Rudd rage

A month ago Julia Gillard found Labor Party backing for her decision to move against Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – a challenge Rudd decided not to oppose. Now, during the election campaign, veteran political reporter Laurie Oakes, a man of immense credibility, has dropped a series of damaging bombshells about Gillard’s performance under Rudd. Revelations that could only have come from very senior government sources.

Rudd, naturally, denies being the source of the leaks.

I’m in mixed minds about our new Prime Minister. On the one hand, I like a lot of her attitudes to life. On the other, she’s a political animal ever since university, having had no “real” job (much like her Liberal opponent Tony Abbott, it must be said) and I find it hard to warm to such creatures.

Her policies are pragmatic – in that they solve immediate political problems – but hardly practical or cost-effective in the real world. Her “Building the Education Revolution” program was a classic case of inefficiency and waste – though at least it didn’t kill anybody the way that the prized Home Insulation Program did.

As for Rudd, I was prepared to give him a go, but when all that emerged from his office was pretty speeches, smiles and delays and denials – not a solid program in sight apart from the stimulus package of giving every taxpayer a few hundred dollars, which naturally was wildly popular – I gave up on him. As did the Labor Party, obviously.

And now we find that someone high up in the Rudd government – headed by a man notorious for making enemies and holding grudges over the decades, described as being “fuelled by rage” – has been leaking damaging information on the new Prime Minister during a crucial election campaign.

I’m sorry – I don’t want either of these people running the nation.

Not that I think Tony Abbott is a safe pair of hands neither. His proposal to prevent illegal immigration by “turning back the boats” seems to me to be a way to solve the problem by drowning asylum-seekers.