determine whether or not you got to be on the front bench next time. There was accountability.”

“It also has an impact on caucus, because there are so many shiny-shoes in there trying to impress the leadership that there are probably things that should be raised in there, that aren’t,” Hutchins concludes. “We used to have an award called ‘The Maxine’.” (Maxine McKew, one of Rudd’s prime enthusiasts in the caucus, was returned to private life in the election of 2010.) Rudd’s first cabinet joins our story at this point – a group of people, beholden directly to their leader, who were without exception pleased to be in government and pleased to be included in the beating heart of its executive wing. Of the 20 men and women so honoured, only two had ever sat in a federal cabinet before: Simon Crean, who had been a minister in the Hawke and Keating governments, and John Faulkner, who’d been Keating’s environment minister and who became cabinet secretary under Rudd.

Their meetings were scheduled for Tuesdays in non-sitting weeks and Thursday evenings when parliament was sitting; the fag end of the week, when most denizens of the parliamentary chambers feel the strong urge to flee.

Two major events, occurring early in the Rudd government, served to weaken the cabinet system. The first was a series of leaks concerning the FuelWatch scheme, a proposed government-run website enabling motorists to track pump prices around the country. On 28 May 2008, the Nine Network’s political editor, Laurie Oakes, broadcast details of a significant cabinet leak. Oakes had received copies of the critical remarks appended to the FuelWatch submission by four government departments; among them was the warning that FuelWatch – designed on the promise that it would keep fuel prices down – might conceivably have the reverse effect.

The leak caused considerable alarm because only about 200 people had access to the documents, through the government’s secure IT system, CABNET. FuelWatch died an ignominious death in the end – defeated in the Senate – while its luckless twin, Grocery Watch, was humanely destroyed by Craig Emerson, then competition and consumer affairs minister, in June 2009, just days before it was due to go live.

“The FuelWatch leak created a situation in which Kevin Rudd believed he couldn’t trust the cabinet. His response was to tighten up the cabinet,” recalls one minister of that cabinet. The secretary for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, called departmental secretaries in for a lecture about accountability. Moran’s own department suspended their co-ordinating comments for a period.

The second event was the global financial crisis. On 11 and 12 October 2008, the cabinet’s Strategic Priorities and Budget Committee (SPBC) met all weekend. Working quickly under the threat of advancing global mayhem, the four-member cabinet committee decided on an unprecedented Commonwealth guarantee of Australian banking deposits. Two days later, Rudd announced his first stimulus package – $10.4 billion in direct handouts to shore up the Australian economy.

From that point on, the SPBC – or the ‘Gang of Four’, as it became known, comprising Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner – assumed an unshakable position at the heart of government decision-making. More and more, the Gang of Four made the major decisions and cabinet found out about them down the track. “The decision-making style that stood well for the early days of the global financial crisis became institutionalised by Kevin, well beyond its efficiency,” recalls another cabinet minister of the time. “I think we could have gone back to cabinet decision-making; it was just the way Kevin preferred to work. In his perfect world, he would have decided everything himself.”

The first minister clarifies that it’s not that cabinet did not meet at all, “It’s that the point at which decisions were made changed. The point of decision became the SPBC, or the ERC (Expenditure Review Committee) or the NSC (National Security Committee), rather than cabinet.”

The cabinet handbook issued to Rudd government ministers directs that matters raised in cabinet should be accompanied by written submissions circulated no less than five days in advance, giving all cabinet members an opportunity to read and absorb the matters for discussion. The handbook continues:



Ministers may, by writing to the Cabinet Secretary, seek his agreement to raise particular matters in Cabinet without lodging a formal submission (referred to as ‘matters without submission’ or ‘under the line’ items). The only matters dealt with in this way should be: a) urgent matters of a procedural rather than a policy nature; b) urgent policy matters which are sufficiently straightforward not to require a formal Cabinet submission and which cannot be resolved in another way (for example, by an exchange of correspondence between ministers); and c) appointments.



Between June 2009 and June 2010, however, the cabinet process had deteriorated to the extent that of the matters signed off by cabinet in that time 58% were handled without submission. The consequences for sound decision-making are obvious.

“No one faults the Rudd government for getting right down to it and making the decisions that have been praised around the world,” adds a third cabinet source. “Where the problem arose is that, having found meetings of four members a congenial way to make decisions, they just kept on doing it.”

The SPBC itself did not exist before the Rudd government, and it did not outlive the Rudd government either. It was formed in late 2007 after a review by the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the cabinet secretary. And it was abolished by Julia Gillard one year ago, when she eventually negotiated the confidence of Australia’s 43rd Parliament.

The dominance of the Gang of Four has been widely reported. In one of those accidental strokes of luck, though, its popular nickname has served throughout to obscure the most bizarre and worrying aspects of the committee’s practical, week-to-week operation. ‘Gang of Four’ imparts the crisp suggestion of murderous efficiency; four people, bunkered down, cutting to the chase on issues of solemn national interest, unencumbered by the stray thoughts of lesser-portfolio-bearing bozos.

But the truth is quite otherwise – startlingly so. Under cabinet rules, the only attendees at a cabinet meeting should be ministers, the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the deputy secretaries, who customarily serve as note-takers. But the rules for cabinet committees are much looser; ministerial advisers are permitted and the range of allowable bureaucrats is wider. And, as the SPBC grew in influence, its casual attendance list grew too. “Quite often, SPBC was attended by a horde of advisers,” says one cabinet source. “Sometimes, there would be up to 40 people in the room. It was the business of government being conducted in a very unusual way.”

“When you walked into these meetings, you’d be hard-pressed to get a seat,” recalls a senior bureaucrat. “There’d be the prime minister, sitting there like some kind of potentate, expounding, the ministers would get the occasional word in, and then there’d be the three year olds, who seemed in some weird way suddenly to have equal or superior ranking to the ministers.” (The ‘three year olds’ are Rudd’s notoriously youthful advisers, whose consolation prize for two-and-a-half lacerating years in the PMO is that they shall not grow old.)

The SPBC meetings were convened wherever Rudd happened to be at the time. When in Canberra, they would take place in the cabinet room. When Rudd was elsewhere, bureaucrats and advisers would be summoned to whichever part of the continent he was visiting. They grew to dread the days on which Rudd did not have a scheduled evening engagement to attend, as the meetings would – on those occasions – meander on into the night.

Even then, decisions were not always forthcoming.

One minister, hostile to Rudd, describes a dizzying cycle of vacillation: “Kevin’s style … he wasn’t good at the methodical approach, and it led to a frustrating indecisiveness. Part of the ‘more briefings, more people, more options’ thing was, it was an excuse for not actually being able to say ‘I don’t know.’”

Ministers desperate for decisions tried other ways to get business finalised. Until mid 2009, when John Faulkner was reluctantly conscripted to serve as defence minister, he was regularly called upon by ministers to intercede with the prime minister. Alister Jordan, Rudd’s chief of staff, was another avenue. And Julia Gillard, Rudd’s deputy, established what amounted to a shadow decision-making system that would kick into gear during her regular periods as acting prime minister during Rudd’s absences abroad.

“Bring out your dead!” she would holler on entering the PMO, seeking out long-stalled ambassadorial appointments, out-of-favour briefs and slumbering cabinet submissions. With the help of Rudd’s staff, she would triage as much of the outstanding business as possible, and the show bowled madly on.

And yet, cabinet continued to meet. Signing off on the decisions made at the SPBC; assenting constructively to the way the government was operating – even though many of the constituent ministers now complain they were not consulted. Who is to blame for this failure? Rudd, for being a beastly bossy boots? Or the ministers, for abandoning their commissions?

Patrick Weller, a Queensland academic and cabinet historian who was given privileged access to the PMO during the Rudd term (he was writing a Rudd biography, since suspended), thinks there is some serious revisionism going on.

“The argument now is ‘We failed to say anything, when asked our opinion,’” he says of the Rudd ministers. “They are in fact saying that they had the opportunity and they didn’t take it. That says as much about them as it says about Rudd. At the time, they didn’t disagree. At the time, they seemed to think it was going pretty well. Looking back, they wonder if they should have said something.”

Weller’s view is that there was “nothing particularly unusual” about the way the Rudd government operated; leaders, he says, all have different ways of concentrating their own power. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. “I don’t think there’s ever been a calmly functioning cabinet system,” he says. “History has an interesting way of putting things into context. My favourite is Billy Hughes, who ran the country for 18 months from England. Anyone who says that prime ministers dominate now and didn’t in the past has not read anything about Billy Hughes.”

It certainly seems remarkable that a group of adults sworn to the obligations of executive office could collectively tolerate such an extraordinary environment as the one the ministers privately outline. Even today, they are unable to explain it. Julia Gillard’s own position is fairly invidious: she defended this system right up until the point at which she declared it intolerable. Her loyalty to Rudd right up until the week she deposed him – and evidence of previous perfidy is extremely difficult to find – makes her challenge to him all the harder to explain. Having covered for him for so long, she is now unable to claim provocation for the fatal blow.

Why didn’t the cabinet ministers band together and confront Rudd? Surely, when they saw each other outside their formal meetings they could talk of nothing else? Did they talk at all?

“We didn’t, much,” says one. “That was one of the extraordinary things. On the night when Julia had been meeting with Kevin, there was a whole bunch of people down in Julia’s office. Bill Shorten made the comment: ‘It’s amazing how many people can have been thinking the same thing but not have spoken to each other.’ Everyone down there was thinking: ‘Oh! You too?’”

On one level, this is a familiar situation for anyone who’s ever worked in an office; the way dysfunctional relationships evolve and entrench themselves. But it’s a little confronting to find that the same mundane failings attend those who run our country. And the most chilling element of it all is that this group of people – the most powerful collection of elected decision-makers in Australia – remained passive until the very end. Left to their own devices, they would have let things go along as they were. They learned about the coup from the television.

“Ministers were genuinely out of the loop,” reported Barrie Cassidy in his book, The Party Thieves. “Many of them, according to the backbenchers, were actually part of the problem. They had become subservient to the leader, seemingly satisfied to be humiliated. So they were literally the last to know, the last to be told.” After the factional leaders (Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney) talked Julia Gillard into initiating the challenge, most of Kevin Rudd’s cabinet – apart from Anthony Albanese, Craig Emerson, Martin Ferguson and John Faulkner – jumped aboard, with varying degrees of alacrity.

*

Nick Champion is a young backbencher from South Australia. He stunned many of his colleagues on 9 September last year when he got to his feet, after Julia Gillard’s first post-election address to caucus, and spoke about the cravenness and mute compliance he felt had entrapped them all in recent years.

The speech was a long time in the writing for Champion. The former union official still has the notes for a speech he drafted to deliver to his second-ever caucus meeting, just after the Rudd government’s landslide election. In it, he constructed an argument against Rudd’s decision to select ministers himself. The caucus rules, he planned to say, existed as a safeguard against erratic leaders (at this point, Champion intended a dramatic gesture towards the caucus room’s three-tiered photo wall of leaders, with its sprinkling of maddies: Billy Hughes, Doc Evatt, Mark Latham).

But Champion never delivered that speech; he chickened out. “I ran through all the normal political arguments, I suppose,” he recalls. “Yes, it’s the right thing to do. Yes, I believe it. But taking on the prime minister on my second day? I didn’t do it, in the end, and I regretted it for the rest of the term.” When he finally spoke, then, nearly three years later, it was with a pent-up urgency. Having ceded the power to Rudd to select ministers, he argued, the party owed Rudd the loyalty to confront him – rather than simply knock him over – when dissatisfaction arose with the way he was exercising that power.

Champion’s concern is with checks and balances. Firstly, the safeguard of the caucus vote as a means of checking the possible excesses of the leader. Failing that, the protection of the Westminster system, which obliges ministers appointed by their leader to do the honourable thing and resign rather than continue to serve in circumstances of resentful obeisance, as unquestionably happened under Rudd.

*

The mood among Gillard’s colleagues is bleak this sitting week, the second-last before parliament’s long winter recess. It’s freezing. The sky is the colour of cold dishwater. In the ornamental garden beds that heap up beside Commonwealth Avenue just before it bridges Lake Burley Griffin, purple and yellow pansies pick out the words “Cerebral Palsy”. The newspapers are full of horrible polls for Labor.

There’s a weird dynamic going on in the caucus though; a sort of Blitz mentality, or doomed bloody-mindedness. One backbencher gives me a rousing speech about the importance of difficult, unpopular decisions, and how Gillard has earned the respect of her colleagues by fronting up to the carbon pricing issue and not allowing herself to be rattled. “Course though,” he grins blackly, “we’re gonna get smashed.”

The clearest difference between the Gillard government and the Rudd government is that the Gillard government is prepared to suffer in pursuit of a goal. And to a significant degree, members of the Labor caucus – some grudgingly, some relieved finally to be standing and fighting for something – are signed up to it. Signed up to prosecuting the case for pricing carbon, even though they’re on the bum end of serial reversals, and even though just about every advantage they had three years ago when embarking on this project – virtual bipartisan consensus, the raw horsepower of a newly minted mandate, the halcyon promise of matching efforts in the US, the galvanising influence of a frighteningly long drought – has since evaporated.

Perhaps this is principle. Steel in the spine, at last. A recognition that political expediency – a tactic neither Gillard nor Rudd can reasonably attribute exclusively each to the other – is no match for long-term courage and conviction.

Maybe. Or maybe there are just no quick fixes left to try.

Julia Gillard, a year into her prime ministership, is in an odd position: she is still a new leader but she leads a government that is older. Only two-and-a-half years older, true, but it’s a government that has been aged prematurely by dysfunction and regime change. There is a reason why Australia doesn’t change its governments very often. Changing governments is disruptive, expensive and wasteful beyond our worst nightmares. It’s not just the changing of the letterhead. Departing governments always leave junk behind, and incoming governments want to throw everything out and start again. Long-term programs get canned, wasting resources and all the work public servants put in to creating them.

Sometimes, new governments will salvage something from the discard pile of previous tenants. The idea of a federally funded insulation program, for example, was initially proposed as a $2.5 billion emissions reduction scheme by Malcolm Turnbull’s environment department in the last days of the Howard government – and rejected by Peter Costello, who could not understand why people who had bought insulation for their own homes should be obliged to subsidise those who hadn’t. Rudd’s government recycled it as a stimulus scheme, and the rest is history.

All this stopping and starting; it’s wearying and expensive. And it chips the hell out of the paintwork. It’s what makes the Gillard government, at a tender one year of age, seem raddled well before its time. But the curious fix that the Gillard government is in is that it cannot rely on the normal device of new governments, which is to express profound dismay at the level of previously undocumented waste and mismanagement it found waiting for it upon arrival at the Treasury benches, and the need for major revisions.

Apart from a handful of changes, the Gillard cabinet is the same bunch as the Rudd cabinet (John Faulkner and Lindsay Tanner have left, and Greg Combet and Mark Dreyfus have arrived). Of the 21 elected representatives entitled to attend cabinet as a matter of course, 19 are the same people who so very recently were in large part mute witnesses to their own disempowerment. Every policy shift or new initiative – perfectly normal and to be expected under any new government – creates a new circumstance about which Gillard cannot be entirely frank. This is the tragedy for Julia Gillard: loyal to Kevin Rudd for perhaps too long, she is now permanently shackled to his mistakes and miserably unable to claim his successes.

Lachlan Harris, Rudd’s former press secretary, wrote perceptively in the Sunday Telegraph that the events of June 2010 in effect created, at the head of the Labor government, a weird, Hollywood-style amalgam of two people, which he calls “Kulia”. “The Rudd and Gillard who led Labor out of the wilderness after 11 years in opposition are gone,” he wrote. “Like Tom and Katie, their individual stars dimmed, replaced not by each other, but the dysfunctional and politically toxic sum of their individual parts.” Many middle-of-the-road voters thought, Harris argued, that Labor was now led by a relationship, not a prime minister.

“I worked non-stop for four years for Kevin Rudd. If asked, I would do the same for Gillard. But on most days, the thought of going in to bat for Kulia fills me with dread. I have built a career arguing for Labor, but sometimes there is nothing that can be said.”

In some cases, the Gillard government retains the labels appended to the previous government, even where circumstances have clearly changed. Take, for instance, the widely held view that the government is poll-driven. This is a perception fed by last year’s panicky reversals on climate policy, on asylum seekers, on the mining tax, on population growth, and so on.

But it’s a hard case to make now against the federal government, as Julia Gillard, quite aware of how deeply unpopular the idea of a carbon tax is, pursues it nonetheless. Calls it a carbon tax, even, when there is a reasonable case to be made that a fixed price is necessary at the beginning of any emissions trading scheme. “Are you kidding me?” laughs the minister with whom I raise the question of whether Labor’s reliance on voter research has eased. There’s a hysterical edge to his voice. “Do we look poll-driven to you? I mean, are we reading them upside down, or what?”

Gillard herself says that voter research should only be used for gauging mood: “So, for example, with carbon pricing, they’re already very anxious coming out of the global financial crisis; natural disasters, cost of living pressures; they’re already anxious, and we are discomfiting them more. So you need to just understand that, because it helps you understand that when you speak about this, you’ve got to talk about it in the language of reassurance and those sorts of things.”

On the Monday morning of the week in which we are talking, the prime minister ducks out of Parliament House and around to the National Convention Centre Canberra, where the Australian Local Government Association’s national conference (an event riddled with mayors, whose keen local knowledge and undisguised hankering for specific funding promises make them nerve-racking company for any prime minister) was underway. Gillard steps out of her Commonwealth limousine and sweeps inside, her driver tidily furling the bonnet flag and popping a little sock over it for the estimated half-hour or so the PM is scheduled to be inside.

As usually happens, Gillard’s accompanying staff ensure that her 2500-word speech is placed on the lectern, ready for her. As very rarely happens, however, the person introducing the prime minister – in this case ALGA president Genia McCaffery, who is also the independent mayor of North Sydney – precedes her to the lectern, places her own notes over those of the PM, introduces her warmly … and then decamps with the lot.

No one apart from Gillard – not even McCaffery – notices what has happened until after the prime minister has concluded her speech, 15 minutes of enthusiasm about the constitutional aspirations of the local government sector, broadcast live on ABC News 24. Gillard, having spent a half-hour reviewing the speech early that morning, has retained enough to present a fairly handy simulacrum off the top of her head, which she prefers to do rather than make a fuss about the notes. After the speech, which is judged a success by those milling about afterwards, Gillard’s staff retrieves the notes from the horrified McCaffery and the PM returns to her car – flag proudly unfurled – and cruises back for her meeting with the prime minister of New Zealand.

Gillard certainly is difficult to rattle. With Rudd, you could spot his panic attacks from a mile off; when the home insulation program veered into disaster, for example, he threw himself into a round of media self-criticism, and called an emergency caucus meeting in which he instructed MPs and senators to rush out and apologise to insulation companies in their electorates. Gillard, on the other hand, seems almost to relish her unpopularity as a badge of her own determination. She is from the dysfunctional Left of the Labor Party in Victoria, after all. Working effectively among people who dislike her is hardly a new thing. She takes her pain up-front, and in the months to come in the carbon pricing debate, perhaps her early pain will bear fruit. For all the attempts to sell this prime minister as a reformist visionary, as a giggling shed-dodger, girl next door or Scripture-reciting atheist, her best quality is simpler: she’s tough as guts. And if the population ever cottons on to the idea that she could be tough for them, that will be half the battle.

In forging ahead with her plan to price carbon, Julia Gillard has fulfilled one of the sternest tests of leadership; preparedness to do grievous political harm to oneself in the pursuit of an unpopular reform. She has also extracted some quite extraordinary results from a parliament that many deemed, just a year ago, to be precarious beyond hope.

The popular perception is that the government is hamstrung by its creaking one-vote parliamentary majority in the House of Representatives. But it’s not had a single piece of legislation blocked in the last year. The Clerk’s office, in the House of Reps, reports that the government has lost just seven votes so far in the 43rd Parliament of Australia. Seven! Of these, the first was a minor procedural matter concerning whether votes could automatically be recast if members missed them for good reasons, such as being unavoidably stuck in lifts. Three were on the question: “That the Member be no longer heard.” One was on the question: “That the Leader of the Opposition be granted an extension of time.” The sixth was a foiled attempt to throw out the member for Paterson, Bob Baldwin, and the seventh was Scott Morrison’s motion condemning the government’s Malaysian refugee deal. An eighth instance, which the clerk doesn’t technically count as a lost government vote but the Coalition counts as a win, is the Nationals MP Luke Hartsuyker’s successful private member’s bill amending federal environment laws to allow the NSW government to remove bats from the trees at Maclean High School. So that’s the dreadful damage, so far, that the new paradigm has wrought on the Gillard government: extra minutes for Tony Abbott and Bob Baldwin, a bit of symbolism about Malaysia and bad news for some bats in northern NSW. The dirty secret of minority government has been that, in practice for the Gillard government, it hasn’t actually been that bad.

And now the prime minister has emerged from months of crossbench negotiations with – incredibly – a carbon pricing scheme that is backed by the Greens but exempts petrol; that commits Australia to rigorous emissions cuts by 2050, but seems at the same time to have assuaged the worst fears of the steel industry; and that has an overdue shot at tax reform on the way through. Whatever you think of the policy or its sponsors, it’s an impressive piece of negotiation.

But everywhere the prime minister goes, people can’t – or won’t – listen. There’s a gap they cannot get across: what she did and said a year ago. The silent elimination of Kevin Rudd, and the broken promise not to introduce a carbon tax. She must bridge the gap, because in order to explain something like carbon pricing, any prime minister must have if not a sympathetic public ear, at least an open one. Perhaps her bloody-minded determination in the face of all this will, over time, become her mud map. Stranger things have happened.

Cabinet processes, under Gillard, have been laboriously reinstated. The full range of cabinet sub-committees – excepting the SPBC, which has been abandoned to history’s ‘freaks and oddities’ file – are meeting again. The proportion of matters arriving at cabinet ‘without submission’ has declined in the period since September 2010 to just 15%. Things are different now, says the cabinet minister who earlier mused on the group’s failure to confer. “We have the argument around the table. It never divides along factional lines. It’s a pretty serious discussion.”

But the insider–outsider divide between Canberra and the rest of Australia has never been so wide. Outside, people want to know why the government can’t get anything right, and what happened to that nice Kevin chap. Inside, they can’t quite explain why it took so long to get rid of him. Either way, it adds up to a catastrophic disconnect between representative and represented. And as people wonder – quite reasonably – why it’s taking the Gillard government so long to do anything, the secret, inadmissible, but honest answer is: it’s cleaning up after itself. Rebuilding a system of decision-making that more closely resembles the one we always assumed to be there. Junking billions of dollars worth of Rudd-authored federal schemes, and whipper-snipping the lavish Rudd-era foliage that sprang up around the Council of Australian Governments into something more manageable. Blandly rephrasing the national health deal, which consumed two of Kevin Rudd’s last months as prime minister – months that he spent in mob-caps touring public hospitals to achieve a breakthrough barely anybody understood. Quietly contracting the Education Revolution to an acronym. Reversing Rudd’s border protection policies, while continuing to deny that those policies had any effect on the rate of boat arrivals to Australia. Fixing a problem, while maintaining that it never existed.

Out of truth and lies, lies are always harder. But when the Labor Party decided – in a mad, exhilarating rush – to get rid of its leader 14 months ago, this is the course it set for itself: to govern without candour, dogged horribly by the memory of what it was and unable to explain what it wants to be.

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Billy Hughes, Carbon tax, Decision-making, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Lindsay Tanner, Prime Ministers, Senate, The Global Financial Crisis, The Greens

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