Rudd is not fit to rule

Phone calls from Kevin Rudd to his friends in the media, which once included me, always begin - according to members of the press gallery - with the words "this conversation has never taken place, right?"

While I will not confirm or deny the accuracy of that account, it is public knowledge that Rudd and I have had numerous discussions and it was written elsewhere that both he and his wife, Therese Rein, have been guests at my home. I have, however, never breached our many agreements of confidentiality. But, without breaking my word, I can say that my initial admiration for Rudd, the man, has diminished over the past nine months until I have the gravest concerns about his fitness to head a political party, let alone run this nation. My main concerns about his character relate to what I perceive to be an unalloyed ruthlessness, a lack of his loyalty to anything but his own short-term political ambitions and his projection of a carefully constructed image that has little or nothing to do with Rudd the man. Of course, all politicians exhibit these traits to some degree. They wouldn't make it through the first pre-selection meeting if they did not, but these qualities drive Rudd as they drive no other politician in Australia today. Everything he does, every word he utters, comes from a person who is totally absorbed in his mission to get ahead no matter what the cost and no matter who has to be jettisoned in the process. As we saw again just last week, even his colleagues will be cut adrift when they bring attention to a weakness in the campaign strategy, even though - in the case of shadow foreign affairs minister Robert McClelland - he was reading a speech that in no way deviated from the accepted ALP policy that Rudd has espoused, and despite the fact that speech had been cleared by spin-meisters in both Rudd's and McClelland's offices before delivery. The potentially damaging fall-out from McClelland's enunciation of the ALP's long-standing policy on capital punishment meant that he had to be cut adrift. Despite his claim to be a conservative Christian, the reality is that everything with Rudd is about power and when he is before an audience not enamoured of religion, he is happy to tailor his persona and step back a few paces from his ready avowals of faith made before other gatherings. The list of excuses he has made for various blunders from the phoney Anzac Dawn Service he was to take part in with Channel 7's Sunrise crew, an essential medium for the delivery of the hand-wrought Rudd image into Australian households, to his night on the tiles with New York Post editor-in-chief Col Allan, runs on and on. But there is an insight that can be drawn from his voyeuristic pole-dancing episode. Allan, as has been widely described, is a colourful bloke. An Aussie from Dubbo who has made it to the top of the tough daily newspaper market in one of the world's most competitive cities, New York. But he is more than that. He is both an intelligent and influential person who is in regular contact with Rupert Murdoch, the global media magnate who controls the company that owns the Post - and this newspaper - among hundreds of other valuable properties. Rudd's lapse of judgement in progressing from dinner to the strip-and-clip joint was not caused by his desire to see bare breasts, or go on the sauce; it was driven by his insatiable craving for power, which Allan personified. Rudd could have met him for a coffee, he could have met him for dinner, he could have begged off going on into the Manhattan night but to do so would have meant giving up an opportunity to curry favour with someone of undoubted influence. It is hard to nail what the real person is like and, while I would never question his love of his family, there is a sense that he does not have the long-standing friendships which help provide leaders with the ability to meaningfully communicate with the population. His "people'' moments are staged, geared for the 6pm news, sometimes disastrously, as was the case when he went to a unit near Canberra to talk about a scheme to subsidise property for low income earners only to later find that the person chosen for the stunt by ALP staffers from the People's Republic of the ACT would be, embarrassingly, ineligible for the scheme he was promoting. This shallowness was exhibited again last week when, after railing against the Coalition for its wasteful advertising spending, Rudd and his staff flew to Perth ostensibly to launch a cancer-screening initiative but really, according to the ABC, to shoot a commercial with two local candidates. Whatever John Howard's critics may say, he is what he is and, apart from a trim of the famous eyebrows, what you see is what you get with no contrivance. He doesn't fabricate an enthusiasm for sport before a grand final, doesn't manufacture grief when tragedy strikes and he doesn't run from tough decisions or blame other members of his Cabinet or staffers when those decisions may be unpopular. It is, however, Rudd's consistent refusal to address grave concerns about the so-called Heiner Affair which bring so many of the question marks about his character together in my mind. Last week, Peter Coyne, the former manager of the dysfunctional youth detention centre at the heart of the child sex abuse and document shredding scandal, told The Australian that concerns about Rudd's possible role in the destruction of material known to be wanted as evidence were first made in the early 1990s. According to the reporter, Coyne said the worries were raised at a meeting with two union officials looking after his (Coyne's) interests, but "only in the sense that he (Rudd) was ruining the (Queensland) public service''. The Australian people don't yet know enough about Rudd's sole experience in government but they should have sufficient knowledge to know he is not fit to run the nation. (Footnote: A production error was made in the processing of the original article, it has been corrected in this version.)