Kevin Rudd

Someone made a very good point yesterday regarding , is that the timing of his coup means he doesn't have to do any governing – just campaigning.

That is possibly not coincidence. There is a huge amount of testimony that he was an incompetent Prime Minister. But he is a very good campaigner.

You have to laugh at the gall, in this story:

New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has used his first address to Parliament to call on MPs to be a ”little kinder and gentler with each other”.

Hours after he was sworn by Governor-General Quentin Bryce, Mr Rudd used his first official comments as Prime Minister to acknowledge the contributions of former prime minister and former treasurer Wayne Swan, while talking of the difficulties of political life.

”As we all know in this place, political life is a very hard life. A very hard life indeed … But let us all remember particularly on days like this that in this Parliament and in this place we are all human beings,” he said.

Incredible. He spends three years undermining Gillard, and then once he has dispatched her he asks for people to be kinder and gentler.

The editorial notes:

Mr Rudd, a Machiavellian schemer who has devoted the past three years to undermining the woman who ousted him as prime minister, is not someone about whom as many nice things can be said. The challenge for the rival Liberal Party, poring over from current and former colleagues, was not what to include in its first anti-Rudd advertisement but what to leave out.

That is so true. Their first advertisement is below and it consists purely of quotes from his own Labor MPs,

Mr Rudd's newfound friends do not expect him to win the coming election but they hope that, with him at the helm, fewer of them will lose their .

Their calculations mirror those that led Helen Clark and other Labour Party notables to persuade Sir Geoffrey Palmer to make way for Mike Moore as New Zealand prime minister eight weeks before the 1990 election.

But will they keep him on as opposition leader? He might be ALP leader for just three months?

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