Abstract

The Art of Losing (un)Gracefully
Jennifer Rayner

In the weeks since the release of her book Tales from the political trenches, Maxine McKew has often said that she sees it as a ‘second draft of history’; one designed to counter the triumphal first draft written by those who deposed Kevin Rudd in July 2010. The inference is that she was one of the losers from that particular episode, and her book makes it clear that she’s a very sore one at that.

The book’s cover touts it as ‘an amazingly frank insider account of an extraordinary time in Australian politics’, but in reality it is little more than a 250-page dummy spit about the way McKew was treated during her short parliamentary career, and her subsequent loss of Bennelong at the 2010 election. For all her talk about ‘positive politics’, ‘Labor values’ and ‘dynamic government’, Tales from the political trenches is a hack job, pure and simple. McKew blames Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and their associates for her inability to hold the seat she took from John Howard with much fanfare in 2007, and seems to feel that it is worth white-anting their fragile government just to settle her personal scores.

McKew has framed the book as an examination of what went wrong in 2010 and how the government that swept to power with such promise and energy in 2007 lost its way. The errors she catalogues are, by now, fairly familiar: Rudd tried to do too much, too quickly; he got mired in policy details and forgot about the master narrative of why it all mattered; he didn’t build allies where it mattered or duchess those who could have smoothed the way; and he put too much faith in a handful of people who ultimately decided they’d rather run the show themselves than live in his shadow. McKew’s discussion of the frenzied activity and scattershot attention span displayed by the government during 2008 and 2009 will resonate with anyone with first-hand experience of governance a la Rudd, but there are two major problems with her analysis.

The first is that she presents Rudd’s leadership failings as minor errors and personality quirks, while portraying the actions of Gillard, Swan and factional leaders like Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar as the most monstrous betrayal since Judas. She seems that feel that Rudd’s catastrophic errors of judgement such as shelving the emissions trading scheme and picking a fight with the mining sector can be explained away as the result of bad advice from others. On the other hand, she represents the parliamentary party’s decision to exercise a century-old democratic process and replace him as an injustice which must never be forgiven or forgotten. Her sense of perspective and interpretation of these events is completely clouded by her personal friendship and admiration for Rudd, something which shows through again and again in her glowing descriptions of his character and achievements.     

The second issue is that McKew appears to have arrived in parliament with an almost comically starry-eyed view of what parliamentarians do and what governments can achieve. Instead of acknowledging that her own perspective was far too idealistic, she rails against the parliamentary system and the ALP for failing to live up to it. For example, she is scathing about the staffers and party personnel who try to maintain focus and message discipline within a large and disparate group of MPs, and impatient with the laborious process of consultation and stakeholder engagement that major national reform involves. She asserts that parliamentarians should be free to say what they like and pursue issues that matter to them and their electorates regardless of the priorities set by the central party, and appears to have been genuinely astonished to find that she was expected to toe a party line instead. Given that McKew claimed to know politics intimately from her time as a reporter and has a long history with the ALP through her partner, former National Secretary Bob Hogg, it is surprising that she found such a gulf between her expectations and reality. But to suggest that the entire system is broken just because it didn’t suit her seems a touch histrionic.

Despite the theatrical recriminations, it might still have been possible to take McKew’s analysis of the ALP’s fortunes seriously were it not for the fact that she uses the party’s failings to absolve herself of any responsibility for losing the seat of Bennelong. She claims that the seat was lost by a combination of voter ‘sullenness’ towards Julia Gillard, the party’s inching to the right on immigration and asylum seekers, and an effective local Liberal campaign which painted her as a do-nothing local member, ‘Maxine McWho?’.

She is almost certainly right about the first two points, but it is disingenuous to argue that the third was totally outside her control. For example, her wafer-thin margin in Bennelong meant that it was probably unwise to take on a Parliamentary Secretary’s role which required her to be frequently out of the electorate and occupied with national affairs rather than local ones, particularly during her first term as an MP. Similarly, she describes speaking at a candidate forum and being surprised to hear that favourable comparisons between Australia’s performance in the Global Financial Crisis and America’s cut no ice with an audience of middle-class voters concerned about their own jobs and finances. This suggests that she did not pay close enough attention to the shifting mood of the electorate after the 2008 crisis, and was therefore taken off-guard by a Liberal campaign which directly acknowledged people’s fear and uncertainty about the future. Of course, her slim 1.4 per cent margin meant that McKew may still have lost Bennelong even if she had been more visible at the local level and more attuned to the changing concerns of the electorate, but like any candidate, at least some of the responsibility for the loss has to lie with her.

Maxine McKew’s chronicle of her brief time in federal parliament contains many salutary lessons for aspiring politicians, although perhaps not the ones that she intended. Her tale suggests that politics does not suit everyone, no matter how good the fit might seem from the outside; and that the unwavering pursuit of one set of ideals in the face of changing circumstances is likely to end in tears. Above all, Tales from the political trenches demonstrates that there is a certain art to losing power gracefully, and Maxine McKew has manifestly failed to master it.
 

Jennifer Rayner is a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University.

Maxine McKew, Tales from the Political Trenches, Melbourne University Publishing 2012.