Nine years isn’t long enough: Kevin Rudd back from exile

It’s pretty cocky of the Labor party to choose Kevin Rudd to front their spoiler event in Brisbane to try to upstage the Liberal party’s nearby campaign launch, writes Miranda Devine.

It’s pretty cocky of the Labor party to choose Kevin Rudd to front their spoiler event in Brisbane to try to upstage the Liberal party’s nearby campaign launch.

Nine years just isn’t long enough to erase the memory of Kevin07’s catastrophic reign. All the egomaniacal visions and deadly waste, his reckless dismantling of border protection, the prissy-lipped virtue signalling was too much even for his colleagues who triggered the decade of revolving door leadership in both parties.

Now he’s back from exile in anonymity in New York, more pompous than ever and pickled in bitterness, haunting shopping malls in western Sydney in the hope of resuscitating Kristina Keneally’s toxic campaign in Fowler. Talk about the kiss of death.

Puffed up with his own importance, Rudd spewed a stream of venom at “Scotty from marketing”.

Australians are “fed up to the back teeth” with the PM, he declared. Well, he would know.

Scott Morrison is the first PM since John Howard to serve a full term. And what a hell of a term it has been. A pandemic, associated recession, floods, bushfires, a newly aggressive China and a war in eastern Europe.

Former PM Kevin Rudd speaks to the Labor party faithful. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Not many prime ministers could have handled it as well – as any objective view of Australia’s performance shows.

Now he wants Australians to put the pandemic behind them and come out from under the doona of big government that kept them safe and the economy ticking during the pandemic.

Labor wants to keep that doona and make it bigger, using crisis to entrench socialist policies that disempower people and never work.

Australians “have had enough of governments telling them how to live their lives,” Morrison said yesterday.

When he said the same thing on Friday at a footy club in the Melbourne electorate of Deakin, he got a rousing cheer.

What Albanese is offering is not what Australians want, despite what the polls are saying.

On the campaign trail last week in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, it didn’t feel as if voters were waiting with baseball bats for the government like they were in 2013, when Rudd was turfed out.

Nor is there the excitement of 2007, when Kevin07 was a fresh alternative, back when we had no idea what Rudd really was.

Madonna Jarrett, Labor's candidate for Brisbane, pictured with Kevin Rudd. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Albanese is not exciting and there is little enthusiasm for him other than as a way to kick the PM in the teeth.

Having spent most of his term overseas, I don’t understand the antipathy to Morrison. Australia did better than any comparable country through the pandemic, with the lowest fatality rates and the fastest economic recovery. That doesn’t happen by accident.

I asked Australian friends who don’t like him: what did he do wrong?

They always cite two sins. First, he said procuring vaccines wasn’t a “race”. Fair enough, though he acknowledged his error and fixed it.

The second sin is that he went on holiday with his family in Hawaii during bushfires at home - back in 2019. How dare people begrudge a busy father a few days off with his wife and two small daughters.

Seriously, these are petty beeves considering the crises this country has weathered so well.

You just have to see the disasters Joe Biden has wrought in America after 16 months to see how fast an incompetent government can wreck your life.

ends

Originally published as Nine years isn’t long enough: Kevin Rudd back from exile