History may be kinder to Julia Gillard - The Centre for Independent Studies

Tuesday marks a notable date in Australian political history – the 10th anniversary of the Labor party coup to replace Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard. Gillard made her challenge late on June 23, 2010, and was elected leader unopposed the following day.

Her government, like that of her immediate predecessor’s, has enjoyed a terrible reputation and remains associated with drift, weakness, incompetence and broken promises. But history may yet be much kinder to our nation’s first female prime minister than many would have thought.

The knifing of Rudd and the installation of Gillard had all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean tragedy. Like many such gambits, and not only in Macbeth, this one ended badly for the assassins. The conspirators fatally stabbed someone they loathed, but as a consequence sparked a cycle of revenge knifings.

The spectre of Rudd haunted Parliament for the next three years: he rose from the political grave and pursued his nemesis so effectively as to make even a ghostly Banquo proud. In 2013, he fatally knifed the assassin who had backstabbed him three years earlier.

The result was not just chronic instability and deep divisions at the highest levels of government, but also bad public policy. Labor’s spending monuments, for instance, became expensive fixtures of the fiscal landscape.

Take the Gonski “reforms”, which involved a massive increase in tax dollars for schools, but failed to improve student outcomes. As a result, Australia is still stuck with a hideously expensive, arbitrary school-funding model that has no educational benefit.

Or take the National Disability Insurance Scheme: within a decade, it is well on track to being the fifth largest federal budget spending program. Far from concentrating on the worst cases, where it can provide the most help, the NDIS is vulnerable to regular demands to expand its scope.

The events of 10 years ago hurt the health of Australian democracy, leaving politics at the mercy of polling, not principle or public policy. Instead of leading a new reform agenda that would make the economy more productive, Labor as well as future Coalition governments just rested on the windfall of our China boom and settled into the complacency of prosperity.

The lesson here is an old and bloody one: when an assassination fails – or even when it succeeds – it may lead to dire consequences for those who undertake it. Those consequences, as Macbeth found out, are liable to be costly.

There is, nevertheless, a case to be made that Gillard was a lot better than many people have acknowledged – especially those on the conservative side of politics.

Gillard’s decision to intensify military co-operation with the US in 2011 was prescient, given an increasingly threatening China. Although it was a huge, glaring broken election promise, the carbon tax was bold and visionary: a decade later, Ronald Reagan’s cabinet secretaries James Baker and George Shultz endorse it.

To their credit, Gillard and her immigrationminister Chris Bowen tried to fix the mess that Rudd and Chris Evans had bequeathed them. The dismantling of the Howard government’s border policies led to the detainment of 50,000 boat people, including 2000 children. Countless others drowned at sea. In response, Gillard planned to set up a processing centre in East Timor and negotiate a “people swap” deal with Malaysia. But those worthy efforts either failed to attract bipartisan support or were scuttled by the High Court.

What really distinguishes Gillard, though, is how she has conducted herself in the years since she left office. When leaders retire from public life, they usually line up like a wailing Greek chorus to condemn their successors and exercise pitiful judgments about politics and policy. They miss the limelight and suffer from what Gareth Evans once called “relevance deprivation syndrome”.

Not for Gillard any ABC 7.30 interviews or front-page exclusives. She does not interfere with her successors, nor does she wallow in bile and spite (Rudd, Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull spring to mind).

Apart from a couple of books she’s written, Gillard focuses on more high-minded endeavours, such as chairing mental health organisation Beyond Blue and the UK-based Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest investors in medical research.

Despite all the tribulations she has endured, Gillard has conducted herself with honour and dignity in retirement. However, her legacy will forever be tainted by the way she came to power 10 years ago.