ON FRIDAY afternoon, June 11, Julia Gillard went to Sydney Airport to catch a flight home to Melbourne. She was travelling alone. No minders, no security.
''I'm flying solo,'' she joked to staff at the airport security baggage check. She was more elegant than usual, in a lovely black and white polka-dot blouse.
Here was a relaxed woman who had no idea she was about to make history. Her hands were clean, her conscience clear. She was just 13 days from an internal coup that would make her prime minister but she did not know it was coming.
The same can be said for her chief adversary in this federal election, Tony Abbott. Right up until last November, on the eve of a leadership spill in his own party, Abbott did not have a clue that he would be leading the Coalition into the election. He had not been plotting to replace his leader. He, too, had clean hands and a clear conscience. The vortex that took down Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal leadership was one of Turnbull's own making. Abbott was almost dumbfounded when the result fell his way, by a single vote.
This election campaign thus caps one of the most improbable years in Australia's political history, the culmination of an unprecedented period of leadership carnage among the two main parties, all during a time of economic prosperity. In the space of just seven years the federal Labor and Liberal parties have chewed through eight leaders (or, in the case of Peter Costello, a de facto leader) - Labor's Simon Crean, Kim Beazley, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd, and the Liberal's John Howard, Costello, Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. Only two were brought down by the electorate. The rest were brought down by their colleagues.
To understand the root causes of such flux, it is useful to dip into the bible of bile, at least for insights into the Labor patronage machine which still controls every state and federal government in Australia except for Western Australia. I refer to The Latham Diaries, which, though published in 2005, continues to be voyeuristically relevant.
It explains, with brutal clarity, why Rudd was dumped even though it was written years in advance. It also explains the elevation of Gillard.
While most people portrayed in The Latham Diaries receive a scorpion's sting, this is Latham's sketch of Gillard: ''I like Gillard because she has a go. She's the opposite of white bread: feisty, irreverent, good sense of humour, the closest thing we have to charisma in caucus. Not afraid of policy innovation but also steady and sensible.''
Contrast this with his depictions of Rudd: ''Kevvie wanted his title expanded to the more grandiose Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Security. No worries, but then he rang to say he objected to [Robert] McClelland also having the word 'security' in his title. At first I thought it was some kind of joke, but the crazy bastard was serious … he was threatening to go to the backbench.''
Later Latham writes: ''I've had a suspicion for some time now that Rudd has been feeding material to [journalist Laurie] Oakes. [I've] decided to set him up.'' He gives Rudd a false briefing which is duly reported by Oakes, then writes: ''Trapped him … Rudd is a terrible piece of work: addicted to the media and leaking.''
Latham has furiously reprised this opinion in recent days, accusing Rudd of using Oakes to spread dirt about Gillard out of cabinet, and sulking and plotting in Queensland. At the weekend, the former senior Liberal minister Alexander Downer weighed in with a similar depiction of Rudd.
This is why he was executed by his own party. His Napoleonic compulsions had become overbearing. His mania for centralised government had failed. Once the voting public started coming to the same conclusion, reflected in the polls, an overwhelming majority of Rudd's colleagues wanted him gone. He was a pain in the rectum.
Someone had to be Brutus, and that someone was not Julia Gillard. The knives were used by a claque of parochial Victorians and an ultimate Labor machine operator, Senator Mark Arbib, the man who has run NSW for years, behind the scenes, via the unions and the party factions. He engineered the installation, then removal, of Morris Iemma as NSW premier, then the installation, then removal, of Nathan Rees, then the installation of Kristina Keneally and now, for the same desperate reasons, he has knifed Rudd to install Gillard.
Arbib has thus become political soft tissue. He is the Joe Tripodi of federal politics. Box office poison. He still leads the power machine which has become so loathed in NSW. He is also straight out of central casting as Marcus Junius Brutus. Surely, therefore, he must become a primary target of the opposition's election campaign.
Because it was Marcus Junius Brutus Arbib who, with the other members of the Senate, not only knifed Rudd for Gillard but have subsequently encased her in the shell made by the Hawker Britton spin doctors, the party's focus groups, pollsters, lobbyists, factional debt collectors and union kneecappers.
This is why the Julia Gillard of June was so unlike the Julia Gillard of July. The Gillard that people, even Mark Latham, admired, has become the inheritor of a raft of grandiose policy failures, the principle architect of the Building the Education Revolution gold-plated feeding trough, and the sprouter of generic slogans.
This creation, this metallic creature of the machine, could not get past the X-ray detectors at the airport, and the public has recoiled from the process.
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