Kev the chameleon keeps on changing his colours

The more we see of the PM, the less we know and like him.

HAS a trend set in? Yesterday's Newspoll has the Prime Minister's satisfaction rating falling to 50 per cent, down from 67 per cent in September. His dissatisfaction rating is up from 24 per cent to 40 cent. With Labor's two-party preferred position unchanged since the last election, the Prime Minister should take these numbers personally. There is a firming question mark over the man.

And the question mark goes like this: Who is this man, Kevin Rudd? It is an odd question because Rudd has been in parliament for more than a decade, a shadow minister for four years, and he has been leading the nation for more than two years.

We have had ample opportunity to watch him on television and listen to him on radio. He tweets. He writes children's books. He spends his summer writing long tomes to prove his intellectual worth. Rudd has worked hard to ensure we are saturated with his media presence.

Yet the more we see of Rudd, the less we really know about him. Significantly, Rudd's personality is directly relevant to his policies and his prime ministership. There is a sinking feeling with Rudd that the inability to get a grasp of the man behind the title is simply a wider reflection of a man who has very little real political conviction.

Think of Rudd's most recent predecessors. In public and private, leaders from Gough Whitlam to John Howard had an authenticity about them. Whether you loved or loathed Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating or Howard, in each case the more we saw, the better we understood them and their passions. The character of each of Rudd's predecessors was forged from a long history of political convictions and it defined their prime ministership.

Now consider Rudd. We know next to nothing about what truly motivates him, apart from seeking and staying in political office. We know he will morph into any character, no matter how unnatural, if he thinks it will boost his political prospects: whether it's trying to look cool to a newspaper editor by drinking in a New York girlie club, doing deals with Labor's left faction to win the leadership or extolling his credentials as an economic conservative in order to win over voters at the 2007 election, only to then turn into a long-winded critic of capitalism when it became the orthodoxy.

People are finally noticing that there is a cold calculation to the way Rudd recalibrates his public persona in a way that his predecessors never did. After only a few weeks, viewers of Rudd's new Friday morning gig on Channel 7's Sunrise are already complaining that they prefer the Rudd who appeared on Sunrise before the 2007 election to the Rudd who now shows up. Ditto Rudd's hour-long "get to know the PM" performance on ABC1's Q&A program last week. When the Twitter PM was grilled by the Twitter generation (in a way the Canberra press gallery has never managed), his awkward smile and contrived mannerisms simply betrayed a deeper phoniness not seen before from our political leaders. Not on top of his own policies and promises, Rudd worked so hard at the spin, he had no idea how to be himself.

Suggesting someone is a fake is a big call. It implies dishonesty and trickery. But perhaps it is something else. For an apparently clever man, Rudd's reliance on a steady stream of meaningless spin suggests a lack of confidence in his own intellect. Alternatively, his spin may be explained by arrogance that the people will be content with political rhetoric, an arrogance fuelled by his early success when his personal ratings soared. But more and more, people are looking a little closer at Rudd. And after just over two years in office, the phony nature of Rudd's lexicon of political strategy is laid bare by the repetition of his rhetoric. Consider how last year Rudd talked about his education revolution, his communications revolution, his grassroots green revolution, his sustainability revolution, his digital revolution and his climate change revolution. In other words, here I am, a man of action. When the PM says he makes "no apology" for his positions on this and that, the aim is that people will see him as a man of conviction. His constant use of the word "frankly" implores people to see him as a truthful leader. One could go on. The problem with so much regurgitated rhetoric is that after a while people begin to notice how artificial it is. Most concerning for Rudd, they are noticing his government's climate change con.

Any number of times, the PM has said that global warming is the greatest moral issue of our time. He says that enacting an emissions trading system is essential. He says it will be tough but his government is up to the task. He says the next election will be about climate change. Over the weekend, Rudd gave Labor MPs a pep talk about the importance of his ETS plans. Ergo, there is a simple test of Rudd's character and his commitment to this core policy.

If Rudd genuinely believes all that he has told us, he must surely call a double dissolution election to enact his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme when it is rejected by the Senate again. Even if the Rudd government is returned at a regular election, a Labor win will not necessarily alter the opposition in the Senate. Only a double dissolution election has the potential to save his CPRS.

If he doesn't call a double dissolution election, we will know that Rudd's commitment to climate change, perhaps like the man himself, is a political sham. And when he leaves the political stage, many will still be asking the same question: Who was that man, Rudd?