How ‘Kevin O Lemon’ helped topple Rudd

As a bureaucrat, empire-obsessed Kevin Rudd took a leaf from “Confucian tradition” to remodel his office in a very specific way.

Julia Gillard may have toppled Kevin Rudd with the help of a lemon.

In 2010, on the night the then-PM was knifed by his deputy, one often forgotten sidebar was the Liberal Party’s “Kevin O Lemon” ad, which was running on TV screens at the time – and may have helped sway a few party-room votes in favour of Ms Gillard, journalist Chris Kenny recounts in a Sky News documentary on Sunday night.

“You just never know, do you?” says the voiceover in the ad, which features a lemon slowly assuming the features of Mr Rudd.

“You think something is going to be great, and you just can’t wait to get it. But don’t you hate it when you start to realise it’s not what you thought it was.”

Peta Credlin, former chief of staff to then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, reveals in Men In The Mirror: Rudd & Turnbull – which traces the parallels between the former Labor and Liberal leaders – why the ad was so successful.

“We found a vulnerability with Rudd,” Credlin says.

“It didn’t take long for the Australian public to sort of see through him.

“Now, you could see that he was a mile wide and sort of an inch deep in terms of conviction and really lacked authenticity, but that stuff takes a while to seep in through to the consciousness of the voter.

“When that started to come off, when Rudd’s gloss started to come off, we felt it would come off fast, and I think that’s where the ‘Kevin O Lemon’ ad was so effective.”

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

Peta Credlin appears in a documentary about Rudd and Turnbull. Picture: Joel Carrett/AAP

The documentary, which premiered on Sky News on Sunday at 8pm, features interviews with a number of people who witnessed the political careers of both men up close, including Mr Rudd’s older brother Greg Rudd, former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, former Liberal Senator Nick Minchin and former Liberal Minister Sharman Stone.

“Unfortunately for both men, when their public opinion polls started to turn against them, because they hadn’t built up that party faithful … because neither of them had built that strong party room allegiance, then their polls diminished and they became vulnerable,” Ms Stone says.

Chris Mitchell, former editor of The Courier-Mail and later editor-in-chief of The Australian, was once close with Mr Rudd.

“I’d have to say, to be fair to him, on his good days, like Malcolm, he can be terribly good company, he can be very amusing and good fun,” he says.

“But he can be brutal when he feels he’s crossed.”

Mitchell shared a bizarre anecdote about Mr Rudd in his early days as a bureaucrat in the Queensland Labor government of Wayne Goss.

“He was sort of a gatekeeper for the Goss government,” Mitchell said.

“Famously taking a line from Confucian tradition, he had his desk raised – he’d had a platform built in the office and people who came to see him had a chair lower down on the floor level, so everyone had to look up to him as if he were an emperor.”

Greg Rudd also told the program that on the wall of the bedroom they shared as a child, there were posters of empires.

“He was always fascinated with the rise and fall of empires, how you get authority, how you keep authority and how to rise through those systems,” he said.

“How do you become a leader? With the absolute, 100 per cent belief, that if he got there, he would make the world a better place.”

Men In The Mirror: Rudd & Turnbull premiered on Sunday at 8pm AEST on Sky News on Foxtel