What if it’s started again?
What if it’s working its way east, finishing the job?
Saving me for last?
His single-minded purpose.
His unending fury.
Fans of author Stephen King will know well the last five lines from his horror novel Christine, the story of a 1958 Plymouth Fury possessed by the evil spirit of its former owner. Vandalised and destroyed, the car repairs itself and embarks on a homicidal revenge not just against the gang members who caused its demise, but also the good people who tried to counter the vehicle’s destructive capacity and malevolence.
For some unbeknown reason these lines come to mind whenever former prime minister Kevin Rudd denounces those he believes have wronged him, as is his wont. In a Fairfax article this week he made the incredulous claim that News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch campaigned in the 2013 election to “destroy the government”.
Spare us, please. As one wag observed during the 2013 electoral campaign, then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott could have cheerfully clubbed a baby seal to death outside the public entrance of Parliament House and Labor would still have lost office. Rudd’s sorry record was one of ineptitude, wastefulness, instability, maladministration, and rampant egotism. If this newspaper has one thing to regret in its coverage of Rudd, it was its endorsement of him in the 2007 election — something he is loath to acknowledge.
Lamenting the state of Australian politics, Rudd blamed in part “the ease at which, under the two major parties’ rules, parliamentary coups can be launched at the drop of a hat — a disease I fixed in the Labor Party with rule changes in 2013, which the Liberals should now adopt.” That being the case, Rudd must have condemned the leadership challenge of 2015 which saw another first term prime minister unseated, right?
Wrong. “Best wishes to Malcolm Turnbull becoming Australia’s 29th Prime Minister,” tweeted Rudd on the day of Abbott’s demise. “Therese and I wish he and Lucy well.”
Best wishes to Malcolm Turnbull becoming Australia's 29th Prime Minister Huge job with huge challenges.Therese and I wish he and Lucy well.
— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) September 14, 2015
Not a peep from him about these spills being a “cancer” on democracy as he put it this week. Undoubtedly he was pumping up Turnbull’s tyres in the belief the Prime Minister would nominate him for the position of United Nations Secretary-General. When this did not come about, Rudd’s response was to engage in incessant and petty social media sniping, not knowing he was effectively vindicating Turnbull’s observation that he had “neither the interpersonal skills nor the temperament to be a candidate” for the position.
I see Turnbull is having fun at the Mid Winter Ball again. #FBF Last time he had so much fun at the Ball was Utegate https://t.co/Au3hkjrPq9
— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) June 16, 2017
That said, Rudd’s rancour for Turnbull is nothing compared with that he reserves for Abbott. “Then there is the unique negativity, toxicity and hatred that one man — Tony Abbott, John Howard’s political disciple — has brought to our national political life over the past decade,” he wrote this week. Note how this period covers Abbott’s time as Opposition Leader, a position in which he excelled.
That Abbott trounced Rudd in the 2013 election is a fact the latter still cannot bring himself to accept. One might say Rudd’s description betrays a unique negativity, a toxicity, and a hatred for one man. Yet it was Abbott who on June 24, 2010 in Parliament condemned the Labor government for removing its leader during his first term, while a dazed and shattered Rudd watched on from the backbench. Whatever Abbott’s faults he never lacked magnanimity nor empathy, traits that Rudd would never acquire.
His description of his political nemesis is a textbook case of projection. You need only reflect on the abortive election campaign of 2010 which prevented Labor from being returned with a majority, thanks to a series of damaging leaks that ended only when then Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised Rudd the foreign affairs portfolio. “I had no choice,” she reflected in 2014. “I had to stop the leaks.” It only delayed the inevitable. To paraphrase another Labor leader, Rudd wanted to do Gillard slowly.
Despite his insistence otherwise, his return to Cabinet was not enough to make him a happy little Vegemite, and throughout February 2012 — when he first challenged Gillard’s leadership — until June 2013 when he resumed the leadership, he continually humiliated and undermined his own government. You might say he was doing to his party what he had earlier claimed the Chinese were doing to him at Copenhagen. Yet he writes of Abbott: “The entire energy of this giant wrecking ball of Australian politics has been focused on destroying his opponents — within the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.” It is reminiscent of that Fawlty Towers episode featuring a bemused psychiatrist guest who remarks “There’s enough material there for an entire conference.”
For someone who this week deplored so-called ‘fake news’, Rudd ironically embraced it. “What’s unique about Australia is Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” he wrote, once again conflating circulation with ownership. “I cannot remember a single positive policy initiative that Abbott has championed and then implemented,” he wrote in the same article. “Not one.” Presumably he has forgotten about the numerous asylum seekers who drowned — conservatively estimated at over 1000 — following his dismantling of Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’. Abbott ended this debacle by turning back the boats, a course of action that Rudd had hysterically insisted could lead to “armed conflict” with Indonesia.
Five years later the histrionics continue, as evident in Rudd’s claim that Murdoch’s recent visit to Australia was the catalyst for the recent leadership spill. “Murdoch is a climate change denialist,” Rudd argued simplistically. “Presumably Murdoch believed Howard and Abbott that Turnbull, on the legislative recognition of carbon reduction targets, was going too far.”
Yet the National Energy Guarantee, which was announced in October 2017, has long predated Murdoch’s visit. Just this February Rudd tweeted: “What I love about the Murdoch boys is their consistency — their consistent hostility to Labor & their efforts to keep Turnbull in power.”
What I love about the Murdoch boys is their consistency—their consistent hostility to Labor & their efforts to keep Turnbull in power. Take a look at my comments at the Press Club Monday & retribution from Boris, Editor of the Oz, on Wed. That's their M.O. https://t.co/JNY1gYVJzL pic.twitter.com/qLlMseGYV8
— Kevin Rudd (@MrKRudd) February 16, 2018
He cannot have it both ways. If he really believed the NEG was the precursor to a shift in support, how does he reconcile this with his claim that News Corp was still protecting Turnbull four months after it was conceived?
As Chris Mitchell, former editor-in-chief of The Australian, noted in 2016, Rudd not only sought the newspaper’s endorsement in his bid for UN Secretary-General, but also asked Mitchell if he would speak directly to Murdoch about his candidacy. “I kept a straight face,” wrote Mitchell. “I could not even begin to imagine a circumstance in which I would raise such a prospect with my boss.”
Like many a narcissistic leader, Rudd could never abide criticism from a free press. “Murdoch and others succeeded in sinking the Finkelstein Media Review five years ago,” he wrote. “Given Murdoch’s impact on the future of our democracy, it’s time to revisit it.”
You have to admire his chutzpah in being concerned on one hand about the future of democracy, and on the other calling for a statutory authority to ‘regulate’ Australian newspapers. He also blames Murdoch for Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. Implicit in this wild speculation and the calls for media regulation is the condescending assumption that readers and viewers lack the ability to sort fact from fiction.
As former prime minister John Howard — a man who was relentlessly attacked by the ABC and Fairfax — philosophically observed in 2015: “There are differences that have been brought about by the more intensive and active media cycle. I’m not into blaming the media ... we are living in a more super-charged, frenetic, top-of-the-head environment.”
Despite his attempts to portray himself as the statesman, Kevin will forever be remembered as the man who put the ‘k’ back into kakistocracy, a government run by the least qualified of citizens. Incidentally, I may have been hasty in drawing parallels with Rudd and the supernatural Plymouth Fury given he is more your eco-friendly Toyota Prius type of motorist, or at least he was in 2007 when he was flaunting his environmental credentials. Whatever the case the wheels came off the Rudd-mobile a long, long time ago, the blame for which belongs solely to its incompetent and road rage-afflicted driver.
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