The Rudd Rebellion by Bruce Hawker

Author:Bruce Hawker [Hawker, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Campaigns & Elections, Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9780522864496
Google: kdS8AQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18745306
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2013-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Week 5: The Party Is Reformed

The week began with the historic decision of the parliamentary caucus to approve Rudd’s democratisation program. From now on the rank-and-file members would have a direct say in the election of the Parliamentary leader.

During this week the senior ministers were working on a Mini Budget or Economic Statement. Our success or otherwise here would be critical in our efforts to re-establish the Government’s credentials for good economic management. This was the fourth cornerstone in the re-election strategy. We knew that we had a chance to recover some credibility because Rudd was given points by voters for helping to keep Australia out of recession during the Global Financial Crisis. We also knew that we couldn’t overclaim on this and that there was great concern about our ability to manage the economy given the Budget blowouts and the broken promises to balance the books.

To make matters more complicated, the amount of money being received by the Government was dropping and under the Charter of Budget Honesty we would have to reveal the books publicly before the election. So, the ministers had to rewrite the Budget. They worked through that process during this week. My task was to help them make the savings that would have the least negative political impact.

This week also saw us focusing on campaign preparations at campaign headquarters (CHQ). During the week we conducted an audit of campaign readiness, which revealed some significant problems. George Wright and Nick Martin worked hard to rebuild the campaign after the change of leadership. Deciding an election date was dependent on everything being ready in the campaign. At the same time, our pollsters started to track voting intentions in key marginal seats across the country—and the news was not good. Nevertheless, work began in earnest to develop a campaign schedule—something that in a normal election would have been well advanced weeks ago. Again, we were struggling to tie all these things together because Rudd came to the leadership so late.

Finally, Rudd decided that it was appropriate to visit Afghanistan to thank the troops for their remarkable efforts and to announce that after 10 years we would be withdrawing our troops from the country. Another very full week.

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