EDITORIAL : THE AUSTRALIAN, AUSTRALIA

After almost a year, the Real Julia is a mystery

AS Julia Gillard approaches the first anniversary of her prime ministership, she is mired in a series of paradoxes of her own making.

Constantly trying to outline what she stands for, Ms Gillard has failed to demonstrate her beliefs and leaves the nation nonplussed. When she can utter the words, "It's time for me to make sure the real Julia is well and truly on display", or break a core election promise, she displays an alarming lack of authenticity. It is possible the nation has stopped listening because she has shown more pretence than conviction.

This dilemma is not the Prime Minister's alone. It betrays a deeper identity crisis for the Labor Party itself -- a life-threatening tug of war between its traditional suburban base and the green Left fringe. On Ms Gillard's watch, the green fringe is winning, with inner-city, tertiary-educated activists and advisers dominating Labor's policy, political and communications processes. Capital Hill has been hijacked by young careerists who have "learned" more about politics from watching The West Wing than from engaging in the real world or the private economy. Gone are the days of shearers and train drivers rising to enrich Labor's ruling elite, bringing sharp minds and rough hands to the everyday concerns of government. Now it is straight from university to a ministerial office, where the talk is of polls and messaging, and the people are distant. Surrounding Kevin Rudd were young, inexperienced men epitomised by a media minder Lachlan Harris, who was fixated on Facebook and Twitter but clueless about the challenging policy concerns of national government. Governments need a breadth and depth of experience in cabinet and in their ranks of advisers. Until this week, Ms Gillard has done little to address this weakness. At times, Labor's communications strategy has had all the depth of a Twitter hashtag. Experienced advisers always understand that substance is crucial and that messaging must be authentic, consistent and intelligent.

Labor has become disconnected from the suburban, aspirational, working families who hold the key, not just to political success, but to the wellbeing of the nation. Ms Gillard and her coterie must do more than pay lip service to Labor's traditional base. Since the Gough Whitlam years, Labor has deliberately appealed to both the suburbanites and the inner-city trendies. But during the high point of post-war Labor, the Hawke-Keating era, nobody was in any doubt that mainstream Australia provided Labor's ballast. There was no sense of the party abandoning its base until Paul Keating lost his way after 1993 and voters turned on him. The "working families" and economic conservative rhetoric of "Kevin07" paid homage to the suburbs and reaped the dividends, but the story since then has been desultory.

Mr Rudd walked away from the "greatest moral challenge of our time" and rushed to an ill-considered mining tax in a transparent attempt to play up the politics of envy. This underestimated the intelligence of voters, many of whom understood the importance of mining profits and investment in underpinning their livelihoods. Labor was forced into a retreat and Mr Rudd lost the prime ministership. Bob Hawke and Mr Keating never would have been so hamfisted. They understood the value of consultation, and credited workers with enough sense to understand that a co-operative approach would deliver the best outcomes for the enterprises, the economy and the workers.

Shrill campaigns against poker machines, alcopops and cigarette packaging, and against sexist interjections in parliament, share the condescending tone of a pious political class telling mainstream Australians what's good for them. These crusades have their genesis in the pleadings of special interest groups, the need for political distractions or demands from the Greens and independent MPs. But Ms Gillard and her ministers join them with the relish of GetUp activists rather than the sober arguments of a grown-up government. This hectoring tone pervades the entire Labor agenda. It can been seen in the Orwellian overreach of a national internet filter and even in the reregulation of the labour market, which is based on the assumption that individuals cannot be trusted to strike their own bargains. This posturing runs the risk of setting Labor at war with its base. When voters attended a rally against the carbon tax at Parliament House, they were denounced by Labor MPs as extremists. Critically, this trend is not being resisted by Ms Gillard but exacerbated.

Border protection is an area where Labor has mocked the concerns of the mainstream, and Ms Gillard's core beliefs have been either convincingly hidden or hopelessly compromised. Former leader Mark Latham recounted last month that in opposition, Ms Gillard was the author of Labor's softer asylum-seeker policy, which was pre-occupied with "mollifying the Left". In government, the consequences of that softer policy have been thousands of arrivals, a detention-centre crisis and deaths at sea. The Prime Minister first denied the problem, then floated the absurd East Timor solution, and now is grappling with the deficiencies and difficulties of her Malaysian solution. In full public glare over a number of years, she has talked down the problem, attacked the harshness of the Pacific Solution and accused the Liberals of appealing to racism. Yet now she decries the use of terms such as "redneck" and is implementing an approach that even former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski says is worse than the Pacific Solution. Australians surely cannot know where Ms Gillard truly stands on border protection.

Mr Latham has spoken at length about the party's drift away from its base: "You look through the long history of the Labor Party and there has never been a time where pacifying the Left has worked in terms of public policy principle." Yet in her minority government, Ms Gillard's constant mission seems to be appeasing the Left. Whether this is an exercise in political management or a return to her true ideological roots, the result will be the same. The disconnect with traditional Labor supporters is palpable. Former Hawke minister Graham Richardson talks about the people "Labor forgot" and how their voice is now found on talkback radio: "Tradies, pensioners and, well, ordinary voters who worry about the cost of living, about violence in their neighbourhoods, about Muslim immigration to their suburbs; Labor doesn't seem to know how to reach them any more."

Labor's mishandling of climate change policy brought Ms Gillard to the leadership because it destroyed Mr Rudd's credibility. After baulking at a climate poll, he was urged by insiders, including his deputy at the time, Ms Gillard, to walk away from the emissions trading policy altogether. This effectively told the public he stood for nothing. "Ever since then," says Mr Latham, "its been downhill for Rudd and the Labor Party and the public support for doing something positive on climate change." So it is extraordinary that Ms Gillard has been prepared to publicly sacrifice her own credibility on the same altar. During last year's election campaign, she said the issue of a carbon price would be reconsidered, including through a citizens' assembly, and there would be no price implemented until after the next election. In an emphatic pre-election pitch, she made the now-infamous pledge: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead."

No doubt the lack of conviction on climate change contributed to Labor losing its majority at the election, but ruling out a carbon tax probably helped it hang on to some seats. Yet Ms Gillard announced in February that she was trashing that promise and moving ahead with the Greens to impose a carbon tax. All the evidence suggests the Prime Minister doesn't quite understand the insult of that broken pledge -- she pocketed people's votes and then disregarded the very basis upon which they were cast. Nor does she comprehend how it leaves the nation looking at her and wondering just what it is that motivates her.

Ms Gillard started her politics at university and was heavily involved in the Socialist Forum, a group that included former communists and favoured death duties, wealth redistribution and shutting down US bases. She plays down this leftist background but whether she's discussing asylum-seekers, climate change or mining taxes, it is the rhetoric of the Left, and the language of the Greens and GetUp, that falls most naturally from her tongue and to which she reverts in heated discussions. Voters look at her inconsistent words, paradoxical actions and constant attempts to articulate her values, and wonder just who is the Real Julia.

Perhaps Ms Gillard encapsulated the dilemma best in her maiden speech to parliament on Remembrance Day 1998: "The end result of this political cycle is a weary people who no longer believe what politicians say and who think the politicians saying it do not even believe it themselves."

Quite, Prime Minister.