Bye Kevin, you wont be missed...

[Smooth]

Anyone else watching the Australian Government self destruct right now?

I have just uncorked a nice red and am happily watching Sky News live.

Its been emotional, bye Kev!

[OZCUBAN]

YEA YEA

The demise of the milky bar kid

[MIKA27]

It's a shame this didn't occur before the Milky bar kids tax increase on tobacco...

I'm watching his speech now and he's super cut and in denial.

Prick personified.

[OZCUBAN]

It's a shame this didn't occur before the Milky bar kids tax increase on tobacco...

I'm watching his speech now and he's super cut and in denial.

Prick personified.

well said Mika ,wait for the next election and we can use "ding dong the witch is dead ) the Ranger one that is

[JoshMP]

wow, this went up FAST

It's going to be interesting to see how this goes down tomorrow morning.

[Smooth]

wow, this went up FAST

It's going to be interesting to see how this goes down tomorrow morning.

happened to turn on Sky News at about 7pm or so and it was non-stop coverage before any word from Rudd etc.

[Warren]

I am just over the moon with happiness at the thought that this egotistical country destroying son of a ***** is getting the reality check that he has needed all his life.

Now all he needs is a good enema and he will disappear completely.

It won't matter who they put in though, the whole party is covered in the Krudd stench, they're just fooling themselves.

[Fuzz AI]

Kevin who?

The real question is, is Gillard any better? Can she do any worse?

[dicko]

See ya later Tintin!

[JMH]

I think this picture summarises Australian politics at the moment rather succinctly.

[partagasd4]

An unpopular Prime Minister steps down and a female takes his place without an election. The same thing happened here in Canada in 1993 and it was a disaster.

[Omskakas]

An unpopular Prime Minister steps down and a female takes his place without an election. The same thing happened here in Canada in 1993 and it was a disaster.

Oh ****! It just happened also here in Finland!

We're dooooomed! DOOOOMED, I say!

[sandholm]

a female takes his place without an election.

What has that to do with it, Germany is one of the best performing countries in the world right now, and they have a female leader...

[Ben]

Thank God that blithering idiot is gone. Problem is we're now stuck for the time being with the Ginger Minger and the rest of Rudd's inept Kitchen Cabinet running the show.

The Election can't come soon enough.

[Warren]

What has that to do with it, Germany is one of the best performing countries in the world right now, and they have a female leader...

The problem is how can they make dinner, clean the house and take the kids to school if they're out galavanting around the place pretending to be important.

I mean really what's the world coming to.

Pardon me, I hit my head and thought I was back in the 1950's again.

[partagasd4]

What has that to do with it, Germany is one of the best performing countries in the world right now, and they have a female leader...

I'm not saying her being a woman has anything to do with her performance as Prime Minister. I was just noting the similarity between what is happening in Australia and what happened in Canada.

[frenchkiwi]

An unpopular Prime Minister steps down and a female takes his place without an election. The same thing happened here in Canada in 1993 and it was a disaster.

Oh ****! It just happened also here in Finland!

We're dooooomed! DOOOOMED, I say!

This happened in 1998ish in New Zealand - PM on overseas tour and female politician mounts coup to become NZ's first female prime minister. Promptly lost the next election - which generally happens to unelected incumbents.

Anyone noticing a trend here?

What does it mean?

a/ people hesitate to vote for a woman PM without precedent so it takes a coup in the governing party for one to break the "glass ceiling".

(at NZ's '99 election another woman was voted PM and won 3 terms)

b/ women politicians are all scheming machiavellis sharpening knives behind the leader's back ;-)

c/ successful female politicians are the ones which embrace the worst powermongering characteristics of their male counterparts - but do it better.

Anyway, generalisations aside, this Australian coup from the Oh-So-Loyal Gilliard (still don't know how she can talk about loyalty with a straight face) is risk-taking verging on political suicide for the labour party. People hate it when party hacks dump their elected leaders - regardless of popularity etc. So why did they take it?

Hypotheses:

-Mining corporations run Australia including the Labour Party. Well at least when threatened with taxes on their $%*!# ginormous profits.

-Rudd was begrudgingly elected leader by fellow MPs who hated him but wanted to win election. When the 1st opportunity to take him down came - low in polls against opposition leader who was even lower - they took it.

-Rudd broke promise on ETS scheme (carbon taxes etc) and lost his core supporters and then tried the mining tax to make it up to them - putting him offside with the Mining Powers That Be, who own the asses of many MPs, as well.

- Rudd personified a latte-sipping bureaucrat not a jug-sculling convict - soooo Un-Australian, had to be kicked out.

[OZCUBAN]

Julia Gillard

Put put it a Cigar scenario different Band same Cigar

Burns irregularly and leaves a burnt acrid taste in your mouth for decades

[MIKA27]

Julia Gillard

Put put it a Cigar scenario different Band same Cigar

Burns irregularly and leaves a burnt acrid taste in your mouth for decades

I wouldn't know about the taste in my mouth with Julia however mate.....

[OZCUBAN]

[Leopolis Semper Fidelis]

A downer from the opposing side of the trough gives us his take on Krudd....

Alexander Downer on Rudd

David Marr reckons the PM is power-hungry. In fact, says Alexander Downer, he just wants fame.

The Kevin Rudd phenomenon is one of the more extraordinary to have swept through Australian politics over the past two generations. For Kevin Rudd to have become prime minister of Australia was astonishing enough, but to have had record personal approval ratings for more than two years in office just defied political gravity. Five years ago, no one who knew Kevin Rudd would have imagined in their wildest imagination that this could happen. Yet it did.

Let me explain.

Members of the Federal Parliament all know each other; not necessarily well, but at least a little. Over the past 20 years, few, if any, MPs have been less popular than Kevin Rudd. All politicians are at the very least a trifle vain. They like to be the centre of attention, to be in the media, to be ‘consulted’. There is barely an exception. All of them think they are a bit better than they really are. Nearly all of them are ambitious, many furiously so. But on all of those counts, no one in recorded Australian political history has ever exceeded Kevin Rudd.

There is a parliamentary consensus that Kevin Rudd is bright. No one could reasonably doubt his addiction to hard work, his studious attention to detail and his passion to acquire knowledge. His success at university and in his early years as a junior diplomat attests to that.

As prime minister, those qualities have shone through. Kevin Rudd, PM, knows stuff, speaks a foreign language — and a hard one at that — and works day and night with barely a break to sleep.

He knows he has academic ability, of course. I recall walking through the corridors of Parliament House late one evening about five years ago and encountered a busy- looking Kevin Rudd. ‘Alex,’ he said to me, ‘you and I are too bright to be leaders of our parties.’ Well, I had been the leader, and a pretty poor one at that, so the comment says something about his mood and self-esteem at the time, not me.

What MPs didn’t like about Rudd, the backbencher, and Rudd, the shadow minister, was his conceit and vanity. On 9 September 2004, an Islamist fanatic tried to blow up the Australian embassy in Jakarta. I was in Victor Harbor that day when the ambassador rang me directly on my mobile to tell me the terrible news. I told my staff we ought to go immediately to Jakarta and to take the head of the AFP, DFAT officials and intelligence people as well. We needed a VIP plane to load our officials in Canberra, fly to Adelaide to pick me up and push on to Jakarta. We could be there before bedtime.

I told John Howard of my plans and he said I ought to also take the opposition spokesman for foreign affairs, who happened to be Kevin Rudd; this was, after all, during the election campaign. Indirectly, I let Rudd know he was invited. I drove to my office to prepare for my departure. There was a message to call Rudd. He was furious. The f***ing VIP plane wasn’t going via Brisbane to pick him up. It f***ing had to. He ordered me to change it's f***ing flight schedule.

I explained two things to him. First, the plane was too small to add him and his staffer unless we offloaded the AFP Commissioner or the intelligence officer. I wasn’t prepared to do that. Secondly, to travel via Brisbane would add hours to the journey. Instead, we would pay for a commercial flight for him.

This was not met with grace. A fusillade of abuse, much of it with sexual references, ensued, and then a demand that I tell him the flight schedules from Brisbane to Jakarta. ‘I am not,’ I crudely said, ‘your f***ing travel agent. DFAT will help you.’

The point is clear: people at the embassy had died, we needed to get the Indonesians onto the case to establish who the culprits were, we had to show support to the embassy staff at this time of crisis. It wasn’t about me and it certainly wasn’t about the shadow minister for foreign affairs, Mr Kevin Rudd. But for the member for Griffith it was about one thing: himself.

David Marr, a warrior for the political Left, has his own stories about Kevin Rudd at the Copenhagen climate change conference. They ring true. They are part of a pattern of Behaviour. So too are the Marr revelations about the way Rudd uses people. They are not emotional beings with feelings of their own; they are vehicles to be used to satiate his personal ambitions and, when used, to be discarded. That’s why he has always had an extraordinarily high turnover of staff.

When the staff of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet assembled to say farewell to the vanquished John Howard, they did so with a sense of respect for a decent man, but not one they voted for. They wanted something fresher, more dynamic, youthful and, being public servants, social democratic. It took them three months to realise their mistake. Work was demanded of them at any time of day or night, through weekends and public holidays; it went to the Prime Minister’s office but it never came back. By the time the work arrived, he was onto something else. One very senior public servant of long standing ruefully reported that there hadn’t been a more inefficient and thoughtless prime minister since Malcolm Fraser.

All of which begs the question: what is Rudd trying to achieve? Marr claims Rudd is fascinated by power, wants to get power but doesn’t know what to do with power once he gets it. I don’t feel comfortable with this thesis. People who want power do know what to do with it; that’s why they want it.

Rudd wants fame. He wants to be on TV every night. He wants to be recognised everywhere he goes. He wants to be the centre of attention. That’s why he casts people aside when he’s done with them, it’s why he courts the media, it’s why as a shadow minister he had his staff film him making a statement and then sent it to TV stations. It wasn’t because he wanted power, it was because he wanted to be on TV.

Rudd never did believe in any political philosophy or policy prescriptions. As shadow minister for foreign affairs, he seldom bothered with climate change. The Iraq war was his theme. After all, it was unpopular.

But when he became opposition leader he talked of climate change with passion; the passion of someone who can read an opinion poll. In September 2007, when Rudd had a 45-minute meeting with the President of the United States, he didn’t mention the topic. When, two-and-a-half years after his election, the emissions trading scheme became a political challenge, he dumped it. These two events marry. If climate change were a core belief — the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ — he would have talked about it with gusto when he met the President; and he would have fought like a Kilkenny cat to save his response to it when it was challenged by Tony Abbott.

Marr is probably right. The secret of what Rudd is all about lies in his childhood. That’s probably true of all of us. Something happened then which made him determined one day to be famous. He has succeeded — spectacularly. But like all people who seek fame for themselves at the expense of others, his fame will eat him up. Fame fed with substance can make a person great. Fame alone will destroy you.

It has taken an incredible three years for the Australian public to realise who their national leader really is. I sat with a Labor luminary having a late-night drink in June 2008. He turned to me and said: ‘Mate, one day the Australian public will grow to hate Kevin Rudd as much as I do.’ That day has arrived.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and federal Liberal leader in 1994.

[maalouly]

Great read! but wouldn't trust Downer. Costello for PM!

[bolivr]

A great read, thanks for posting. Downer was a pretty good foreign minister - apart from studiously looking away when the AWB were paying bribes to Sadam Hussein...anyway I believe he is spot on with the discussions which happen in parliament, both within parties and between members of opposing parties. There is quite a lot of honesty there which the general public may not believe exists when all they see is the media spin night after night.

[Fuzz AI]

Great read! but wouldn't trust Downer. Costello for PM!

Screw that! Ken for PM!!

At least the tobacco tax will be reduced (or even removed entirely) and there's also a fridge in it for all of us.

[MIKA27]

A great read, thanks for posting. Downer was a pretty good foreign minister - apart from studiously looking away when the AWB were paying bribes to Sadam Hussein...anyway I believe he is spot on with the discussions which happen in parliament, both within parties and between members of opposing parties. There is quite a lot of honesty there which the general public may not believe exists when all they see is the media spin night after night.

I don't know about that Mike....

Downer looked like a cross dresser!