Kevin Rudd,celebrity and audience democracy in Australia

Introduction

In this article I explore former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s encounter with Australia’s celebrity industry – where he crafted a celebrity persona in celebrity media – as, in part at least, a strategic response to long-term changes in Australian democracy. I also show how Rudd used celebrity media in addressing his own intrinsic challenges. Three developments are noted in analysing Rudd’s approach: the transformation of the public sphere by changes which have been analysed internationally under the rubric of ‘post-broadcast democracy’ and ‘audience democracy’; the intensifying competitive dynamic between political advocates and Australia’s official political media; and the expansion of the celebrity industry and celebrity media. These trends combined with Rudd’s own challenges as a change candidate needing to win over a broad constituency, as a politician lacking internal support within the ALP, and a political advocate trying to control the political messages he was sending. I offer detail on Rudd’s most important occupation of celebrity media – his long residency on the Seven Network’s breakfast program Sunrise, showing how Rudd managed to use the show to manufacture himself as an ‘intimate stranger’, a mundane presence somehow unlike other politicians, and how he parlayed the informality and ordinariness of his Sunrise persona into campaign communication.

Further on, I also relate Rudd’s participation in celebrity culture to the charges of inauthenticity that were so telling in his decline from popularity during 2010, as the public meaning of his celebrity changed. Rudd’s intense management of political journalists led to intensified metacoverage, and to journalists producing unflattering versions of the ‘real Kevin Rudd’ lurking behind the presumed artifice of his political celebrity. The conclusion deals briefly with Rudd’s 2012 leadership challenge, where, popular once more, he appealed to ‘people power’ in trying to displace an unpopular Prime Minister, but foundered on opposition from factions within the Labor Caucus which themselves were connected with the traditional, union-based power centres within the industrial arm of the labour movement. Rudd’s career to date raises questions that are relevant across contemporary democracies: what are the prospects for reforming political leadership in celebritising, fragmenting, mediated polities, with accelerated political and media cycles?

‘Post-broadcast democracy’ meets ‘audience democracy’ in Australia’s public sphere

Australia’s fragmenting media environment means that, like the other older Anglophone polities, it can be viewed as a ‘post-broadcast democracy’ (Prior, 2006) where political actors must operate ‘beyond the presumption of attention’ (Couldry et al., 2010) that underpinned earlier phases of democratic politics. No one can assume a homogenous or politically attentive national citizenry and broadcast audience. The ‘post-broadcast’ is a familiar category in media studies. It describes a proliferation of media technologies, media channels and viewing contexts, and a general adoption of timeshifting and personal media devices, which has led to a high degree of fragmentation and unpredictability among media audiences.

The audience is no longer confined to the stability of regulated broadcasting, consumed in domestic environments. The ‘solid normativity’ of broadcast television, a result of its domesticity, its ‘[articulation] to the democratic state as part of its communications infrastructure’, and its central place in depicting the post-war consumer society has unravelled. (Turner and Tay, 2009: 2). In its place we now see a fragmenting heterogeneity – both of programming and audiences. An increased range of delivery platforms (2008: 2) and information channels, and lower barriers to entry in content production, ‘both in terms of required capital and specialized technical skills’, mean that ‘an increasingly divided audience pool has led content producers to more narrowly craft their programming, seeking to appeal to more finely differentiated audience groups’ (Baym, 2007: 96). This leads to a ‘breakdown of broadly shared political and social experience’ (Bennett, 2001: 741). In mediated national democracies like Australia’s, this has an effect on the conduct of elections, the strategies of political actors, the dynamic between them and established media outlets, and the nature of the engagement of citizens with political life.

In a demand-driven media environment, consumer choice is more important in determining whether that content is consumed. A relative preference for news or entertainment forms the basis of a major cleavage in the audience and the citizenry (Coleman, 2003; Norris, 2000; Prior, 2006). In the United States, this ‘high choice media environment’ contrasts with the high water mark of mass broadcast media in the late 20th century, when almost everyone absorbed at least some political information. Now, the amount of political information absorbed is far more contingent on the preferences of audience members: ‘To news junkies, politics has become a candy store. Others avoid news altogether. Political involvement has become more unequal … as a result’ (Prior, 2006: i). Australian research shows a similar divide in levels of political engagement and public connection (Jones and Pusey, 2008; Young, 2010). Compulsory voting means that voter turnout in Australia is never in question. But in Australia, too, the news audience is fragmenting. An ‘elite audience’ is ‘able to choose from a range of media options and a plethora of news websites and sources’, and in the future will be ‘will be better-served by the internet [sic] and new media as media companies find ways to reach this lucrative and active news-seeking audience’. The ‘general news’ audience, ‘the majority of the population – who used to watch TV news but are now switching off … may not necessarily replace this’ with other forms of political content (Young, 2008).

This dynamic has influenced the coverage of politics in Australia. Television news and current affairs has shifted its focus ‘from addressing national communities towards addressing “taste communities”’ (Turner, 2005: 15). There has been a concomitant shift from an emphasis on information, especially in commercial television, that has ‘taken current affairs slowly towards becoming a genre of entertainment that makes use of news related material’ (2005: 19). Increasingly, commercial current affairs has addressed the viewer as a consumer rather than a citizen, and has settled on a ‘narrow range of populist topics’, such that ‘politics has largely been evacuated’ (2005: 14) from the format. On the other hand, what remains of serious current affairs broadcasting on public broadcasters has suffered due to underfunding, stale formats and a lack of investigative work. The remaining serious broadcasting finds at best minority audiences, which for some programs (like Sunday’s Insiders) might be better described as niches (Young, 2011). Similarly, while newspaper circulation and readership are falling across the board, newspapers foregrounding serious political coverage have continued to claim a very small share of the newspaper market (Wilson, 2010).

The decline of serious current affairs broadcasting and print journalism presents challenges and opportunities to political advocates. Increased media choice makes it more difficult for a particular message or politician to ‘cut through’ to the electorate. But audience fragmentation provides the means (and the alibi) for them to bypass the ritualised conflict of serious current affairs broadcasting and the scrutiny of the quality press to campaign in less traditional outlets. Thus fragmentation, as a technological change in the political communication system (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995), interacts with the existing dynamic of co-adaptation and competition between the media and politicians. The fragmented mediascape becomes part of the context for their activities as ‘strategic, reflexive agents [who] are engaged in a dynamic series of interrelations, played out in a … competitive environment’ (Stanyer, 2007: 4); bypassing the serious media for celebrity outlets is one way in which ‘political advocates … innovate and utilise new techniques to control the news agenda … [and] find new ways of reaching the public’ (2007: 7). But, as always, such strategies tend to ‘clash with not only the professional culture of journalists, but also the market imperatives of new media environments’, and can lead to a ‘backlash, or a journalistic fight-back’ (2007: 7). At the same time that there may be a price to pay in the form of a journalistic backlash in employing such strategies, there are powerful incentives for going beyond traditional political news channels.

Somewhat anomalously, as media becomes more fragmented, it is also becoming more central to the political process, as traditional party loyalties and party organisations decline in importance. Many theories have been constructed and terms coined in media studies and political communication studies to describe this movement. In Bernard Manin’s (1997) analysis of the history of representative government, he points to a series of ‘metamorphoses’ over two centuries, where elite republican ‘parliamentarism’ is gradually captured by mass political organisations and becomes ‘party democracy’ from the extension of suffrage in the 1870s until around 1960, when it gives way to démocracie du publique, or ‘audience democracy’. For Manin, audience democracy is distinguished by a personalisation of the relationship between candidates and voters. The mediating function of political parties has declined relative to the role of electronic media, which has provided the means for more direct communication between politicians and citizens. Whereas in party democracy the ‘socio-economic and cultural characteristics’ (Manin, 1997: 222) of voters are important in producing loyalty to parties representing particular class or social interests, in audience democracy election results vary significantly. The images of particular candidates assume more importance, and voters choose between these images in a ‘system of differences’ created by mediated election campaigning. Media and public opinion are more independent of partisan alignments. Deliberation has moved outside parliament and into the media and discussions between political leaders and organised interest groups.

Manin’s account of audience democracy is essentially pessimistic; Jos de Beus’s development of Manin’s framework (2011) is more measured and descriptive. He is also more specific about what it might mean for politicians and journalists. For him the paradigm of audience democracy allows a focus on:

The public sphere and the laborious transition from politics with a core of party conferences, characterised by social cleavages, inclusive (and overlapping) membership, and a deferential news media to a politics with a core of television programmes, characterised by public troubles, campaign parties and assertive news media. (2011: 20)

He reformulates Manin – for De Beus the essential features of audience democracy are the personalisation of political support (and the drift away from parties); the proliferation of publicity, media criticism, and surveillance of party government by the media; the loosening of party mandates and the boosting of personal promises from political leaders; and the onset of perpetual, horizontal campaigning, both from leaders and pressure groups.

The impact of audience democracy is visible in the behaviour of politicians and political journalists. Politicians must now present themselves as autonomous from other powerful and authoritative leaders (including figures within their own parties). Those who are charismatic or mediagenic will gain access to strategically important communications networks, and increasingly they will prevail over less skilled media performers. De Beus suggests more will come from backgrounds in entertainment, and that they will continue to hone ‘front stage’ performances in order to reach targeted publics. They are more than ever dependent on the news cycle as opposed to party organisations. Most of all, audience democracy has seen a growing intersection between the worlds of celebrity and politics, including the embrace of celebrity media. Street points out that we have increasingly seen ‘the exploitation of non-traditional platforms or formats to promote the politician’ (2004: 437).

Journalists’ roles and activities also change in audience democracies. Journalists present themselves as autonomous and central to the political process, and as a distinct power antagonistic to politicians and branches of government. They present themselves as spokespersons of the people and see themselves as being in competition with politicians to represent the public interest. They adopt an ‘interpretative/infotainment’ approach in order to survive intensifying market competition. And they attempt to influence or determine the selection both of political candidates and agenda issues. In sum, structural changes lead them to being more openly antagonistic or competitive vis-a-vis politicians, a phenomenon which has been noted elsewhere (Stanyer, 2007).

The emergence of audience democracy is visible in Australia. Its traditional political parties, once mass-membership organisations, have seen their community base eroded as they transition to a ‘cartel party’ status (Katz and Mair, 1995), as have organisations with an association with politics, like the trade union movement (which still controls more than half of the votes at the Australian Labor Party’s national conference) (Marsh, 2006). The role of party bureaucracies and members in election campaigns has declined as the tools of political marketing have become more prominent. Leaders have sought to communicate directly with voters using the electronic media (Flew, 2004; Turner, 2005). Increasingly, voters are prepared to switch their votes. The reliable electoral base of Australia’s major political parties has shrunk, and has to some extent been converted into support for minor parties (Dalton R, 2002). There is a proliferation of voices and venues of media criticism of politicians, and an increasing tendency to permanent campaigning (Van Onselen and Errington, 2007). The relationship between journalists and politicians is becoming more fractious and agonistic (Tanner, 2011). Increasingly, politicians burnish celebrity images, and mediagenic, strongly branded politicians are able to make direct appeals to the electorate, and to build a constituency without the mediation of their parties.

Like most western democracies, Australia can be seen as being in the throes of a transition that encompasses features both of post-broadcast and audience democracy. But, as an examination of Kevin Rudd’s career shows, the transition is not smooth or uncontested. Just as media becomes more important to the conduct of politics, the competitive pressures on journalists and media outlets increase, and the disaggregation and multiplication of channels in a demand-driven environment sees the diminishment of the ability of ‘serious’ political journalism to control or influence agendas. Party bureaucracies which are seeing their power diminished by media-centric campaigning may not go quietly, and might resist candidates adapted to audience democracy, even at the cost of some political support, or even government.

From Sunrise to Kevin 07 – Rudd’s post-broadcast, post-party candidacy

Kevin Rudd is an illuminating study of a politician adapting, with initial success, to post-broadcast and audience democracy. In building his political appeal, he engaged with celebrity and entertainment-focused media, and especially the breakfast television program Sunrise. In doing this, he showed himself a model contemporary political entrepreneur, but he was also trying to overcome intrinsic problems, some of which had caused him to establish certain tactical patterns early in his career. From the beginning of his career Rudd engaged in compulsive media networking, placing his own political persona at the centre of his campaigns, and often pursuing his own interest at the expense of the Labor party.

One of Rudd’s intrinsic problems was that he was seen as an outsider in his own party (Hartcher, 2009). ¹ He had no close association with the industrial arm of the labour movement, nor was he well integrated in the party’s factional system (Franklin, 2010). His history prior to politics was not the usual one in unions, party forums or ALP-aligned law firms. Instead, Rudd’s experience was mainly as a diplomat and bureaucrat. To an unusual degree in the history of the Australian Labor Party, Rudd was and is a solitary political entrepreneur, whose leadership was built almost entirely on a direct appeal to the Australian people, via the media.

From his entry to parliament in 1998, therefore, he was adept at using the media to enhance his own profile. There was a boost to Rudd’s political career and media visibility came with his promotion to Opposition Foreign Affairs spokesman following the 2001 election. This played to his strengths, and led to regular ex officio appearances in elite political programming like the ABC’s late night current affairs offering Lateline. Foreign affairs had an unusual level of prominence in general outlets following the 9/11 attacks on New York City, the subsequent deployment of Australian troops to Afghanistan, the ongoing commitment to peacekeeping in Timor L’Este, and the long build-up to Australia’s participation the Iraq War from 2003. But the portfolio didn’t help Rudd to fight impressions that he was ‘wonkish’, serious and remote.

Rudd’s fortunes improved with his selection as the Labor’s representative in a segment, ‘The Big Guns of Politics’, on the Seven Network’s breakfast program, Sunrise. The particular place of Sunrise in the landscape of Australian broadcasting suited Rudd, and would later reinforce his change message as Opposition leader. Sunrise was Seven’s first success in challenging the decades-long dominance of Australian broadcasting by the Nine Network. Experimentally, Seven employed unheralded hosts Melissa Doyle and David Koch (known universally as ‘Mel and Kochie’) to ‘inject some personality’ (Harrington, 2010) into the moribund breakfast format. Sunrise embraced the informality of breakfast radio to create a ‘news-oriented variety program’ (2010: 176). Its selling-point was its informal tone: in stark contrast to the luminaries of Nine’s long-standing star system, Seven’s hosts struck viewers as ‘ordinary people’, and viewers bought into the program’s frequent description of it and its viewers as a ‘family’:

Whereas television newsreaders have historically been defined by their lack of visible personality – that they are mere ‘talking heads’ – on Sunrise we see the news team as ‘real’ people who are ‘like us’, and who become part of the family. They come across to their audiences as nothing special and, precisely, as ‘part of life’. (Harrington, 2010: 177)

Though loosely structured around regular, informally delivered news bulletins, the show also engaged extensively with celebrity culture and a wide variety of everyday, ‘kitchen table’ concerns.

In ‘The Big Guns of Politics’ segment, Rudd squared off against Joe Hockey, who for most of the segment’s life was the Howard government’s employment minister. Both men benefitted in several ways. First, they became extremely familiar to viewers as ‘intimate strangers’, whose appearances were woven into morning household routines. From 2003, when Sunrise began winning the ratings battle against rival programs on Nine:

Rudd could not help but notice its eclectic appeal. He and Hockey began trading yarns about being recognised in areas far removed from their own electorates, and being greeted fondly as mates, rather than politicians. (Jackman, 2008: 32)

Both men were able to reach out to a ‘general’ audience who were uninterested in politics as it was presented in elite political media. This meant that ‘average Australians, people who were not normally engaged by the high-brow political analysis of the Canberra press gallery, felt they had a relationship with [Rudd and Hockey]’. They were able to communicate directly with a mainstream audience without the mediation of the national political media (Harrington, 2009: 178). It also did good business for Sunrise – the segment became so popular that it was moved to the highest-rating period in the highest-rating day of the week. Sunrise’s style also encouraged Rudd and Hockey to discuss politics in a way that was different from the arid partisanship of parliament or elite media appearances. As a result they were able to develop ‘non-political’ political personae. The segment worked:

… not to let the two politicians ‘fight-it-out’ but for each of them to air their opinions in a more relaxed and informal way. It [was] a hybrid form of political discussion which further [blurred] the boundaries of ‘publicity’ and ‘serious’ interviewing by blending in-depth analysis … a semi-combative interviewing style … with personal jokes … and pop culture references … It [demonstrated] that political discourse can be both serious and fun – at the same time silly and important. (Harrington, 2009: 125)

For Rudd, the programme made a virtue of his wonkish, nerdy image. Sunrise’s producer remarked that even the fact that Rudd dressed without flair ‘worked because it matched the persona. There was a level of honesty there, a comfort with who he was, that we thought was cute’ (Jackman, 2008: 31). Rudd began to be ‘perceived as “ordinary”, rather than just “another boring politician”’ (Harrington, 2009: 178).

Rudd gained five years of sympathetic, regular exposure. During this time he was able to present his political messages in a relaxed and informal fashion. He became well known to a much broader slice of the electorate than elite media appearances alone would have allowed. He was able to raise his profile in a format that was interwoven with the intimate routines of viewers. Several writers have suggested that the extraordinarily positive polling numbers Rudd achieved from the beginning of his tenure as Opposition leader were directly related to the public goodwill he had built up on Sunrise (Harrington, 2009; Jackman, 2008; Marr, 2010). What is certain is that by appearing in celebrity media, Rudd himself became a political celebrity of a particular kind – ordinary, informal, intimately known. Even previous Prime Ministers with a broad popular appeal – like Labor’s Bob Hawke, who was a popular figure in the early years of his Prime Ministership from 1983 – never had this kind of quotidian exposure.

The impact that the ‘Sunrise effect’ had on Rudd’s candidacy can be seen in the campaign’s use of ‘Kevin 07’ as a brand and a slogan in the election. Echoing the ‘Keep Kevin’ campaign in Griffith in 2001, the distinctive ‘Kevin 07’ logo was carried on the campaign website, where you could buy branded t-shirts, thousands of which were worn around the nation in the lead-up to the election. The branding and slogan assumed Australians were comfortable in being on a first-name basis with the alternative Prime Minister. It also assumed the word ‘Kevin’ carried instant and immediate associations with the aspirant candidate. The faint echoes of James Bond’s ‘007’ gave the slogan – attached to the wonkish Rudd – an ironic, self-deprecating twist that matched the ‘nerdy but comfortable’ persona Rudd developed on Sunrise. It is unusual in Australia for an aspiring Prime Minister to campaign under their Christian name alone, or to try for laughs with one of their central pieces of campaign branding. But the informality in this message, and its gesture of familiarity, even intimacy, was central in the campaign that saw Rudd elected.

Rudd prevailed in the 2007 election, and early in his term he was by some measures the most popular Prime Minister in Australian political history. He saw off two Opposition leaders in quick succession. Until the first quarter of 2010, his leadership looked unassailable. In these months Rudd demonstrated the efficacy of his strategy. Rudd overcame and even exploited the dynamic of fragmentation underlying Australia’s post-broadcast democracy by making himself available to the outlets of the celebrity industry, especially Sunrise. He not only engaged with these outlets, but was able to manufacture himself as an unprecedented kind of political celebrity in Australia. By reaching out directly to the voting public and building his personal support, bypassing his party organisation, and burnishing his own celebrity appeal, Rudd was an exemplar of the politician of audience democracy. While making himself available in forums like Sunrise, Rove and FM Radio – before, during and after the election – Rudd managed and limited his appearances in elite political media. But when combined with emergent political difficulties, the journalistic backlash to this was to prove fatal to his Prime Ministership, which did not last a full term.

‘Driven by anger’: The backlash and the quest for the ‘real Rudd’

Despite the success in using celebrity media to win office, Rudd struck snags in implementing his agenda. Rudd and his government attempted to execute and promote major policy initiatives – principally an emissions trading scheme, tax reform, and a Global financial crisis (GFC) driven financial stimulus package, centred on home insulation initiatives and building new facilities for schools. In executing these, he committed political errors, the most prominent being his decision to temporarily back away from climate change action after the failure of the Copenhagen talks, and his inability to pass his emissions trading scheme through Australia’s Senate. ‘Insider’ post-mortems of his Prime Ministership suggested that Rudd’s highly centralised, almost autocratic style of governing alienated members of his own parliamentary party (Cassidy, 2010). Certainly, he presented explicit and implicit threats to those who exerted control over the parliamentary party by means of factional power and control of party offices. But Rudd’s removal was fuelled by a journalistic backlash that gathered momentum throughout his term. The backlash was partly focused on the persona and appeal Rudd had developed in his use of celebrity media outlets. In building his political appeal around this persona, Rudd invited others to view it as legitimate, contestable political terrain.

Journalists’ increasingly adversarial attitude to politicians’ innovations in media strategy and intensifying media management has been widely noted in political communications studies (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Stanyer, 2007; Swanson, 1997). It is also nominated as a general feature of audience democracy (De Beus, 2011). The journalistic response to Rudd’s close media management and his ongoing preference for general news and celebrity outlets developed in two main ways. First, journalists intensified metacoverage, and suggested that the government’s tendencies toward spin and media management were evidence of deception. Second, a range of journalists, in different ways, questioned the authenticity of Rudd’s political persona. This second variety of backlash journalism was undoubtedly the more damaging for Rudd. Attacks on his authenticity resonated with the perception that his policy backdowns signified an absence of core values. More importantly, worries about authenticity corroded the persona he had developed in celebrity media, which was the basis of his broad public appeal.

Metacoverage of the Rudd government’s ‘spin’, manipulation and media management began even before he assumed the Prime Ministership. This was premised on the idea that only certain genres and certain formats provided scrutiny adequate to national figures and national politics. But many explicitly contrasted Rudd’s efficient PR apparatus with the friendly and intimate persona he had developed. A major feature in The Australian (the News Limited outlet which many came to consider to be openly campaigning against Rudd (Menadue, 2010; Tingle, 2010) serves as an example:

‘It’s important to be who you are,’ Kevin Rudd was fond of telling journalists during the election campaign when asked about his leadership style and his freshly minted image with the Australian public.

Twenty months after Kevin 07 swept to victory, the PM’s burgeoning media machine has become so practised at controlling his image and massaging his message that some political analysts liken it to a PR state.

Here, metacoverage of Rudd’s public relations machinery and practices blended with a suggestion that Rudd simply is not who he says he is, another focus of backlash coverage.

Stories began to appear early on in his Prime Ministership alleging that Rudd made considerable efforts to hide his true self. Though his own policy backdowns contributed to an impression that Rudd ‘didn’t stand for anything’, accusations of inauthenticity began long before this. The narrative of Rudd as a dissimulator was readily available when the backdowns eventually came. Initial suggestions that the public face of Rudd was not consistent with his private behaviour and motivations included him being accused of being a ‘control freak’ (e.g. Bahnisch, 2010; Colebatch, 2010; Crabb, 2010; Fagan, 2007; McPhedran, 2010; Rice, 2010; Trinca, 2010). His occasional mangling of Australian vernacular was employed to suggest that despite the act, Rudd was anything but an ordinary person – instead he was a mandarin, a technocrat who was doing a poor job of acting like a human being (e.g. Levy, 2009). One journalist amplified the charges of inhumanity by dubbing the Prime Minister ‘the Ruddbot’ (Crabb, 2010). As the accusations of inauthenticity intensified, some journalists began to suggest that the ‘real Kevin Rudd’ was actually driven by actively sinister motivations – that the ‘friendly’, ‘ordinary’, ‘relaxed’ person they had allowed into their homes was an artefact of an elaborate performance concealing a much darker self. There were small revelations (which became international news) in 2009 about his treatment of a steward on a government jet: perhaps the ‘real Rudd’ had a temper, and was perhaps a bully (see Coorey, 2009). Although previous Prime Ministers had been known for their sharp tongues, and even publicly dressing down journalists, the problem for Rudd was the contrast with his Sunrise persona.

Most memorably, just before Rudd’s removal by his party, Sydney Morning Herald journalist David Marr wrote an extended piece, ‘Power Trip’, for the Quarterly Essay series, which was widely re-reported in the news media. Marr suggested that the real, private Rudd was driven by a deep anger arising from his deprived childhood, and his treatment at a Catholic boarding school. The main evidence for the anger that defined the ‘real’ Rudd was an off-the-record conversation between Rudd and Marr, where Rudd asked about the angle he would be taking in his essay. Marr keeps the specific details of the conversation off the record, but wrote:

Face to face, it’s so clear. Rudd is driven by anger. He is a hard man to read because the anger is hidden by a public face, a diplomat’s face. Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is the man with rage at his core … (Marr, 2010: 86)

Again, Rudd’s anger was primarily of interest because of the contrast with the persona he presented in getting elected. Marr’s essay was released just after Rudd’s last appearance as Prime Minister on the ABC’s elite nightly current affairs programme, the 7:30 Report, on 12 May. Here, Rudd lost his temper when being asked to join in with metacoverage of his own brand. The reframing of Kevin Rudd’s persona in this way did irreparable damage to his key political asset.

Scepticism about Rudd’s personal authenticity was powerful partly because it played to a well-established appetite in a familiar way. There is a ‘desire in contemporary political culture, and mediated culture more generally, for transparency between the public and private domains’ (Craig, 2008: 96). Any perceived division between public and private selves can be exploited by adversarial journalists. Any attack on politicians’ authenticity is particularly damaging in contemporary, mediated and celebritised democracies. Authenticity underpins politicians’ ability to operate successfully in audience democracies, where it is even more important than competence in voters’ evaluations of competing political images (De Beus, 2011). It also underpins the essentially aesthetic effort on the part of politicians to represent plural, disparate electorates (Coleman, 2011). In a sense, by going beyond the more adversarial arenas of serious political media, and engaging with celebrity culture, Rudd made himself an easy target for personally directed ‘debunking coverage’ like Marr’s. The gentler, more informal persona so familiar from Sunrise and Rove could always be presented as lacking alignment with other aspects of a Prime Minister’s behaviour. Rudd’s shying away from difficult policy processes interlocked with debunking, backlash journalism to shift the public meanings of Rudd’s celebrity. Not long after the polls registered the results of his being framed as inauthentic, he was deemed ‘unelectable’.

Marr’s essay and Rudd’s 7:30 Report appearance were still ringing in the air on 22 June 2010, when factional powerbrokers moved on Rudd’s Prime Ministership, and the Labor Caucus installed Julia Gillard in his place and called an early election. The pretext was the sudden turnaround in Rudd’s polling numbers – the ALP’s share of the vote and Rudd’s personal ratings were both trending into the zone of defeat. Importantly, though, the party and its bureaucracy – and especially those inside and outside the parliament whose power resides with the continuing importance of the trade union movement within Labor – were able to take an opportunity to replace Rudd, the candidate of audience democracy, who had signalled his impatience with the party’s factional system, with Julia Gillard, who herself had a far longer and more significant set of relationships within the party’s factional system. A celebrity Prime Minister was replaced with someone who was much more representative of ‘party democracy’, and whose position was dependent on support from the most powerful trade unions.

The contrast between Rudd and Gillard has other dimensions, not least of which is gender. Gillard is Australia’s first female Prime Minister, and gender has been important to the manner in which her own persona has been attacked and reframed since she assumed the role. Gillard’s childlessness, her de facto relationship and her having colluded in removing Rudd were all passed through the lens of gender, and used to depict her not only as an excessively careerist woman but as a problematically ruthless political feminist. Depicted as a ‘witch’ and called a ‘bitch’ in protests about her carbon emissions trading scheme, in late 2012 Gillard turned what she described as ‘misogyny’ into an effective attack on the Opposition leader’s complicity in turning her gender into a problem. But until then, gender was used as a resource for political attacks on the Prime Minister. It is important to acknowledge the role of gender and sexism in determining Julia Gillard’s fortunes. In a mediated democracy, it is also important to acknowledge that her gender has affected her ability to access the economy of celebrity in the same way as Kevin Rudd. Although Gillard has advanced her career with the principles of party democracy, audience democracy may not be a welcoming place for female politicians.

In 2010 Gillard moved quickly to legitimise her position by declaring a general election. During the campaign in October she made a series of errors, including at one point calling her own political authenticity into question by promising people that they would see more of the ‘real Julia’ (Harvey, 2010). She was also destabilised by a series of leaks about confidential cabinet discussions, the source of which was commonly assumed to be Rudd. But most disastrous, in retrospect, was her declaration that she would not introduce a carbon tax. She was forced to reverse this in a deal to form a minority government (a political rarity in Australia) with the minority Greens party, who also held the balance of power in the upper house, the Senate. This reversal was damaging to Gillard’s Prime Ministership, and formed the basis of a number of campaigns against her, and the Opposition’s attacks on her. Along with her own political misjudgements, the prospect of the tax contributed to a deterioration in Gillard’s and the ALP’s political popularity to a point which was, by early 2012, much worse than Rudd’s had ever been.

Gillard’s decline led to speculation about her leadership, and active destabilisation on Rudd’s part. In order to head off Rudd’s undermining of her position, Gillard declared a leadership ballot for 27 February 2012. Rudd was overseas when the ballot was announced on 23 February and announced his resignation from his ministerial position and declared his candidacy from New York. During the campaign, Rudd appealed to the electorate to contact MPs and urge them to vote for him – his was a ‘people power’ candidacy, he said, and he claimed that only he could win the next election. He chose this frame even though only his parliamentary ALP colleagues would be able to vote on the leadership – the people’s voice would not be heard directly. Gillard’s appeal was to party democracy’s chief virtue – competence. In her centrepiece press conference, she said that ‘talk is easy’ and that the Labor leadership was not ‘an episode of celebrity Big Brother’ – direct attacks on Rudd’s celebrity status and competence as a performer. But others, supportive of Gillard, engaged in character assassinations of Rudd, and attempted to depict his time in office as chaotic and ineffectual, in ways that echoed the scourging coverage of journalists. Rudd lost the ballot by 71 votes to 31, and returned to the parliamentary back bench, where, at the time of writing, he remains.

Although as at late 2012 Rudd remains the preferred Prime Minister for a plurality of Australians, his parliamentary colleagues, and those in the broader labour movement, disagree sharply with the electorate. His celebrity appeal is potentially an election-winning edge, but his party is, for the moment, remaining with a leader who seems fated to lose the election in 2013. Notwithstanding that he has been an effective communicator in the context of audience democracy, Rudd’s personality and the threat he poses to the power structure of his party mean that, for now, he is unacceptable as a leader. Just as post-broadcast democracy and the embrace of celebrity media threaten the pre-eminence of political journalists, so the leader who embraces audience democracy threatens the position of those who have built their power on party democracy. These transitions are not smooth, they bring about tensions, and they can be resisted.

From Sunrise to sunset: Concluding questions

This article should not be read as suggesting that Kevin Rudd’s political ascendancy was entirely attributable to his engagement with Australia’s celebrity industry, or to his aptitude in the context of audience democracy. He defeated a tired government that had been in office for a decade, which had itself prosecuted some deeply unpopular policies in its final term, and which mismanaged its final campaign. Neither should the article be taken as arguing that backlash journalism or party treachery was wholly responsible for his political decline. His management style, his mistakes, the difficulty of the policy issues he confronted, and the turn in the Opposition’s fortunes under a new leader, Tony Abbott, all played their part in his defeat.

What was new about Rudd’s period as leader of the ALP, though, was the way in which a politician’s mediated persona became a central part of the terrain for political conflict and debate. In the first place, Rudd used celebrity media to circumvent official or elite political media channels, to speak directly to a broad constituency, and to become an ‘intimate stranger’ whom people were prepared to entrust with national leadership. Later, the authenticity of Rudd’s persona was brought into question by elite journalists seeking a response to this novel strategy. In each case, at stake were not rational judgements about policy, but the meaning of Kevin Rudd’s celebrity. He also made the most candid attempts yet on the part of an Australian national politician to bypass his party, and to burnish his own celebrity appeal in crafting a constituency.

Rudd’s fate neatly illustrates the difficulties posed for political leadership, and for democratic politics itself, in an era where mediated polities are fragmenting, the competitive relationship (and the disdaining dynamic) between political media and politicians is intensifying, where parties are declining, and where celebrity-focused media are increasingly attractive as a way of reaching a public who may have tuned out from ‘serious’ or ‘elite’ political programming altogether. Arguments such as Street’s (2004) that problematise the dismissal of politicians’ engagement with celebrity culture are well made, but we also need to recognise the competitive response of influential elite media, who are invested in maintaining their own priority in representing public life. Given Rudd’s promise (and failure) to deliver urgent reforms such as climate change, the import of which go to the future of the planet, several urgent questions arise from his short Prime Ministership.

These questions go to the very possibility of campaigning and governing in post-broadcast and audience democracies. How can politicians build broad popular support without alienating elite political media, who still retain considerable, if second-order influence? How can they build constituencies in audience democracies without provoking their own parties, who may still retain a veto over their political careers? What version of authenticity ought we to expect when media fragmentation necessitates a variety of media performances from politicians, and an ever more complex constitution of political celebrity? Can a politician become a celebrity in contemporary media cultures and still pursue difficult, sometimes unpopular reforms? What version of democracy is possible in an environment where a large minority have tuned out from official politics?