Former PMs bury the hatchet in show of unity at Labor campaign launch

 Australian election 2019

With Bill Shorten a key player in the demise of both Rudd and Gillard, it’s a message that needs reinforcing

Katharine Murphy, Political editor

@murpharoo

Sun 5 May 2019 17.08 AEST Last modified on Sun 5 May 2019 17.36 AEST

Labor leader Bill Shorten is greeted by former Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard at the launch of the Labor campaign in Brisbane. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

It wasn’t clear from our vantage point up the back how Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard reacted to the sequence of homilies at Labor’s 2019 campaign launch designed to tell voters the party had learned from the mistakes of the last period in government.
The former combatants walked into Bill Shorten’s event together, projecting tranquility and geniality, the joint entrance a modest mic drop executed in the low key spirit of show, don’t tell.
Neither spoke during the two-hour event, because what good could come from that? The public gesture of reconciliation was the hard currency sought by the Labor campaign as it assumes battle formation, and turns into the home stretch.
But the persistent homilies about the importance of unity delivered from the stage didn’t miss.

"Everyone had a job. If it was a dinner party, the instruction would have been bring a plate"

In a promotional video showcasing the front bench team, and showcasing the team’s respect for Shorten’s leadership style, the shadow climate minister Mark Butler remarked the party had rediscovered Labor’s internal culture of frank and respectful debate about ideas during this period in opposition. Penny Wong observed that leadership was a team sport.
This was a circle that needed squaring because Shorten wasn’t a bystander, he was a key player in Rudd’s demise in 2010 and in Gillard’s demise three years later.
Shorten still carries that negative baggage, it weights him, so on Sunday, the campaign sought to draw a line over the past by casting him as the unifier. Shorten praised the legacy of both Rudd and Gillard from the stage after his obligatory roof-raising hat tip to Paul Keating, who was present and in loquacious form, and Bob Hawke, who was absent and ailing. “Bob, we love you,” Shorten said, “and in the next 13 days we’re going to do this for you.”
To put it simply, everyone had a job on Sunday. If it was a dinner party, the instruction would have been bring a plate.

Rudd and Gillard’s job was to make up, credibly, in public, and endorse their former colleagues who harbour the ambition of returning to a cabinet not riven by civil war if Labor wins on May 18.

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s job was to deliver the call out to undecided voters in Queensland, reminding them that they didn’t like Campbell Newman, and by extension, they shouldn’t like Scott Morrison either. Labor is not travelling as well in some parts of Queensland as it had hoped, so the gesture of coming to Brisbane to launch the campaign, and Palaszczuk’s efforts at persuasion, were important parts of the staging on Sunday.

The team – Labor’s frontbench – was there to show voters that the 2019 offering is about more than Shorten, and to land the sharpest attack lines on the Coalition.
Wong castigated the Coalition leadership as “small men, with small ideas” – people prepared to trade away societal harmony for “nothing more than a handful of votes, in a handful of seats, from a handful of haters”. Tanya Plibersek noted Morrison “talks so much but he has so little to say – no ideas, no solutions, no vision”.
While Shorten was served by a display of common purpose that the Coalition will struggle to match – which was of course the point of mounting the display, and choreographing it all down to the most minute of details – the Labor leader had the most important job of all.
He had to show up and deliver the designated moment in the campaign calendar – and the designated moment in the calendar was the case for changing the government. Morrison, daily, delivers the case for the status quo. Shorten’s job on Sunday was to make the case for change.
There was nothing subtle about it, because politics has either forgotten how to be subtle, or subtlety is now an unaffordable luxury. “Today we sharpen the argument, today we make the choice clear, today I present the case for change,” Shorten said. “Our great country needs change, because more of the same isn’t good enough for Australia.”
“Look up now” was Shorten’s instruction from the podium – a message to voters who have been reluctant to engage over the opening weeks, and are currently racing to pre-poll stations in record numbers.
Shorten’s pitch was it’s time to pay attention guys. See we are united. See we are sorry about the past. See we have done the work. See that we are rolling out a case to move the country forward. See that we are prepared to tell you before an election what we intend to do afterwards.
His objective was to tell voters Labor had a comprehensive program, and more significantly, had the courage of the program.

The program laid out in Shorten’s 55 minute speech has held this group of people together during two terms in opposition. It is the sum of their collective effort, not a postscript trailing a presidential figure like an after-thought.
The program is the glue, and Shorten wanted voters to know that as the Labor leader, he would not be apologising for the program, or disguising it – he would prosecute the program every waking hour for the next two weeks, and then hand it to the voters for their best deliberation: yes or no.

Labor, Shorten said, had chosen hope over fear, had chosen the future over the past, had laid out a real plan rather than resort to “petulant name calling and empty scare campaigns”.

Shorten’s pitch was if you give us government, we know what we want to do with it, so even if you don’t love all of our program, you might respect us for respecting you sufficiently to lay it all out.
Labor in this election cycle is taking all the risks, and continues to take all the risks. There is more on the line in this contest than who gets the keys to the Lodge on May 19. Election day will be a national deliberation on big target versus small target, with the traditional roles reversed. Normally governments are the big targets and oppositions play safe, but not in 2019.
The interesting thing about Sunday, given the high stakes, was Shorten’s equanimity about where he finds himself, out the front of this institution, with everything on the line, nothing safe, nothing certain, but carried by his instinct that he’s called the zeitgeist correctly.

Shorten is campaigning like a leader who intuits Labor’s program will return them to government, and if it doesn’t, then it will be an honourable defeat in pursuit of the right causes.