The Rudd Government has certainly run into some trouble over the mining tax, the scrapping of the ETS and the botched insulation scheme, but more significantly it has hit the skids due to the personal style of Kevin Rudd himself.
You don’t get a much bigger step away from the leadership of Kevin Rudd than appointing Australia’s first female, single, atheist Prime Minister.
She’s a superior communicator to Rudd, and has a better chance of beating Tony Abbott, a fact that was written across the Opposition Leader’s slightly panicked face all day yesterday.
You only have to look at how NSW Labor went in the Penrith by-election last weekend to see how well Keneally’s going with voters. Labor’s looking at ending up with a barely a cricket team in the NSW parliament, and there’s nothing the photogenic Keneally can do to stop it.
Next. Keneally was forced to espouse her now famous “I’m no body’s puppet…” after her own predecessor Nathan Rees accused her of being just that. She was installed by NSW factional heavyweights Joe Tripodi and Eddy Obeid. The next day she sang their praises to the Daily Telegraph.
Tony Abbott was quick to level a similar accusation at Gillard yesterday, constantly referring to “the Labor powerbrokers who installed her”.
Gillard brushed it off with two sharp responses. The first was in her press conference when she said:
This isn’t my first day in the parliamentary building, I’ve been here since 1998, and I would defy anyone to analyse my parliamentary career and find that I have done anything but made up my own mind.
Then in an interview with Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report she emphatically denied doing any deals to promote the men, such as Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib, who had delivered her the numbers for victory.
When Keneally was asked the same thing in a press conference she made reference to something she’d done as an eight-year-old.
The new Prime Minister took the job on her own terms. The powerbrokers who “installed” her did so only after expending vast energy to convince her to knife her boss, and pictures of Gillard on Wednesday night leaving Kevin Rudd’s office showed a complete absence of relish in her demeanour.
Not that Gillard would ever say something so insubstantial as “I’m nobody’s puppet, I’m nobody’s girl”, but if she did, at least it would be true.
Keneally’s ascension to the Premiership was not a win for women. But the swearing in yesterday of our first female Prime Minister is absolutely something to be celebrated, because no matter who came to her with the numbers, Gillard got there by her own effort