Labor lost the war. But it won the reconstruction handily.
Nobody thought the Gillard team could come together as it did in the last two weeks.
Julia Gillard herself kept largely out of the public eye; distant and, dare I say it, prime ministerial.
The leaks stopped after Kevin Rudd was brought back inside the Labor tent. (Sure, that could be a coincidence.)
Even Mark Latham quietened down. His post-election column in the Australian Financial Review was, mundanely, on the Governor-General. Somewhat topical. But not disruptive. Hardly the Mark the Knife of the campaign.
Considering how close the ALP came to all-out bloodletting -- a certainty had Abbott won government -- this was a remarkably restrained performance.
Compare Gillard's Labor team to the Coalition.
It started on election night when Barnaby Joyce picked a fight with Tony Windsor on live television. Windsor had previously called Joyce the ''Sarah Palin of the north'', so the two were never going to get along well, but Joyce could have bitten his tongue a little harder.
Since election night, we were treated to a carnival of the Coalition's ''personalities''. Bill Heffernan inexplicably called Rob Oakeshott's home. Never mind what he described himself as. Why did he call? Heffernan is a backbencher.
Alby Schultz, another backbencher, also thought claiming the independents were arrogant, naive, and ''holding the country to ransom'' was a good idea.
In the last few days, the usually disciplined Andrew Robb was claiming it was ''inconceivable'' the independents would support Labor. Who was he addressing with those remarks? He might as well have dee-double-dared them to go with Gillard. And Tony Abbott wrote an ill-advised column in the Daily Telegraph repeating presumably the same points he'd made to the independents in private.
The bluster-your-way-into-government strategy didn't work very well.
Yet pause to think about just how close they came to victory; just how close Tony Abbott -- Tony Abbott! -- came to unseating the first federal Labor government since Paul Keating.
In all likelihood Abbott would have made a perfectly competent prime minister. Just as he made a perfectly competent health minister.
Yet Abbott was tossed the leadership at the end of November 2009 while the Liberal Party came to grips the emissions trading scheme. That was an emotionally traumatic time for parliamentary Liberals; by the end of it, they seemed glad they got any leader at all.
Say what you like about the policy performance of the Rudd government. But the 2010 election clearly showed that, by any standard, they screwed up their term badly.
Rudd swept into power taking seats that had never been Labor-held, knocking out senior ministers like Mal Brough and Gary Nairn, and, of course, humiliating John Howard in Bennelong.
Rudd was seemingly impregnable, with broad mandate for action.
He promptly commissioned a series of reviews.
So in the first year of the Rudd government, the opposition claimed Labor was ''all talk and no action'', and a ''do nothing'' government.
This misread Rudd. The real problem was that the prime minister was trying to do too much. Eventually those reviews report.
For instance, it's easy to commission the Henry tax review, but what on earth did the government plan on doing with it when it was finally completed?
When John Howard tackled the GST, his government took an election and nearly a full term of office to do so.
The Henry review came with 138 recommendations, all major, covering nearly every aspect of government.
And it handed down those recommendations in a policy environment that saw Kevin Rudd trying to deal with the emissions trading scheme, the ongoing stimulus package, health and hospitals reform, preventative health reform, Aboriginal disadvantage, and the national broadband network. (There are no doubt others I have missed.)
In that complex reform environment, Rudd chose the Henry review's mining ''super-tax'' -- surely the stupidest nickname for a tax hike ever -- to add to his collection of bridges too far.
The government eventually had to back down from most of its grand schemes. Or substantially revise them. Or delay them. Or hope everybody had forgotten about them.
Eventually, Labor even revised the prime minister before it went to the polls.
So the gridlock of minority government could be good for the ALP.
Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor were quick to say their support for Labor did not indicate support for Labor's policies, or, indeed, any policies.
They're under no obligation to back the Gillard agenda. When the next stimulus package or mining tax comes up in parliament, the Government will have to negotiate with -- convince -- Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor, Adam Bandt and Bob Brown, Andrew Wilkie, and failing one of those, Bob Katter.
It could be pretty slow going. But it will force the Government to concentrate its mind on one thing at a time.
A Gillard minority Government may end up more effective, and more unassailable, than a Rudd government with a mandate, a healthy buffer of seats, and a pile of big plans for Australia.
Kevin Rudd may end up wishing he didn't win so comfortably in 2007.
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