Angry man shaped by a tragic past

KEVIN Rudd is driven by loneliness and anger, according to a new essay.

Kevin Rudd as a child in front of the Volkswagen in which he, his mother and sister slept following his father’s death.

KEVIN Rudd's "angry heart" is the subject of an extraordinary new essay on the making of the Prime Minister that asks what drives his ambition and comes to a startling conclusion: he is "a politician with rage at his core".

Written by journalist, biographer and leading left intellectual David Marr, Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd traces the rise of Rudd from his childhood to his ascension as former Queensland premier Wayne Goss's right-hand administrator, his years as a diplomat and his lonely rise through Labor ranks with few friends in caucus.

The lengthy essay also explores striking parallels with his recent collapse in public support, as seen in Newspolls, and the premature death of the Goss administration.

"Millions of words have been written about him since he emerged from the Labor pack half a dozen years ago, but Rudd remains hidden in full view," Marr writes.

The abandonment of an emissions trading scheme had prompted voters to ask who was this man in the Lodge who had sold himself as a new kind of leader offering values and intellect. "If he isn't that, people are asking, what is he? And who is he?" Marr asks.

A devastating conclusion is reached in Power Trip following a barefoot stroll on a beach in Mackay, north Queensland, with the Prime Minister and a revealing confrontation: the secret of Rudd's success is his incredible emotional resilience forged in a difficult childhood, but at his core he is an angry man.

It's an anger documented first in the Marr essay during the dark days of the Prime Minister's attempts to broker a deal on climate change at last year's UN talks in Copenhagen on a global approach to climate change. The summit failed to reach legally binding targets for emissions control.

"Those Chinese f . . kers are trying to rat-f . . k us," Rudd told journalists and political aides, according to Marr.

"Was a deal still possible?" asked one of the Australians.

"Depends on whether those rat-f . . king Chinese want to f . . k us," Rudd replied.

Marr also writes of the Prime Minister's deep emotional and physical resilience, noting Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was "dead on her feet" after a marathon 40 hours of negotiations at Copenhagen. He finds Rudd's desire to act decently both a blessing and a curse that spills into micromanagement and a failure to delegate.

But it is his anger, largely unfamiliar to voters but not a surprise to those who engage with the Prime Minister behind closed doors, that is a central theme of the essay. Stories have emerged only briefly into public view: the tale of his rage at a flight attendant over the lack of a hot meal on an RAAF flight, a loud argument with editors in the Melbourne restaurant Nobu, Coalition claims - denied by Rudd - that he threw a tantrum in Afghanistan over a hairdryer.

There are sporadic reports of abusive tirades to staff in the back of cars and rude behaviour towards NSW Premier Kristina Keneally, captured by television cameras as they met over his health reforms.

He embraces "petty grudges" and has a pattern of ignoring people once their usefulness is past, Marr says.

After ringing former Unions NSW John Robertson - recently appointed NSW Transport Minister - up to six times a day when he was seeking his support for the leadership challenge, he is said to have stopped calling and to have passed Robertson in a corridor with barely a nod.

This week, former NSW treasurer Michael Costa accused Rudd of backstabbing then NSW premier Morris Iemma, who loyally relented to the federal Labor leader's pleadings to delay the electricity sell-off in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election but then confronted the reality of a Prime Minister who refused to take his calls.

Where does this anger come from ? The essay proves something of a detective novella, with Marr examining the "formative tragedy" of his childhood: the death of his father in hospital after a car accident and his forced departure from his childhood farm at Eumundi, a "wound that never healed" that he barely spoke of to friends and colleagues for three decades.

"They sensed his childhood was a no-go zone," Marr writes. "The long silence says much about Rudd's pride. He wanted to be known for what he had become and what he had achieved rather than the mess his family found itself in when he was boy." He was passed around to relatives and boarding school as a "charity case" as his mother, Margaret de Vere, worked hard to support the family as a single mother.

It was discovered a bout of rheumatic fever as a child had weakened his heart. It ultimately led to a valve transplant heart operation as an adult.

"The damaged heart was on a list of dark Rudd secrets that would only emerge in a Liberal Party smear campaign before the 2007 election," Marr writes. "Did he have the ticker?"

As he rose through the ranks to become Goss's chief of staff and then head of the cabinet office, he cut a door from his office into the premier's room, called "the cat flap", to maintain his access, according to Power Trip. Veterans of that time remember him as talented but without good political instincts and hard to deal with, Marr writes: "Watch out, they say, history is repeating itself."

"He has a computer-like mind that can analyse all 12,000 policy options but he chooses by comparing and contrasting. Not by instinct," according to one former colleague quoted by Marr.

When Rudd arrived in parliament in 1998 after a failed and personally devastating bid to enter politics in 1996, he unnerved colleagues with his ambition. "Leadership is always a lonely race," Rudd tells Marr. "Anyone honest about their reflection on that reaches the same conclusion."

When he finally forms a pact with old foe Julia Gillard to wrest the leadership from Kim Beazley, Bob Hawke rings him urging him not to tear down the then leader. "Get f . . ked," Rudd says he replied.

Marr also depicts Rudd as the boy who was fascinated by China but who as Prime Minister discovered at Copenhagen China was complicit in frustrating his political dream of a global emissions regime.

Others, including former Liberal foreign minister Alexander Downer, have argued suspicion and caution towards the Chinese, not admiration, have always driven Rudd's fascination.

Marr hints at chaotic and centralised policy development that gave birth to the contentious experiments in the Rudd government's stimulus program, such as the insulation and schools building schemes.

But the essay is a powerful narrative and character study rather than any attempt to offer a blow-by-blow account of policy formulation in the first term.

In Marr's account, Rudd, having forced himself on caucus and ultimately gaining the leadership via his media performances and profile on the Seven Network's Sunrise, lets cabinet processes break down and centralises power in government, as during the Goss years. The damaging consequences are underlined by the insulation debacle.

Backbenchers complain he is harder to get a meeting with than the Pope and, as has been reported widely, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was forced to get on a plane with him just to have some time to tell him the tendering process for the national broadband network had failed.

"There comes a point when these big ideas need prime ministerial time, and it isn't there," Rudd's special envoy to the Asia-Pacific community, Richard Woolcott, tells Marr. "It's a disjunction."

As he confronts his biggest battle with business since Work Choices over the mining tax, Rudd has spoken of "deep kissing" big business and prides himself on understanding it, but those who work closely with him doubt his self-assessment.

Marr's powerful conclusion comes after a conversation with the Prime Minister, detailed in the final chapter, titled Face Time.

As he leaves the table after their encounter in a waterfront pub in Mackay, the Prime Minister asks Marr what the argument of the essay is. It being a man-to-man question, Marr tells him. His piece will examine the contradictions in the Prime Minister's life, the farmer's kid who runs away to China, the politician unloved by his own parliamentary caucus but a hit with the polls. "And I'm wondering if his government will go the way of Goss's," Marr tells him.

"I don't notice his face changing at first, but by the time I finish giving this bare-bones account I realise Rudd is furious," he writes.

"I have hurt him and he is angry. What follows is a dressing down which registers about a 3.8 on his Richter scale. What he says in these angry 20 minutes informs every corner of this essay. But more revealing is the transformation of the man. At last he is speaking from his heart, an angry heart. Face to face, it is so clear. Rudd is driven by anger. It's the juice in the machine. He is a hard man to read because the anger is hidden by a diplomat's face. Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is a man you see when the anger vents. He's a politician with rage at his core."

Quarterly Essay 38: Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd by David Marr (Black Inc, $19.95).