Kevin Rudd returns to Labor for 'healing', but the Band-Aid only goes so far

It’s quite something, almost a decade after his defenestration, how Kevin Rudd’s pain expands in enclosed spaces. In the cavernous main hall of the Adelaide convention centre, Rudd’s injury filled the room.

Australia’s 26th prime minister, never much beloved by the party’s rank-and-file, not one of the union fraternity, and clearly battling a heavy cold imported from the northern hemisphere, took to the stage at Labor’s national conference on Tuesday to accept the honour of life membership.

But the reception in the convention centre, in Julia Gillard’s home town it must be said, was more perfunctory than warm.

At one point, Bill Shorten was moved to applaud at the podium as a visual prompt to the assembled delegates, who seemed inclined to grit their teeth and be polite, but hold their rapture for someone more worthy. Perhaps the ACTU’s Sally McManus, who attracts a welcome percussive enough to raise the roof.

Shorten also felt compelled to telegraph the official message frame of the morning, just in case someone had missed the memo.

It was time for healing, the Labor leader volunteered. This was proffered by way of background, both an instruction and a rhetorical bridge unfurled, ushering Rudd, and wife Therese, ever gracious, ever smiling, to the stage.

Rudd stood, weighted, like a pastor in a pulpit, and obliged. “Friends, Bill has just said in the history of every political party, there is a time for healing.

“For us, to fully grasp the future, we have to put to bed the disagreements of the past. For us, that time has well and truly come.

“That is why I am here”.

But the homily, portentous as it was, and doubtless sincere enough on all fronts, only served to highlight a time warp.

Rudd was still mired in the events of 2010, still prosecuting a legacy war through volume two of his memoirs, in all good bookshops now for Christmas giving, still striving for the last word.

But the parishioners, pitiless souls, had already moved on.

The parishioners, at this conference, have their eyes fixed on the next term of government, not the last bitterly contested chapter, projected in the present, in the convention centre in Adelaide, like a ghost of lost opportunity. Labor wants to look forward, not backwards.

Rudd stitched self-deprecation through parts of Tuesday’s presentation, but penitence wasn’t part of the offering.

Gillard had already been referenced in Rudd’s opening dispatches as “very formidable”, an observation that won spontaneous acclamation on the floor, but didn’t really sound like a compliment.

“History,” Rudd noted, would be the “judge of these things”, meaning the past disagreements, the ones allegedly being put to bed on a Tuesday morning in Adelaide.

He also noted the rules that he had imposed on the party to protect Labor leaders from the startle reflexes and trigger fingers of their colleagues, the rules designed to stop a repeat of the injustice visited upon him in 2010, had “given us stability of leadership” for the past five years.

Courtesy of this salvation bequest, it was no longer death by Newspoll for Labor leaders. Labor leaders now had time “to plan policy and plan for future and secure government for Labor”. This, Rudd noted correctly, had been “a good reform”, a consequential one.

Rudd then moved to Rupert Murdoch, who has been the recipient of a good chunk of his mind in recent times. The Murdoch empire, more “political party” than news organisation in Rudd’s telling, was ranged implacably against Labor governments.

The delegates warmed slightly at these fighting words, the notion that Labor was sufficiently audacious and self-confident to pit against itself against the Murdoch machine, which then felt sufficiently affronted to whack back.

“That is why they hooked into Bill,” Rudd said, building his case. “That is why they hooked into Julia.”

But the rapprochement between the pastor and the flock could only go so far. Behind me in the convention centre, loud enough for the interjection to be heard for some distance, there was a piercing interjection.

“Actually, you hooked into Julia,” said a disembodied voice, to some stifled laughter.