Horse 1404 - RuddBull: Such a Beautiful Dream... But Only A Dream

On Monday night's edition of Q And A on ABC1, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull outshone Judith Sloan and Heather Ridout to the point where you began to feel sorry for them. Both Judith and Heather are both incredibly interesting people to listen to and I've heard them both on Radio National and ABC News Radio but on Monday, it was decidedly unfair that they play second fiddle to Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. I do hope they both come back on Q And A in the future.
Both Rudd and Turnbull gave off airs of men who looked to have been stomped on by their respective parties. Both of them as ex leaders of their parties had.pretty well come to the conclusion that for the moment that neither of them would leaf their parties again and neither of them would hold the job of Prime Minister.

The question was inevitably posed as to why they don't form their own political party. In fact if you'd been following Twitter for both the duration of the episode and for the next eight hours, #Ruddbull was still trending Australia wide.
Obviously you can't very call a political party centre-rightbut the question remains, why don't they?

Rudd and Turnbull see eye to eye in a great deal many issues. They both believe in education as the means of improving the stock of labour in the country, though they disagree on how it should be delivered. They both agree that broadband and the internet will be the highways of the 21st Century and again they disagree on its delivery. They even both agreed that a carbon trading emissions scheme was the best mechanism for dealing with that issue because it would have used the market itself to find the most efficient pricing structure.
The reason why they see eye to eye on so many issues is pretty obvious. Both of them are pragmatic people and the net outcome of a plan is important. Turnbull's left meets Rudd's right and they'd be able to find an agreeable solution on a lot of issues and in a lot of circumstances. They're both fairly close to the centre of the Australian political spectrum, which is broadly to the right of the theoretical centre of politics generally as it has been since about 1976.

The question as to why they don't form a new political party isn't then one of ideology then but of pure pragmatism.
Assuming that they did form a new party. Ideologically speaking, they'd bite the centre out of Australian politics. If it were possible tomorrow, they'd pull maybe 25 members from both Labor and Liberal and then have to fight for the remaining 26 seats for outright government. If they didn't get that though, they'd find themselves in the position of forming coalition with either Labor or Liberal, thus alienating part of the electorate which voted for them and at best it would last maybe three election cycles.
There's also the very real problem of what happens to any of those members. Suddenly very safe seated members if they'd switched would find that they'd never be readmitted to the party which they'd been in for maybe more than 20 years and with the double whammy of having to fight that same party for their own seat.

Andrew Catsaras on ABC Radio National in interview with Waleed Aly last night suggested that the public like two party politics. I suggest that what the public like in this particular case is irrelevant. Joining the new Ruddbull party would be akin to political suicide and there'd be a good chance that such a person would never have a job in politics again. There's very few people who would deliberately resign with only a possibility of gaining the same job again.
The question of why don't they form a new party isn't even a particularly new one. There were suggestions pretty well much like this during the era of Bob Hawke and Andrew Peacock, although given that Hawke had been head of the ACTU it was also like so much smoke, a chasing of the wind.
Perhaps in the days of non party politics, the idea wouldn't have been so crazy. When Robert Peel and Lord Melbourne came up against each other, parties weren't very heavily delineated; they certainly weren't registered corporations with constitutions, marketing machines and permanent staff.
Not even the great shift in Australian politics which saw Menzies pull lots of members into the then brand new Liberal party out of the old United Australia Party was quite this hard. The United Australia Party and the Nationalist Party of Australia before it were both grounded in centre-right conservatism. Ruddbull would be pulling from the centre-left as well and would be far harder to establish.

Ruddbull as a party would in people's minds emotionally fill the centre and win government tomorrow. The problem is that the real world would start knocking at the door very quickly.
Durveger's Law says that with any single member constituency system, it tends towards two party politics. It's not very hard to see why this is the case. The simple fact that there is a government and there are members of the parliament who are not in the government, draws a very very black line down the middle of the parliament. Even if you have six or seven parties battling for control, the system is such that it eventually settles; one only needs to look at the period in Australian politics from 1901-1911 to notice that the experiment has already been performed.
You will from time to time get a third party who sits in the balance of power and the Australian public are sort of fine with that in the Senate at least. The Greens sort of fill it now and the Democrats did in the 1990s. Somehow I think that neither Turnbull or Rudd want to resigned to third party politics.

For Turnbull, staying in the Liberal Party means a spot in a Liberal cabinet. It is possible over the long game of politics that he'd have another shot at the leadership too.
Rudd on the other hand is less likely to again be Prime Minister but at the moment, he still sits in the Government and has a chance at regaining a cabinet post if the political winds change.
The pragmatists in both of them see the value of staying in their party because at very least it means staying in their seat. Just like playing poker if you have a chip you have a chair and not having a chair means that you're out of the game. They'd both rather stay in it me thinks.