After all the lies, to come clean on Kevin exposes Labor's rotten core

CREDIT where it's due. Please. Mark Latham was the first to tell us all about Kevin Rudd. In The Latham Diaries, published in 2005, the former Labor leader -- Mark, not Kevin -- exposed the "Nightmare on Rudd Street".

Latham detailed Rudd's disloyalty, his leaking, his unreliability, his addiction to the media "worse than heroin". With courageous honesty that has earned Latham permanent exile from the party, he has said those who knew Rudd the least, liked Rudd the most. As someone who knew Rudd well, Latham concluded that the man who served as his foreign affairs spokesman was a "terrible piece of work".

Last week, a steady stream of senior ministers, from the Prime Minister down, channelled Latham, telling us that we didn't know Rudd like they knew Rudd. The PM told us that by 2010, the Labor caucus knew Rudd so well that he didn't even bother to contest a leadership ballot. Other ministers have also come clean: Rudd is a treacherous leaker, ran a dysfunctional, chaotic office, demeans people he works with, is obsessed with the media, is insecure about being loved by the people, lacks basic leadership qualities, is a sleepless sociopath who manipulates and manufactures media attention. Treasurer Wayne Swan, who contributed the most to unmasking the real Rudd, informed us that the former Labor PM was a man who "does not hold any Labor values". In sum, perchance, a "terrible piece of work".

It won't please members of the parliamentary Labor Party that they have vindicated Latham, one of the nation's most honest and piercing political commentators. But then Labor Party politicians have little to be pleased about, even after Julia Gillard's resounding win in the leadership ballot on Monday. Winning 71-31, the problem is still Kevin Rudd. And the fact that he's hanging around.

As a backbencher, the former foreign minister will have to overcome his addiction to jet fuel: no more weekly overseas trips, no more meetings with world leaders, no international crises for Rudd to solve. As Spectator Australia editor Tom Switzer said on Sky News on Monday, Hillary Clinton's appointments secretary can breathe easy. That leaves one remaining obsession left for Rudd. Happily, it is his main love, the reason he keeps on going. The media. Rudd's drive was best explained last week by his "deep-seated anxiety about the public's approval". He is a man "who needs to be liked" and "that's not leadership". And with few friends, let alone people who like him, in the caucus, Rudd's only course is to woo the media, and through the media, the people. Expect to see the faux-chirpy face of Rudd pop up on everything from Sunrise to Celebrity Big Brother.

When, last Thursday, we should have heard from senior Labor people supporting Rudd as the next leader, instead we witnessed a press conference with Therese Rein who talked about "two kinds of Australia . . . what happens in Canberra and what happens in the street". And, according to his wife, "what ordinary people tell me is that they trust Kevin, and they respect him".

Normally we talk about the disconnect in terms of Canberra not understanding what is happening beyond the beltway of politics. But when it comes to Rudd, it works in the opposite way. People in the street don't know what's happening in Canberra. Driven by a shared need for status and power, the Rudds have carefully exploited the two Australias, presenting one of the many faces of Rudd -- the gee-whiz K Rudd to that other Australia. We now know that Rudd is politically bipolar. In Canberra, he is a foul-mouthed, dysfunctional, intemperate man who "freezes" out those who disagree with him.

By exposing the real Rudd and completely destroying his reputation, Labor has ensured he won't be leader again. Nor even a likely minister. That leaves a lot of time for a former PM and former foreign minister to nurture his grievances, old and new, by manipulating the media in a manner few can do with such skill.

And here is Labor's problem. For so long as Australians continue to see the smiley public face of Rudd plastered all over television screens, augmented by his family's fanatical use of social media, Labor will be haunted by one question still not sufficiently answered by the astonishing events of the past week.

Why did Labor lie to us about the real Rudd? And Labor did lie to us. The unprecedented revelations about Rudd tell us Labor's most senior people presented to us in 2007 as alternative prime minister a man they knew to be, not just deeply flawed, but lacking Labor convictions. And rather than stand up to Rudd as prime minister, threaten a mutiny if he did not end the continuing Nightmare on Rudd Street, senior ministers such as Gillard, Swan, Nicola Roxon, Stephen Conroy and so on persisted in lying to us about him. They lied about the ability of the man running the country, the man ultimately responsible for policies that affect every Australian and future Australians.

And in 2010 they kept lying when they appointed the deposed PM as the nation's foreign minister. And then they lied some more. The relationship between Gillard, as PM, and Rudd, as foreign minister was a dysfunctional disaster.

Why did Labor lie to us about Rudd for so long? Asking this question is not a glib political exercise. The answer goes to the heart of what is eating Labor. The "whatever it takes" agenda made famous by Graham Richardson is now deeply embedded in Labor's DNA. It justifies calculated dishonesty at the highest levels about matters of great importance.

When the Labor caucus voted for Rudd as leader in December 2006, it didn't matter to people such as Swan that Rudd had no Labor values. They appointed Rudd for one reason; to win an election. Labor people like Swan and Gillard knew that Rudd had no genuine political convictions, apart from the burning personal conviction that K Rudd deserved to be prime minister.

Are we really to believe that Labor has now undergone an epiphany on the importance of Labor values, that it has eschewed the "whatever it takes" pursuit of power for power's sake? The dilemma for us is obvious. If, a week ago, it was difficult to believe politicians, the task of believing them is made almost impossible after Labor's mass admissions of dishonesty. Our dilemma becomes Labor's dilemma. To stop us asking why Labor lied to us, the only option is for the Labor Party to send Rudd far, far away from our television screens. Let's go through his skill set again. Autocratic. Chaotic. Doesn't get things done. Surely K Rudd's next home must be the United Nations.