The riddle of Rudd's incredible popularity

ONE of the year's intriguing mysteries remains the source of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's popularity when there is no evidentiary reason for the continuing level of public support he enjoys.

In the US, the American public, both Republicans and Democrats, have long realised that President Barack Obama's "yes, we can" is more accurately defined as "no, we can't", despite the passage of his health-care bill on Christmas Eve. In this, he has achieved rare bipartisanship. Both major parties accept that the bill, in its current form, is a real stinker. So much for compromising with the states and with every Congressman and Senator to get it passed. Given Rudd has achieved nothing of similar magnitude - and please don't talk about the symbolic apologies to waifs and orphans, to the mythical Stolen Generation, to whales and red river gums - he has finished two years in office with a duck on the political scoreboard. Speaking of ducks, the manner in which he closeted himself in Kirribilli House after skulking back from the Copenhagen disaster, hosting jolly knees-ups for the rich, the powerful and the cronies, while sending the deadpan Penny Wong out to front the press, was an exercise in abject cowardice. That this master of the universe in his own mind, who pronounced human-induced global warming to be the greatest moral issue of our times, could not find the words to confess to failure, could not even rally the spin doctors to come up with some nonsense to fill a Tweet, reflected the much-mused-upon emptiness of his character. As the Opposition leader in the Senate, Nick Minchin, told The Weekend Australian's Christian Kerr yesterday, Rudd has had no less than six top priorities since he took office, listing health (December 22), national security (December 10), the economic crisis (early November), jobs through a global response (March), war on unemployment (November, 2008) and financial stability (March, 2008). Who knows how global warming slipped off that list? Generally speaking, Australians don't like a smart-arse and when Rudd's in full flight he's the complete Nambour nerd. Tony Abbott, settling in as Opposition leader, offers a complete contrast: down to earth, plain-speaking, self-deferential and sympathetic. Abbott is proving to be a surprisingly sound replacement for Malcolm Turnbull who was fatally damaged by his blundering in the Ute-gate fiasco and could not have recovered to make a fist of an election campaign. The mystery of Rudd's incredible popularity may well lie in the sneaky admiration Australians have for those who get away with extraordinary scams. Remember how the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs found a haven (for a while) with his family in Melbourne while on the lam from British authorities and how he managed to stay ahead of the law while making good his escape to Brazil? Biggs was no Ned Kelly, nor a Robin Hood, but managed to gather a surprising mass of public sympathy despite dudding his wife and children and was in all reality no more than a petty criminal addicted to good- looking women and a lazy lifestyle. Australians appreciate clever rip-offs and may not yet have cottoned on to the personal cost that they will have to bear from Rudd's profligacy with their cash. His over-the-top commitment to introduce a Draconian new tax regime in Australia on the basis of his unproven claims about global warming failed because of Abbott's intervention, and that intervention was vindicated when the 193 nations gathered in Copenhopeless failed to reach agreement on anything of any real substance. Rudd's policies would have left Australia isolated, its economy gutted, with unemployment and inflation soaring. Now the global warming crowd's scam is being revealed day after day, as the layers of the great global fraud are being stripped away. Not only did the so-called scientists that Rudd and the UN relied on produce fraudulent data, but they also endeavoured to remove from the literature reproduced on the internet information site Wikipedia - a most unreliable source at best - all scientific data that contradicted their false hypothesis. Climate scientist and Wikipedia editor William Connolly, a member of the team behind the RealClimate website which purported to demonstrate the existence of human-induced global warming, has been shown to have edited more than 5000 articles that appeared on the Wikipedia site to eliminate solid scientific evidence that disproved the claims embraced by the UN's favoured team. Under Rudd, Australia's own peak scientific body, the CSIRO, has seen its international reputation irreparably damaged because it, too, instituted its own bizarre censorship of scientific opinion which challenged that being dictated from the Prime Minister's office. Now, from the confines of Kirribilli House, Rudd promises to reintroduce his infamous tax bill, still without offering any proof that humans have affected the natural climate cycle of the globe, still without presenting any evidence that anything Australians do (including destroying their economy) will alter the Earth's temperature by one-thousandth of a degree. This may be why his popularity remains so high. Australia likes winners - and when it comes to scams, Kevin Rudd is King Con.