I wish I was smart enough to say this as I think it summs up RUDD perfectly
Michael Kroger writes on - and writes off - Kevin Rudd:
Like life itself, one day Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership will come to an end. Calls to Cate Blanchett to check on the progress of baby Iggy will be met with the butler telling him “Ms Blanchett is busy, could you possibly ring back on another occasion”. He will then realise that celebrities have a thousand fans but John Button only one funeral. As a former Prime Minister once said “remember that it is not about you, it is only about the position you hold”.
Like a boy in a lolly shop with a stack of blank cheques, Kevin Rudd is a man hopelessly out of his depth. Easily the worst Prime Minister in living memory.
Nowadays he hardly ever refers to former Prime Ministers Hawke, Keating or Howard by name, thinking of them as irrelevant to Australia. He views them more as reluctant but necessary local administrators of a scorched earth nation in post-Mad Max environment. A wasteland where the main role of the three former PMs was to preserve as much petrol as they could and keep the fledgling scrap metal compounds in place until someone could rescue the survivors.
How else should we account for everything that Rudd does as having to be ‘big’, ‘landmark’, ‘historic’, ‘root and branch’, ‘the first time’ and so on? It is as if Hawke, Keating and Howard did absolutely nothing as Prime Ministers. Don’t worry about Gough he will just be delighted that after the passing of more then 30 years Australia has produced a Prime Minister worse than him.
It is Rudd and his fellow blow-in Penny Wong that had to save us from the great moral issue of our time. Vital to our nation’s future the CPRS bill had to be passed by 3pm on some Friday back in October or November, not a minute later. What an embarrassment to them this high-pressure hoax became. Surprisingly the world did not end in 2009 after all.
Rudd also needed to save the nation from a looming recession by plundering our national savings and putting us into debt for years. But, of course, a man with no experience in running a business of any size at all would panic and overreact to the crisis because he failed to take notice of or give credit to John Howard or Peter Costello for having Australia in a position where we entered the GFC in a much better state than any other Western nation. This is because in his mind there really was no economic management before Rudd. His election was year 0. Charging into the GFC with all of the incompetence and inexperience of a financial markets wood-duck, Rudd spent billions of taxpayer’s money on hair brain schemes that have made Australia a laughing stock internationally.
Have you noticed how Rudd never now attends all of those international forums you couldn’t keep him away from in his first year as PM? The gain for international leaders is the loss to Australia’s hospitalised who have to endure Kevin Rudd exploiting their illness for cheap photo opportunities. The second last thing Australians deserve or need is such an incompetent Prime Minister trying to run the hospital system.
The “Building the Education Revolution” has also been a farce and an embarrassment to both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. With Peter Garrett, these three ministers are lucky they are not company directors otherwise they would be prosecuted by ASIC, cross examined by liquidators and sued by shareholders. It is a pity that some years ago our business leaders did not demand of our politicians that any corporate governance rules applying to them would be willingly accepted if the politicians imposing them agreed to be bound by the same rules.
Some weeks ago, the Prime Minister was passionately in favour of “a big Australia”. You know that when a process driven politician like Rudd declares himself passionately in favour of something, it means he has only just discovered the idea, this is especially true in his case given that this passionate belief like most of his ideas, only lasted a few weeks until he realised his passionate belief was not shared by the voters.
If you add closure of the insulation scheme, the failure of Grocery Choice and Fuel Watch to the debacle over the Green Loans scheme, his border protection policies and the now failed child care centre scheme, you are right to conclude that Kevin Rudd’s hide is much thicker than that of any politician we have ever known in this country.
Having been responsible for some of the greatest policy failings this country has ever seen, he would be forgiven for being so humiliated that together with Gillard and Garrett, they never showed their faces in public again.
Agree with him or not on the policies, the only runs Rudd could say he has scored are the two apologies and the signing of Kyoto which only saw him capitalise on the work done over many years by others. Just like a footballer whose only game for the year is the winning Grand Final in which he was selected due to other player injuries.
With such a record of failure and incompetencies, he should not claim credit for any success in relation to his policies pertaining to the GFC which were by good luck rather than good management. He inherited the best economy in the Western world, spent too much money and working families now have six interest rate rises as a result of it.
Kevin Rudd has now announced a disastrous new tax regime which will seriously damage the mining industry. The last thing Australians need is Kevin Rudd trying to overhaul the tax system. Another fiasco looms. What Kevin Rudd needs is less power, less money, less influence and fewer Cabinet Ministers prepared to go along with this circus. Anyone with a nodding acquaintance of politics in this country knows that Colin Barnett and John Brumby were right. Why give any more power to a man whose Prime Ministerial record is bad beyond belief and whose period in office will be ridiculed by history?
Kevin Rudd now leads a Government in crisis. His capacity to deliver anything successfully must be severely shattered. He is a man without friends in the Labor Party. He is a loner. Not only without friends, but with a huge number of enemies inside his own Party. Why would the electorate keep liking a man so intensely disliked by those that know him best.