The K-Rudd-inator is back

[OZCUBAN]

Yes the red headed clown should have her reputation saved. We should never forget that she was the worst pm this country has ever seen.

What about her hero Whitlam ,quiet ironic I think ,still would have loved to see her get thrashed at the polls

[OZCUBAN]

extraordinary that the bloke who has done nothing but drag the labor party into the cesspool, has lied, is the most self centred pile of excrement in history, is to be rewarded.

if he was on fire, i would not piss on him with hitler's ****. and he will cause me to break a vow. i swore i would never vote for abbott but if it means dumping that grub, i will.

i would have trusted bin laden before rudd.

the election cannot come soon enough. i'd rather have deans as prime minister (at least then he wouldn't be stuffing up our rugby team).

and way to go, bill shorten. right now, bacteria on the moon would know you are a spineless worthless jellyfish and no one on any side will ever trust you again.

You are. Legend Ken ,well put

I see Westy deleted his post which was also good ,I personally would like to see Malcolm Turnball as liberal leader

[sharks]

You are. Legend Ken ,well put

I see Westy deleted his post which was also good ,I personally would like to see Malcolm Turnball as liberal leader

I concur, if Turnball was there I think it would guarantee Liberal win but with Abbott I am not convinced

[David67]

Boy Labor must think we are fools.

[frenchkiwi]

Boy Labor must think we are fools.

well i suppose when you're as desperate as labor right now it doesn't matter.

and rudd generally does well in the popularity stakes, got dumped basically because he behaved like an autocratic prick, so bad even his fellow politicians noticed!!! (incredible)

now they've brought him back to soften their downfall by jumping in between the titanic and the iceberg on point of impact. he will go down with the ship, and the next leader can rebuild from the lifeboats. politicks as usual.

[CanuckSARTech]

extraordinary that the bloke who has done nothing but drag the labor party into the cesspool, has lied, is the most self centred pile of excrement in history, is to be rewarded.

if he was on fire, i would not piss on him with hitler's ****. and he will cause me to break a vow. i swore i would never vote for abbott but if it means dumping that grub, i will.

i would have trusted bin laden before rudd.

the election cannot come soon enough. i'd rather have deans as prime minister (at least then he wouldn't be stuffing up our rugby team).

and way to go, bill shorten. right now, bacteria on the moon would know you are a spineless worthless jellyfish and no one on any side will ever trust you again.

My gawd, Ken.

Tell us how you really feel.

Mod or not, don't hold back now. Let it all out...

[Ken Gargett]

My gawd, Ken.

Tell us how you really feel.

Mod or not, don't hold back now. Let it all out...

trust me, that is sitting on the fence, as this is a family site.

detested gillard, rudd even worse, prayed i'd never even be given the chance not to vote for abbott and i would trust turnbull as much as i'd trust a cut snake. remember we had turnbull and he made a complete mess of it. anopther one who thinks he is so much cleverer than everyone else. and i've heard a few too many people who have dealt with him in business say that they would never ever trust him in any respect.

doesn't leave much, does it?

big joe? but he looks more like someone you'd have a beer with, not vote for.

[CanuckSARTech]

Now just imagine being someone who directly deals with / works with / takes orders from these types....

[Ken Gargett]

Now just imagine being someone who directly deals with / works with / takes orders from these types....

just chatting to my postie. one of his friends (who was on his staff at the time) was on the plane when rudd exploded because he didn't get the meal he wanted. said it was the most embarrassing thing she'd ever seen. he was screaming. everyone was looking for places to hide and cringe. even his staff think the bloke is a complete grub.

did i miss a memo? has all australia had a meeting that i didn't know about and said this is simply one giant practical joke and that they actually do know what filth he is. just pretending so it is a bigger dump come the election.

[CaptainQuintero]

Oh wow she's actually gone! Somehow she managed to annoy me from half a world away!

Pity she has gone now that filming for the hobbit has ended, they were wanting lots of extras to play goblins.

You'd think the the best thing for you guys would be to have a guy who worked in the mining sector run the country as that seems to be the big economy driver there.

[Chris7]

[orangedog]

Great photo! Sending this to all of my expat mates.

[sengjc]

She doesn't need a job though since she will be given a pension of about $200,000 a year tax-free for as long as she lives. Not sure if it's transferable to her partner after that.

Sigh...looks like she will have the last laugh after all.

[Fuzz]

Don't worry, she's already looking...

[sengjc]

$200K a year to spend not enough?

[ARRV]

Rudd is anything but a fool. His elevation will save them the senate and maybe the lower house , although that is unlikely especially with Windsor and Oakshottt leaving who are possibly the biggest traitors in modern history.

Election will be close. People do not inherently trust Abbott. KRudd is popular. Best move labor could have made at this time. Gillards speech was perfect - showed grace and humility which was lacking from most of her time as leader . showed she really had something just couldn't communicate it - I guess if you have a hung parliament and insurrection in ranks your message gets lost

[Warren]

Gillard still has a police investigation to face regarding her dodgy dealings while at Slater and Gordon .

She could still end up as the first PM to obtain a criminal record.

The rumor was that they would not proceed against a sitting Pm but all bets are off now.

[Ken Gargett]

from the business spectator. seems highly far-fetched but these days, who knows?

Has Rudd walked into an almighty trap?

Rob Burgess 28 Jun, 6:24 PM

Has Kevin Rudd walked into an almighty trap? Events of the past few days may have seemed chaotic and unpredictable, but look further and there seems to be more to the Rudd resurrection than meets the eye.

The evidence is circumstantial – it could not be otherwise, until various players’ memoirs are published decades from now – but there is certainly a pattern of events to suggest Bill Shorten’s bid to save the ALP from Kevin Rudd is working.

Before getting into that, let me say that Shorten receives high praise from some of my sources – yes, he’s a schemer and ruthless powerbroker, they say, but he’s also an incredibly hard worker and the driving force behind Labor’s historic DisabilityCare reforms. In this dirty game of politics, say Shorten fans, all leaders have some blood on their hands.

The question over Shorten’s role this week is exactly whose blood he’s rinsing off. The dominant narrative is that he has ‘betrayed’ Julia Gillard, or ‘knifed’ the very woman he manoeuvred to install as PM in 2010.

But all may not be as it seems. A high-level, high-profile political strategist told me some weeks ago that Shorten was “doing everything he can to get Rudd to run for the leadership”, as a circuitous but certain way to remove the Rudd threat to his own ambitions to one day be PM.

Let’s not forget, however, that no matter what kind of machiavellian Shorten is, his roots are in the union movement. Even in moments of cynicism or treachery, a man like Shorten believes in the party with which his former union, the AWU, has a symbiotic relationship.

Shorten will not wish to see Rudd sever links with the unions in the way he began to do between 2007 and 2010. Under Gillard’s prime ministership, unions have had a number of wins, most recently gaining strong right-of-entry provisions in the Fair Work Act, and succeeding in tightening 457 visa regulations to slow the flow of foreign workers into Australia (a piece of legislation that Rudd allowed to pass parliament on his first day in the job).

So by fostering a successful Rudd challenge, Shorten would know he faced two prospects – a Rudd victory at the federal election, which would cement the move away from the unions; or a Rudd loss that would make Shorten himself leader of the opposition, and end Rudd’s influence within the party for all time.

That latter outcome is pretty tempting and the cynics (and Shorten’s enemies) would see a strong motive for leaking or in some other way wrecking Rudd’s election campaign, in the way Rudd is widely believed to have done to Gillard’s 2010 campaign.

But then it’s not actually necessary to suggest such a sinister move. As journalist Andrew Crook recently wrote in Crikey, the ‘sudden’ switch of Shorten to the Rudd camp on Wednesday evening was actually “the end point of months of wailing within Victorian Labor”.

Crook writes: “In Victoria, long considered Gillard's ‘rock’, the thinking within Shorten's Australian Workers Union circle was always that Labor could safely hold onto the crown jewels even if the rest of the country was aflame with anti-Gillard pathos ... On June 4, JWS Research polling was leaked to News Limited. Almost surreally, it showed [Victorian seat of] Isaacs was now in play with a 15.4 per cent swing. Alarm bells, and Shorten's mobile, started ringing off the hook. It's understood Shorten then took the extreme step of commissioning private polling in his seat of Maribyrnong, that he holds by 17.5 per cent on the new boundaries.”

While Crook’s article argues that this forced Shorten’s AWU supporters to panic, and to talk Shorten into the Rudd camp just to protect their Victorian powerbase, there is another interpretation to these events – that the swings under Gillard were so big, that even with Rudd leading the party Labor would lose government.

That would make the choice for aspirant Shorten extremely clear. Become leader of a handful of Labor MPs after a Gillard loss at the federal election, or lead a large number of Labor MPs after a Rudd loss – with the latter option also guaranteeing that Abbott would not have control of the senate.

Viewed through this lens, Rudd has walked into a trap.

The election, if Rudd loses, will end his career. Had he waited until after the election to rebuild the party in his own image and defeat an unpopular conservative government at a 2016 election, he would have been unstoppable.

Could this be the reason Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan look so chipper in their joint media conference late on Wednesday night?

Swan, so often a flustered, frustrated and angry performer when dealing with journalists, looked just as sanguine, just as magnanimous in defeat as Gillard had been moments before.

Historians will piece together these events when more information comes to light. But from this moment in time it's quite feasible that Gillard, Swan and Shorten all knew exactly what they were doing on Wednesday evening.

The common view of Shorten is that he was devastated, at his media conference at 6.30pm on Wednesday, to be changing camps, and that his relationships with his friends are severely damaged.

When I spoke to AWU leader Paul Howes on Friday, Howes said he would be maintaining a “dignified silence” for some weeks.

It’ll be some time before we know Howes’ real views of Gillard, but it does bring to mind that lyric from Bob Dylan’s Tombstone Blues: "The tears on her cheeks are from laughter".

The apocryphal ‘petition’ that ‘flushed Gillard out’ may not have been an invention of the Rudd camp after all.

[frenchkiwi]

from the business spectator. seems highly far-fetched but these days, who knows?

Has Rudd walked into an almighty trap?

that's my opinion as per the Titanic metaphor but the "almighty trap" thing is a bit silly. Rudd knows full well that there is a heavy probability that he has replaced Gillard only to minimise the depth of the Labor ship sinking. This is the standard stuff of everyday politicking. But he either believes that he has a chance, however slight, of actually winning ... and/or he is prepared to lose as long as he got that ultimate revenge.

Considering his superhuman ego i imagine that it's not only both of the above i.e. his lust for power, but he also probably believes that there is a chance he might see off a leadership challenge post-election loss (getting a narrow loss would give earn him some brownie points) and take labor back to power. The fact that after umpteen failed leader challenges, he got there because Labor begged for him to come back will only strengthen his resolve. Alea jacta est.

[marty922]

Just heard this on Triple J radio.

"This country doesn't have elections. It has 'pick an idiot or pay a fine' "

Bloke might be on to something methinks.