Rudd channels his inner Churchill to save the country – again

Cometh the hour cometh the man: step forward Australia’s boy-PM Kevin Rudd to save the nation from utter catastrophe a second time.

In 2008, as the Global Financial Crisis exploded around the world, Rudd channelled his inner Churchill: he felt as if he were walking with destiny, and that all his past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

His sense of destiny played out in school halls and Pink Batts and tens of billions of dollars of budget deficits as far as the fiscal eye could see.

Well, Churchill was a piker in comparison with our boy wonder. Churchill only got to walk with destiny once; he only got to save the nation, and possibly the world, once.

In contrast Rudd was called to walk with destiny a second time: in 2009, at the conference on global warming held in a very chilly and indeed brass monkeys frozen Copenhagen.

Unfortunately, the world declined to walk with him. As I’ve previously detailed, what had started as Rudd’s glorious Hoppenhagen finished as his ignominious Copenfloppen.

But now destiny – in the form of a, to quote the ABC’s Laura Tingle, “senior Australian business figures based in the United States” – reached out to him to save the nation a second time.

Thanks to Rudd reaching out to Pfizer – after these “senior Australian business figures” reached out in desperation to him – millions of doses of that precious lifesaving and lockdown-avoiding vaccine are going to flood into Australia early.

How do we, or rather the ABC’s Tingle more specifically, know this? The answer – the pointer to Rudd’s ‘save the nation’ efforts – is revealed in a private letter from Rudd to current PM Scott Morrison.

This letter, according to Tingle was “obtained” by the ABC. Obtained from whom? A private letter from one (former) PM to another (current) PM?

My money’s on ScoMo.

Rudd has a peerless record of never leaking anything to his advantage; in my judgment ScoMo would have wanted to subtly reveal his predecessor’s great work that crass party politics would otherwise prevent.

Added weight to this was given by Pfizer itself which point-blank denied that any third party “or individual” had played any role in the contractual agreements between Pfizer and the Australian government.

That’s Rudd again at work; clearly pleading not to be the story, just as he did all the way through his successor Julia Gillard’s time as PM. Further, we even had yet another PM joining in the ‘false-flagging’, aiming to bury Rudd’s behind-the-scenes work on the Twitter version of what we used to call the front page or the nightly news.

Malcolm Turnbull, who has shown Rudd-level unflagging loyalty to his successor since the succession, tweeted how staggered he was that the vaccination of Australians didn’t apparently warrant a phone call from the (current) PM to the boss of Pfizer, while thanking Rudd.

Subtle, really subtle: pretending to praise Rudd and damn ScoMo. It was double-blind false-flagging par excellence from Turnbull.

I was a little surprised that the ABC’s Tingle didn’t specifically praise the all-too modest Rudd for seeing the big picture so clearly: that our largely virus-free nation deserved to get more Pfizer vaccines ahead of virus-wracked poorer countries; hey, let them, so to speak, eat our excess AstraZeneca instead. Now, all that remains is to uncover the identity of these “senior Australian business figures based in the United States”, and the one “very senior Australian businessman” in the US in particular referenced by Tingle.

My money’s on Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of this paper. Just quietly, he’s always been a big big fan of Rudd; he knows exactly Rudd’s worth. In our time of need, he would have instantly made the call, and Rudd just as instantly, selflessly, answered.