Kevin Rudd returns to Labor for 'healing', but the Band-Aid only goes so far

It’s quite something, almost a decade after his defenestration, how Kevin Rudd’s pain expands in enclosed spaces. In the cavernous main hall of the Adelaide convention centre, Rudd’s injury filled the room.

Australia’s 26th prime minister, never much beloved by the party’s rank-and-file, not one of the union fraternity, and clearly battling a heavy cold imported from the northern hemisphere, took to the stage at Labor’s national conference on Tuesday to accept the honour of life membership.

But the reception in the convention centre, in Julia Gillard’s home town it must be said, was more perfunctory than warm.

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At one point, Bill Shorten was moved to applaud at the podium as a visual prompt to the assembled delegates, who seemed inclined to grit their teeth and be polite, but hold their rapture for someone more worthy. Perhaps the ACTU’s Sally McManus, who attracts a welcome percussive enough to raise the roof.

Shorten also felt compelled to telegraph the official message frame of the morning, just in case someone had missed the memo.

It was time for healing, the Labor leader volunteered. This was proffered by way of background, both an instruction and a rhetorical bridge unfurled, ushering Rudd, and wife Therese, ever gracious, ever smiling, to the stage.

Rudd stood, weighted, like a pastor in a pulpit, and obliged. “Friends, Bill has just said in the history of every political party, there is a time for healing.

“For us, to fully grasp the future, we have to put to bed the disagreements of the past. For us, that time has well and truly come.

“That is why I am here”.

But the homily, portentous as it was, and doubtless sincere enough on all fronts, only served to highlight a time warp.

Rudd was still mired in the events of 2010, still prosecuting a legacy war through volume two of his memoirs, in all good bookshops now for Christmas giving, still striving for the last word.

But the parishioners, pitiless souls, had already moved on.

Timeline Australia - six prime ministers in 10 years (and five in five) Show Hide Kevin Rudd (2007-10) swept to power in a landslide after 11 years of conservative rule under John Howard. Enjoyed immense popularity as the bookish "Kevin from Queensland … here to help", but after he faltered on climate change (having previously described it as “the greatest moral challenge of our generation”), his convictions were questioned and his administration became increasingly erratic. Alienated his colleagues with an at-times abrasive manner, he was ousted by his own deputy …

Julia Gillard (2010-13), Australia’s first (and only) female prime minister, who narrowly won an election after disposing of Rudd, but was forced to govern in minority. She was remarkably productive given the constraints of parliamentary numbers, passing significant legislation on climate change and addressing clerical abuse, but faced misogynistic attacks from the opposition and was undermined from her own side, led by … Kevin Rudd (2013), who assumed the foreign ministry under Gillard, but never put his field marshal’s baton back in his knapsack. He is widely regarded as having led a campaign of leaks against Gillard, destabilising her. Having failed in one tilt to return to the leadership, he succeeded at his second try. However, he had only three months in the job before losing the election to … Tony Abbott (2013-15), who was widely regarded as the best opposition leader in Australia, but an ineffective and inconsistent PM. His term was marked by an adoption of hardline asylum policies, an abandonment of climate change action, and poor economic management. After a series of gaffes and controversial "Captain’s Calls" (including knighting Prince Philip), he was unseated by ... Malcolm Turnbull (2015-18), a former investment banker and lawyer, who was seen as an urbane, articulate, centrist who could appeal to a broad swathe of the Australian population. But he was mistrusted by the conservative wing of his party, and openly derided by some as "Mr Harbourside Mansion", a reference to his grand house on the opposite side of Sydney Harbour to the PM's official residence. But it was Turnbull’s commitment to action on climate change that incensed the climate-sceptic right wing of his party, and he was stalked by his arch-conservative home affairs minister, Peter Dutton. However, Dutton’s attempted coup failed, and the numbers fell 45-40 for the treasurer … Scott Morrison (2018 to date), who as immigration minister had established Australia’s controversial hardline asylum-seeker policies – including indefinite detention on remote foreign islands. The son of a police officer and an active member of a Sydney Pentecostal evangelical megachurch, he voted no in Australia’s plebiscite on same-sex marriage, listed “church” as one of his interests in his Who’s Who report, and regards former prime minister John Howard as his political inspiration. Howard was prime minister for 11 years – a lifetime by today's standards. Ben Doherty

The parishioners, at this conference, have their eyes fixed on the next term of government, not the last bitterly contested chapter, projected in the present, in the convention centre in Adelaide, like a ghost of lost opportunity. Labor wants to look forward, not backwards.

Rudd stitched self-deprecation through parts of Tuesday’s presentation, but penitence wasn’t part of the offering.

Gillard had already been referenced in Rudd’s opening dispatches as “very formidable”, an observation that won spontaneous acclamation on the floor, but didn’t really sound like a compliment.

“History,” Rudd noted, would be the “judge of these things”, meaning the past disagreements, the ones allegedly being put to bed on a Tuesday morning in Adelaide.

He also noted the rules that he had imposed on the party to protect Labor leaders from the startle reflexes and trigger fingers of their colleagues, the rules designed to stop a repeat of the injustice visited upon him in 2010, had “given us stability of leadership” for the past five years.

Courtesy of this salvation bequest, it was no longer death by Newspoll for Labor leaders. Labor leaders now had time “to plan policy and plan for future and secure government for Labor”. This, Rudd noted correctly, had been “a good reform”, a consequential one.

Rudd then moved to Rupert Murdoch, who has been the recipient of a good chunk of his mind in recent times. The Murdoch empire, more “political party” than news organisation in Rudd’s telling, was ranged implacably against Labor governments.

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The delegates warmed slightly at these fighting words, the notion that Labor was sufficiently audacious and self-confident to pit against itself against the Murdoch machine, which then felt sufficiently affronted to whack back.

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“That is why they hooked into Bill,” Rudd said, building his case. “That is why they hooked into Julia.”

But the rapprochement between the pastor and the flock could only go so far. Behind me in the convention centre, loud enough for the interjection to be heard for some distance, there was a piercing interjection.

“Actually, you hooked into Julia,” said a disembodied voice, to some stifled laughter.