Kevin Rudd short on tenure, long on words

Two-time former PM Kevin Rudd has signed a lucrative, two-volume deal for his memoirs with Macmillan.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd is to write a political memoir.

Kevin Rudd has literary ambit­ions far greater than any of his prime ministerial predecessors.

The two-time former prime minister has signed a lucrative, two-volume deal for his memoirs with Macmillan, which outbid other publishers that had long pursued him to put pen to paper.

The first volume, Not for the Faint-Hearted: A Personal Reflection on Life, Politics and Purpose 1957-2007, will be published on October 24.

Mr Rudd’s memoir is unprecedented: no former prime minister has needed two volumes to tell their life story, yet he is one of Australia’s shortest-serving PMs, having served a combined two years and 286 days in office.

The first volume will chronicle his pre-PM life and his election victory in 2007, when Labor won a 23-seat majority and dispatched John Howard’s government.

“Political autobiographies are basically a dime a dozen,” Mr Rudd said this week.

“They have been around for a long, long time and many of them are deadset boring. I hope this one doesn’t turn out to be too boring. I’ve tried to make it as reflective and self-analytical as possible.”

Macmillan describes Mr Rudd as somewhat of a mystery. “Who was the man behind the phenomenally successful Kevin07 campaign, this Mandarin-speaking, family-focused, churchgoing, ‘here-to-help’, policy wonk from rural Queensland?” it said.

“Rudd chronicles a childhood shaped by the love of his mother and tragically disrupted by the death of his father, an event that left the family without a home or an income and which would foster Rudd’s passion for social justice and forge his political vision.”

He also tells of his years as a budding Chinese scholar, his marriage to Therese Rein and his experiences as a diplomat.

He is expected to settle scores, reinterpret events and bur­nish a legacy — par for the course in politic­al memoirs — but he says it will include frank reflections. “It’s not a tale of human perfection,” he said. “There is a whole bunch of stuff that I got wrong, quite a number of things I got right.”

Observers will be keen to see his opinion of Julia Gillard, who said Mr Rudd led a government that was “incompetent” and that he had not coped with being PM. And former treasurer Wayne Swan was brutal in his assessments of Mr Rudd in his memoir.

According to Macmillan, some of the targets in volume one include “the arrogance of John Howard”, “the mania of Mark Latham”, and “the absurdities of the Labor factions”.

A big challenge is whether Mr Rudd can outsell other former PMs, including Ms Gillard, whose My Story (2014) sold 72,400 copies according to Nielsen BookScan.

The biggest competition for top-selling honours will be with Gough Whitlam, whose tome about the dismissal, The Truth of the Matter (1979), sold about 150,000 copies, and John Howard­’s Lazarus Rising (2010), which has sold 103,600. Bob Hawke’s The Hawke Memoirs (1994) sold about 75,000.

The best-selling books by polit­icians in recent years include Peter Garrett’s Big Blue Sky (2015), which sold 26,600 copies; Peter Costello’s The Costello Memoirs (2008, 37,000 sales); and Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries (2005, 51,500 sales). Tony ­Abbott’s pre-PM book Battlelines (2009), sold 13,900 copies.

Bill Shorten’s For the Common Good (2016) sold a dismal 800 copies. Mr Swan’s The Good Fight (2014) sold 5900 and Greg Combet’s The Fights of My Life (2014) sold 5000 copies. Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014) sold 11,500 and Bob Brown’s Optim­ism (2014) sold 15,700.

Paul Keating has not written a memoir but wrote a book on foreign policy, Engagement, published in 2000. Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs (2010) sold 8400 copies.

Whitlam wrote several books, including The Whitlam Government (1985). John Gorton wrote a series of autobiographical articles for The Sunday Australian in 1971, while Billy McMahon’s memoir was never completed.