As tigtog says, “the level of personal vituperation” she’s attracted in some quarters is surely inordinate. However, I agree with her when she also writes that:

…it would be wrong to dismiss all that anger against the new leader as simply a misogynistic response to the reality of a woman finally running the country.

I think gender has been deployed in complex ways in the reaction to Gillard’s rise to power. As ludicrous as her characterisation as Lady Macbeth is (an analogy that could only be made by those that don’t know their Shakespeare), similarly praise of her as some sort of reincarnated Queen Elizabeth I sounds a most odd note.

And it’s been distasteful to read tendentious comments from Labor supporters damning any legitimate criticism of Gillard’s actions as PM as sexist, when a lot of it patently isn’t. This sort of thing is just the flip side of the uncritical fantasies projected on her, and the failure or refusal to assess her performance in the high office she’s attained outside the context of her gender is a common theme.

In part, this sentiment probably derives from a view that was common some time ago, an essentialisation of femininity which led to a belief that women’s presence in politics would bring about a utopia of niceness. Catherine Marshall’s article in Eureka Street partakes of this trope, reinforced by a portrait of Gillard as somehow fragile.

In both instances, whether people are praising Gillard or not, they’re drawing portraits of her in terms of qualities which are putatively of the essence of woman, qualities whose negation also shows forth in the rush to condemn her for the way she became Labor leader.

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of the angst about her successful challenge to Kevin Rudd derives from the fact that it made some of us confront the fact that the Labor Party is not much of a viable vehicle for idealism.

Those of us who’ve seen Anna Bligh’s government trash Labor values with abandon in Queensland over the last few years are left completely disillusioned with a party so prepared to adopt the views of its political opponents on the basis of presumptions about what marginal suburban voters want, now that attitude has also been enthusiastically embraced by the federal party.

On the other hand, we know well that the election of a female leader with a background in the left provides anything but a guarantee that progressive politics will triumph.

The truth is that Julia Gillard should be judged on her own merits.

There is no doubt that she is an impressive politician. Whether or not she fulfills that promise as Prime Minister is something that is not yet evident. While celebrating the fact that a woman is Prime Minister, we need also to be realistic about the fact the elements of the Labor Party who contributed to her ascension are ones whose motives are partly self-serving and partly purely electorally driven. Her election by caucus should prompt us to take stock of what the Labor party has become, and what could be done to change it.

While praising Gillard, rightly, for her significant past contributions to the feminist cause, and to the cause of equality for women in the workplace, Anne Summers is also right to warn us of the complacent attitude that a female PM means that all is now rosy in gender relations in this country. That’s a theme echoed by Shakira Hussein:

… the hardest feminist battles have never been the struggle for a few women to attain positions of power.

And the most difficult battles are also the most important, because they are the battles for the most vulnerable.

In recognising that, we need to make the way the Gillard Labor government responds to the needs of the most vulnerable our yardstick. And in so doing, we need to avoid the danger of lauding her to the skies simply because she is a woman. But we also need to be vigilant about those who can see a female PM only through a misogynist lens.

There is no doubt that the reaction to Julia Gillard’s rise to the top also demonstrates that we, as a society, have a long way to go in escaping the snares of a culture still too marred by misogyny. If we become more collectively conscious of that, then that would be a true gain from the events of the last few weeks.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the leadership spill is here.

24-hour media cycle does no favours for our democracy

We are all New South Welsh-persons now.

Three Tweets encapsulated the extraordinary series of events which brought down a first term Prime Minister:

Daniel Burt:

“We live in fickle and disposable times.”

Richard Di Natale:

“Damn poll driven politics. Narrow one dimensional snapshots of a single point in time are meaningless.”

Jonathan Green:

“A certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat.”

Australians don’t pay anything like the constant attention to politics that suffuses the world of the journosphere, the political tragics, the commentariat. Or, of course, the world of Labor MPs and Ministers, many of whom were among the last to know that a coup against Kevin Rudd was in the works yesterday.

A lot of citizens will only be hearing now for the first time that Australia has a new Prime Minister. I’ve just had an email from a friend asking what has happened, and I won’t be the only one. My Facebook feed is full of people expressing shock that this could occur.

There was a significant moment on ABC tv this morning when Chris Uhlmann, asked about the public’s response to this sequence of unlikely events, could only answer that he didn’t know, and segue into a discussion of how Canberra public servants are feeling.

Australia is not contained in Canberra, not that Canberra is a bad thing. But the political class needs to remember that.

Much as those attached to the verities of the Westminster system might protest otherwise, it’s difficult for many to come to terms with the fact that an elected PM has been torn down.

And it will be particularly difficult if the plotters can’t get beyond policy wonk talk, process stuff, egos, and insider ALP obsessions. ‘The polls made us do it’, ‘Rudd was a bad chair of meetings’ and ‘Alister Jordan’ won’t cut the mustard.

Let’s make no mistake. It is a historic day for our country to have a female Prime Minister.

But it is also a historic tragedy that a first term Prime Minister, the first Labor leader to win a national election since 1993, has been politically executed by his own party. It’s a tragedy which will set a disturbing precedent.

Julia Gillard has become Labor leader at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and through the agency of the wrong people.

But let’s leave that aside. What does this event tell us about post-modern politics?

A few days ago, talk of a leadership challenge appeared to be the preserve of a bunch of urgers in the press gallery. No one outside the hermetic Canberra circle could have realistically expected what unfolded last night to occur.

After Kevin Rudd’s dignified and moving press conference today, the media couldn’t wait to get back to parsing the micro-details of his address. A pause for reflection on a very human moment might have been better than the ghoulish sights and sounds of the vultures circling his political corpse, and picking over the entrails of his remarks. It’s a very good argument against the relentless and dehumanising noise of the 24/7 media cycle.

Consider the comparison between the life cycle of the British New Labour government and Kevin Rudd’s 2 years and 5 months in office.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s reformed spinmeister, has written persuasively of the propensity of the press to devour politicians. The charge that spin takes precedence over governing is an ironic one when made by those with a never satiated appetite for yet another event, a yearning for an always renewed narrative.

Tony Blair survived three victorious elections before making an exit whose timing was not of his own choosing. A massively unpopular war was one of the key reasons for his demise.

Kevin Rudd has not been permitted to face the people as Prime Minister. He looked quite shocked at the fact that his political demise came when it did, and with good reason.

Poll driven perspectives ignore the fact that polls reflect a static view of political reality, and the absurdity of demanding that leaders shape up or ship out according to the Newspoll timetable should be evident.

It’s damaging our democracy, and profoundly. We’re constantly being told, in the anodyne language adopted by the commentariat, that Labor needed ‘clear air’, and that Kevin Rudd couldn’t ‘cut through’. Yet no one has explained to me how a complex and sustained political argument could be prosecuted in the context of a media obsessed with the eternal present.

We might well pause to reflect on the irony that Kevin Rudd, whose performance today should forever negate claims that he’s a passionless robot consumed only by anger or ambition, was trying to do so – on the Resources Super Profits Tax. That was impossible, it would seem, in the face of a concerted campaign by the big battalions of industry, and those backroom apparatchiks whose utterances were amplified by the megaphones of the media.

Kevin Rudd was arguing for progressive reform, and because he couldn’t be seen to ‘back flip’, his leadership was the sole obstacle to those who believe they properly own our resources and our public sphere. He had to go, they pronounced, and the Labor party obliged.

If leadership, in both senses of the word, is what is at issue, we must ask ourselves whether we allow our leaders the space, and the time, to exercise their political craft as we would like to see it practiced.

In a single parliamentary term, we’ve now seen three opposition leaders and two Prime Ministers.

Much has been made of purported governance concerns: a ‘kitchen cabinet’ and faceless advisors distinguished only by the supposed callowness of youth. Yet the faces of the hit squad who destroyed Rudd’s leadership are hardly well known.

Gordon Brown also promised a return to cabinet government, and due process, after Tony Blair’s ‘government on the sofa’ was roundly condemned. Yet nothing changed. It may be impossible, in a world where an hour is a long time in politics, to govern at the pace of a slower era.

Julia Gillard, whatever her intentions, may learn that lesson quickly. And that any honeymoon will be short indeed. The opposition, and the media, have been laying down the lines of attack, in readiness for the latest twist in the political narrative they’ve arrogated themselves the right to script.

Rudd was right, in his address to caucus, to warn against the transformation of federal politics into the sordid realms of Labor politics, New South Wales style. Yet the ALP held power in the Premier State for thirteen years before its leader was overthrown.

If the AWU and Sussex Street types who orchestrated Rudd’s downfall believe that Labor can win only by attacking the Coalition from the right (which I’d have thought was barely possible with Tony Abbott as leader), and by throwing the leader overboard at the first sign of trouble, then they only have to survey the damage wrought in NSW.

In the United States, the United Kingdom, and in this Commonwealth of Australia, disillusion with politics as usual has been the abiding sentiment of the electorate over recent years. We should stop to consider whether the culture of constant obsolescence and the relentless drumbeat of narratives of the eternal now we’ve just seen make history, almost without knowing what it was doing, is good for any of us.

Will any future Prime Minister take the time to reflect, or have the courage to lead, knowing that a few marginal seat polls and a media firestorm can dissolve their legitimacy in the flick of an eyelid?

Most political observers agree that the Labor party was still odds on to win this year’s federal election. The events of the past two days ought to make all of us slow down, take a breath, and think about what our democracy really requires of us.

One of the central reasons Kevin Michael Rudd was elected the 26th Prime Minister of Australia was that he correctly identified a widespread public sentiment that the problems we confront go beyond the short term horizons of the political and media class. Whatever his failings, and for me, many of them pall beside the dignity of his exit from high office, we must now ask ourselves whether politics as usual allows any leader to wrestle with the great moral challenges of our time.

Because those challenges are not going away, even as the timescale of the Twitterverse and the 24 hour news machine rolls relentlessly on to another moment of the present.

Dr Mark Bahnisch is a sociologist and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He founded the leading public affairs blog, Larvatus Prodeo.

Kevin Rudd didn’t stand for the leadership.

Wayne Swan is Deputy Prime Minister, and both were elected unopposed.

Previous coverage at LP here.

Elsewhere: Guy Rundle:

Gillard Labor might give itself a few days of sunshine before the storm.

Elsewhere: Jacinda Woodhead at Overland, Jonathan Green, Guy Beres, Possum.

Elsewhere: Andrew Norton.

Elsewhere: Crikey’s live blog.

Update: Gillard is expected to give a press conference at 11am AEST, which will be televised live on ABC1.

Elsewhere: Skepticlawyer.

Update: The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, will now be giving a press conference at 11.20am, and the Leader of the Labor Party, Julia Gillard, will be speaking at 11.40am. After her press conference, Gillard is expected to go to Government House to be sworn in as Prime Minister.

Update: Kevin Rudd is having great difficulty keeping his composure during his press conference.

Update: I’ve posted links to the YouTube of Kevin Rudd’s last press conference as PM and Julia Gillard’s first press conference as Labor Leader.

Elsewhere: Club Troppo, Tim Dunlop at The Drum, No Right Turn.

Update: Catriona Menzies-Pike asks in New Matilda if this is how you smash a glass ceiling.

It’s not an insignificant thing to tear down a Prime Minister in his first term, a Labor leader who’s the first to win a federal election since 1993.

The problem with the poll obsessed apparatchiks is that their horizon is always the next poll. And they tend always to have a static assessment of the political situation.

In a situation like we face today, where it would seem a number of marginal seat polls have given unexpected momentum to a putsch dreamed up by so-called ‘hard heads’ in the ALP right, and talked up through the ‘media narrative’, I wonder whether any thought has been given to the need to persuade the public of the need to destroy a Prime Minister. Any thought that is, beyond simplistic reasoning that hardly goes beyond ‘Rudd’s the problem, so if he’s removed, there will be less of a problem’.

Paul Howes’ appearance on Lateline tonight indicates there isn’t much of a communications strategy within the Gillard camp (where his, and the AWU’s, tent is firmly pitched). The plotters will need to articulate something much more persuasive than ‘the polls made us do it’ and ‘Alister Jordan’s calling MPs offended Gillard’. The stupidity of the ‘Rudd disloyal to Gillard’ theme was apparent, and apparently Howes only belatedly realised that announcements that unions such as his and the HSU had swung their support to Gillard opened the way to the Kristina Keneally attack – a leader installed by faceless union bosses and party apparatchiks.

Indeed, that’s a theme Kevin Rudd astutely exploited in his press conference tonight [full text here].

Howes made nothing of any policy differences between Gillard and Rudd, and continually claimed that the Rudd government was a good government.

I don’t imagine that ‘we were goaded by Dennis Shanahan and Peter Van Onselen’s columns’ would be persuasive either. Unless this really is a “coup by commentariat”. Or Howes’ other line, which equated to a feeling of panic that Tony Abbott and the Coalition would defeat Labor.

Anyone who imagines that, if Julia Gillard is Prime Minister tomorrow, she will have no need to explain why she is, and Rudd no longer is, lives in a fool’s paradise.

It also won’t be long before Gillard’s reported reluctance to challenge is questioned. Did she really first become aware of moves which have obviously been in train for some time earlier this afternoon?

As I said earlier, this challenge, it would seem, has been brought to you by the genius “strategists” who talked Rudd into dropping the ETS in the first place, setting in train his plunge in the polls. The NSW Right, as I’ve said before, knows no other response to bad focus groups than to bring on a leadership challenge. Political courage and leadership is unknown among the apparatchiks and Sussex Street types.

If the ALP dumps Rudd now, it will be the height of political stupidity, and be a demonstration of nothing but craven cowardice in the face of a media/mining industry orchestrated campaign, at a time when the polls indicate, despite a low primary vote, the ALP is still odds on to win the election.

While I’d like to see Julia Gillard become PM, the Labor Party would be insane to dump Rudd now, and nor should they.

If Rudd prevails, heads should roll.

Previously on LP: The events of tonight as they unfolded are documented on this post and thread.

Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger, Bernard Keane.

Update: The full text of Kevin Rudd’s press conference.

Elsewhere: Hoyden About Town, Politically Homeless, Shakira Hussein at The Stump.

The story follows a report in today’s Fairfax papers that Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had been asked to take soundings among MPs on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and claims from The Australian that Julia Gillard had done herself and her party a dis-service by not initiating the challenge the paper had been talking up at yesterday’s caucus.

Update: There’s now a report on the ABC News website.

Update: The Twitter hashtag #spill is being revived… though #ruddroll also has its admirers.

Update: Kerry O’Brien says there’ll be more later on in the 7.30 Report. Meanwhile, the most astute summary on Twitter comes from RachWelsh who points out that some tweeting journos with sources are saying something is happening, and others are not.

Update: Heather Ewart on the 7.30 Report claimed that meetings were taking place between elements of the NSW and Victorian Right, and Mark Arbib is said to have defected from Rudd. She reported that Gillard is meeting with Rudd, but of course, Gillard may be meeting with Rudd to quash the unchallenge. Or not.

Update: Fairfax reports (at 7.39pm) that Gillard’s office has said “nothing has changed”.

Update: There’s very little news among all the noise. Bill Shorten is said to be one of those orchestrating the unchallenge, and the AWU has reportedly withdrawn its support for Rudd.

Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Anthony Albanese and John Faulkner are reported to be in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Gillard is reported to be not intending to challenge.

This micro-event, it would seem, has been brought to you by the genius “strategists” who talked Rudd into dropping the ETS in the first place, setting in train his plunge in the polls. The NSW Right, as I’ve said before, knows no other response to bad focus groups than to bring on a leadership challenge. Political courage and leadership is unknown among the apparatchiks and Sussex Street types.

And we’ve also had an unprecedented campaign against the PM from the media and the mining industry. While I’d like to see Gillard become PM, the Labor Party would be insane to dump Rudd now, and nor should they.

This will be highly damaging, coming as it does just at the point when it appeared that things could be turned around for the government. If I were Julia Gillard, I’d urge Rudd to convene a caucus meeting tomorrow morning, and personally move a confidence motion in his leadership. And heads should roll in the ALP. Soon.

Update: The Punch, which is live blogging what is still the unchallenge, reports that John Faulkner between Gillard and Rudd.

I’ll repeat what I said before: if the ALP dumps Rudd now, it will be the height of stupidity, and be a demonstration of nothing but craven cowardice in the face of a media/mining industry orchestrated campaign, at a time when the polls indicate, despite a low primary vote, the ALP is still odds on to win the election.

Update: Paul Howes has just Tweeted that he’ll be on Lateline to explain the AWU’s position.

Update: Rachel Hills says it all on Twitter:

I feel like much of the anti-Rudd sentiment recently is more journalists getting bored with him than a newfound excess of crapness. #spill

Update: The Drum editor Jonathan Green on Twitter:

a certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat

Update: Sky News is reporting Kevin Rudd will be giving a press conference in the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Update: Lots of Tweets claiming that Rudd is about to quit.

Update: Rudd’s press conference will be televised live on ABC1 very soon.

Update: Rudd has convened caucus to meet at 9am. Gillard will be challenging. He is not standing down.

Update: Rudd indicates he will be running against faction and union domination. He is also running against the NSW Right, indicating that if he wins he will not be retreating from the RSPT, or giving in to calls for a hardline on asylum seekers. He suggested forward movement on climate change.

Update: New thread here.

I stand by the analysis I offered last night – Turnbull has the numbers, and if he has the will, he can re-establish his leadership on the basis of these events.

The numbers on the CPRS bill can’t be transposed to the leadership. The Nats don’t have a vote for that, and George Brandis on Lateline was very pointed in emphasising that Turnbull had a larger majority among *Liberals*. Brandis also commented that several who disagreed with Turnbull on the ETS strongly supported his leadership.

Tony Abbott’s behaviour, in praising Turnbull this morning, demonstrates that he knows which way the wind is now blowing, and wants to preserve his position in the face of possible retribution against those who’ve sought to bring their leader down.

Liberal MPs who want to chuck Turnbull out had the opportunity to do so last night, and didn’t take it? Why? Because he has a majority of the Liberal party behind him as leader. That will become clear when he defeats Andrews today.

Parliament rises for the year on Friday.

How, exactly, is he going to be toppled? By a strongly worded Wilson Tuckey email?

All this media stuff about the “killing fields of December” is all well and good, but they don’t decide the leadership on the basis of counting op/eds but by a vote of their parliamentary party.

As I argued last night, Turnbull now has the power to reward and punish, and the reporting of the lobbying before the meeting made it clear that his numbers people were concentrating dissidents’ minds about the long delayed reshuffle.

The Libs might of course be insane enough to topple him this afternoon, but if not, he’s got til February to re-establish his leadership, and has some weapons with which to do that. It’s not certain that he will do so, but in my view, he has the chance to rebuild his position, and I’d be very surprised indeed if he doesn’t take it. I imagine that he regards these events as a game changer. He’s clearly appealling over the head of his own party to public opinion, and that was made evident in his press conference last night.

The commentariat appear to be following the “doomed leader” script. What about the “strong leader stands up to dinosaurs in his own party and gains extra kudos” script? Or what about recognising that politics is more complex and unpredictable than a menu of ‘media narratives’ might suggest?

Update: The ABC is live streaming Kevin Andrews’ press conference here.

Update: Follow the Liberal madness on Twitter.

Update: Malcolm Turnbull has survived a secret ballot on a leadership spill motion 48-35.

Update: Abbott has resigned, further developments anticipated. Please comment on the new thread here.