Labor members are ready to dump Rudd

EITHER Kevin Rudd is finished or the Labor Government he leads is for the chop, according to some of the most senior voices in the federal ALP caucus.

EITHER Kevin Rudd is finished or the Labor Government he leads is for the chop, according to some of the most senior voices in the federal ALP caucus.

The busy little bureaucrat, who happily accepted acknowledgement as the most process-driven prime minister in the nation's history, is now finding his sheer lack of coherent policy management is killing him. "His handling of the Super Tax on miners has cost him any credibility he may have had left after his dumping of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and his flip on the 'greatest moral challenge of our time'," an experienced Labor figure told me. "How can Kevin Rudd legitimately claim to be negotiating with the mining industry when it is clear that he has frequently misrepresented the issues? "What sort of credibility does he have when he puts it out to the nation that he is negotiating when it is apparent to all that there have been no negotiations? There is a total lack of credibility." No one in caucus supports the method with which he has dealt with this issue, the senior Labor figure said. "Everywhere I go people say they have had enough of brand Labor but then they admit that it is brand Kevin they have turned away from," he said. It took Hawke and Howard several years to fall as far in the polls as Rudd has slipped since last December. Caucus members say Rudd has listened to a handful of inexperienced advisers and ignored long-standing party members. "He did this with the ETS and hung on well after the issue was on the way out," one said. "He had Turnbull in his pocket and thought everything would flow from that, but the people he was listening to had no idea of the reality. They were banking on a hoped-for outcome, not what everyone else could see was a disaster. "His credibility is such that people in caucus are now saying that he is no good and has to go. The only support he has for the tax is from the Financial Review, which seems to hate business, and from a couple of power-hungry union leaders. "If Cabinet had not been so full of such gutless wonders, they would have pulled the PM up by now but the punters forget that Rudd handpicked his Cabinet, he has the right to hire to fire. "That's why the members are prepared to be treated like school children, waiting outside his office like schoolgirls," the exasperated MP said. "It's fine for some to say now the process hasn't been handled well, but they've known that since the Budget was brought down last month. Cabinet has been shown to be a one-man show. "I think we're going to get whacked. No one is at all optimistic. No one believes Kevin can turn this one around." There is no view on who should replace Rudd, despite Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard winning favour in some quarter. "She may be more personable than Kevin, but billions have been handed to shonks under the school building program she was meant to be looking after," another Labor MP said. "Caucus is worried there is not enough time left to restore brand-name loyalty to the ALP before the election." The time will come, he said, when youngsters in Labor families will ask their elders how it all come to grief and pose the question: "Daddy, what did you do when Kevin was running things into the ground?" Not surprisingly, many in caucus are already asking why Treasury Secretary Ken Henry was handed so much power by the Prime Minister and why Resources Minister Martin Ferguson was left in the dark until the last minute. Strip away the Rudd government spin and it is immediately apparent that neither the process nor the proposed Super Tax have won support from any but a handful of rusted-on, Labor-reliant apparatchiks. Retail figure Gerry Harvey, who was a huge supporter of the billions which flowed from Treasury in the early days of the economic stimulus package, now says Rudd is an "amateur" while his friend, advertising man John Singleton, cannot find anyone who thinks Rudd speaks anything but "s***." The Government is guilty of misleading the market through its own admissions. The Treasurer originally claimed that the tax currently paid by Australian mining companies was between 13 and 17 per cent. This percentage was based on a student paper from North Carolina University in the US, the purpose of which was to model comparative rather than effective taxation rates for mining companies. Modelling by KPMG has since shown that iron ore producers pay an effective tax rate of 43.6 per cent. For coal producers it is 41.1 per cent and for nickel it is 34.3 per cent. The Prime Minister told parliament that the Opposition was "wrong wrong wrong" for suggesting that the tax could impact on financial markets. Two days later, Labor used the impact on financial markets as basis for their $38 million advertisement campaign, which had been planned for two weeks. Finally, Treasurer Wayne Swan admitted on Monday that under the mining tax, companies could pay an effective tax rate of up to 58 per cent despite maintaining for over a month that the rate would be 40 per cent. Australia's international reputation is at risk due to the Government's misleading claims. This is why leading investment managers are starting to express their concerns about the tax. As one elder statesman of the ALP told me: "Kevin Rudd is the first person I have seen occupy the office of prime minister and fail to benefit from the experience. He has not grown with the job, he is still has the intellect of a basic Queensland public servant, and it is hurting the nation".