> So what are her politics now? Did she originate in the working class only to
> rise to serve the bourgeoisie? Or is it more complicated than that?
The Australian Labor Party is a strange machine, well-oiled and ruthlessly efficient - at maintaining a delicate, intricate equilibrium between its factions. I've only been here five years and it's still pretty opaque to me, but it seems to get to the top of the ALP you have to be a (Louis) Bonaparte, emerging as a compromise candidate, everybody's least worst. Rudd, who deliberately kept aloof from the factions, it now emerges, was despised by most of his colleagues, and as an anonymous party source told the ABC today, his only factional support came from Newspoll and once that faded, the conditions were such that a union meeting in Melbourne could set in motion a chain of events that rolled him pretty much out of the blue.
Gillard's personal politics are pretty much irrelevant. She comes out of the Left, but her support today came from the Victorian and New South Wales Right. (The faction names don't signify too much, by the way, they've evolved into networks of patronage.) She has a reputation as a friend of the unions, but she's spent the last few years as deputy PM spending that capital to 'stand up to the unions' as Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. She has a 'working class' style (in the old-school identity politics sense Catherine complains about) that seems much more genuine than Rudd's, and she's obviously very bright. I don't find her viscerally annoying like I do Rudd. But so what? She's likely to be even more cautious than Rudd, even though neurotic prevarication was Rudd's downfall - because she can get away with it, with a fresh image all she has to do is coast through the election against a loudmouth Catholic weirdo who talks about his daughters' virginity and is the only politician in history to be embarrassed by a love child turning out not to be his.
Gillard's first action as PM was to call a truce with the mining corps about a planned mining super-profits tax, which they have been furiously opposing for the past few weeks. Ad campaigns on both sides now suspended, and the miners' share prices went up when Rudd went down. I don't think there was a direct influence from the miners on Labor, but I do think it's likely that the tax played a big part in making the Right factions uncomfortable with Rudd and seeing a leadership spill as a way to back down without losing face.
Mike Beggs