In the history of Australian politics there has never been a collapse as dramatic, unexpected and unnecessary as the one experienced by Kevin Rudd during the past two months. Those who have been supporters of the prime minister and his government must now try to answer as honestly as possible the overwhelming question: what has gone wrong?
The story of the Rudd government falls rather neatly into three discrete chapters. The first involves the fulfilment of promises and the conjuring of dreams. In coming to office, the Rudd government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, an important but easy and essentially costless exercise. On the first sitting day of the new parliament, with considerable eloquence and grace, Kevin Rudd offered an apology to the stolen generations, by almost universal agreement the high point of his government. Some months later, the prime minister called one thousand Australians to Canberra where his ego was massaged by an adoring crowd but where, in the absence of anything resembling rational process, virtually nothing of substance was achieved.
More seriously, the government took the first steps towards the fulfilment of its rather grandiose agenda to “fix the Federation”, to enact an “education revolution”, to prepare for root and branch reforms of the national health and the taxation systems, to “close the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, to revitalise Australian manufacturing with an industry policy, and to build a $43 billion national broadband network and a formidable submarine fleet. In the sphere of domestic policy, the government began work on the replacement for WorkChoices and on a modest system of paid parental leave. In the sphere of foreign policy, it promised to play a major role in reducing world poverty and the nuclear weapons threat, in reshaping the international architecture of the Asia–Pacific region and, above all other things, in helping solve the diabolical problem of climate change. Hopes were high. Ambitions were Whitlamesque. Both the prime minister and his government enjoyed one of the longest political honeymoons in the history of Australia.
