Reshuffle doesn’t guarantee Gillard a winning hand

POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallum

Commentary on Julia Gillard’s ministerial reshuffle has tended to concentrate on the negatives – not just from the Nomadic Noman, Tony Abbott, but from more serious pundits as well. And it is true that in the short term – from here to the next Newspoll, which is the attention span of most media these days – there is not too much to commend it.

Gillard’s apparent inability to sack or demote senior ministers has meant that her cabinet has now increased to an unwieldy 22; even in his misguided democratic heyday Gough Whitlam only had five more, and that was clearly unmanageable. Gillard will be faced with a similar problem and will inevitably have to break another pre-election promise by setting up her own version of Kevin Rudd’s kitchen cabinet, an inner group which will make the key decisions and then take them to the full cabinet (or not, as the circumstances dictate) before submitting them to the wider ministry and finally to caucus for endorsement. This can only exacerbate the bitterness the reshuffle has already set festering.
Robert McClelland and Peter Garrett have both remained in cabinet and therefore taken the loss of their effective demotions with good grace, at least so far, as has Chris Evans who could not be pushed out because he remains the elected leader of the government in the senate.
However Kim Carr, who was banished to the outer ministry, now reduced to a mere eight against the inner’s 22, has made his unhappiness public. He has a case; from the public point of view he has done very well, restraining his own protectionist instincts and treading a clever and effective line through the maze of Australia’s mendicant manufacturers.
The spin from Gillard’s camp is that he was suspected of leaking from Cabinet to boost his case with caucus and was also guilty of cosying up to Kevin Rudd; but even if these charges were true, they could have been dealt with by less drastic measures. His demotion looks especially bad when contrasted with the survival of Joe Ludwig, a clear failure in his portfolio but apparently a protected species because of his factional warlord father.
Much has also been written about the promotion of Gillard’s own supporters but this is hardly an unusual move; there is no prime minister in history who has not given his (now her) own team a bit of a leg-up.
Certainly it is hard to argue that Bill Shorten’s rise is not based at least as much on talent as on loyalty; it would have been both unjust and foolish not to have promoted him. And two of Gillard’s so-called faceless men, David Feeney and Don Farrell, continue to languish unnoticed and unmourned in the pool of parliamentary secretaries. But Mark Arbib, the Minister for Sport who has retained that portfolio (according to the Prime Minister, because he wants to go to the London Olympics next year – is she serious?) is another matter.
Graham Richardson claims that Arbib is actually a serious and skilful administrator, and for all I know he is right. But to the voters, Arbib remains anathema: the archetypal sleazebag of the New South Wales Right, a ruthless and cynical numbers man who knifed the leader he helped to install for personal advantage and crippled his party in the process Making him Assistant Treasurer is, to put it mildly, not a good look.
Okay, that is the less-than-celebratory atmosphere in which Julia Gillard retires to enjoy her Christmas break. But looking and moving forward, something of which she has always been fond, there are quite a few positives – or at least there might be, if only the government can find some way to avoid stuffing them up. Gillard has, at last, got the beginnings of a program of her own, and potentially the team she wants to put it into play.
Probably the single unequivocally successful initiative of the last term was a universal disabilities scheme. Bill Shorten, who had the initial carriage of it, is now in cabinet with another portfolio but the experienced and reliable Jenny Macklin, a Gillard loyalist, has taken over the responsibility. Gillard herself has retained overall control of mental health reform, but has drafted another useful newcomer to cabinet, Mark Butler, as her assistant. T
anya Plibersek, yet another success story in the making, takes charge of the vital health portfolio with the stated ambition of putting a public dental health scheme in place, a long overdue reform which would be a huge vote winner.
And Garrett, while retaining control of schools, will have the cool-headed Brendan O’Connor looking over his shoulder when the vital question of a new funding system comes up for consideration. This is an agenda which concentrates on Labor’s traditional strengths in health and education and puts many of its best and brightest to work on implementing popular and saleable reforms.
In other more troublesome areas Stephen Conroy in Communications, Chris Bowen in Immigration, Anthony Albanese in Transport and Infrastructure, Tony Burke in Water and Sustainability Craig Emerson in Trade, Greg Combet in Climate Change, Martin Ferguson in Resources and Energy and Simon Crean in Regional Australia are joined by Shorten in Industrial Relations and Superannuation.
Person for person it’s not a bad team; certainly it’s a clear class or two above Tony Abbott’s rag tag mob of zealots, ratbags, has-beens and never-will-bes. But: it also has Kevin Rudd, probably the smartest of them all and certainly potentially the most dangerous. If he can be kept in check and Abbott remains leader of the opposition, there is still some chance of a comeback. If not ... well, according to the Mayan calendar, the world is going to end next year anyway.
Indeed, it might well end sooner than the prediction; if the arse really falls out of Europe there won't be much for Gillard's ministers to do except cling to the wreckage, and they'll be the lucky ones.
As for the rest of us ... no, that's not a thought to nurse through the festive season. And on that note, good wishes and good luck. And, of course, bah humbug.