| Sports |
by NICK BRYANT
Rudd transforms Aussie race
Sydney: Australia’s Kevin Rudd has
the kind of headline-friendly name that handily suits good times
and bad.
Had he made an indifferent start to his new job of opposition
leader, “Rudderless” would no doubt have featured prominently in
the nation’s newspapers.
As it is, the Queenslander has skyrocketed in the polls since
winning the Labor leadership last December, and is headed, in the
journalistic parlance of the day, for a “Ruddslide”.
Last week, a poll suggested he has surged to a 20-year high for an
opposition leader – 22 percentage points ahead of prime minister
John Howard’s government, suggesting this year’s federal election
is suddenly up for grabs, something which seemed almost
unthinkable under Labor’s gaffe-prone former leader, Kim Beazley.
A brief thumb-nail sketch of the life and times of Kevin Michael
Rudd starts in the coastal hinterland north of Brisbane, where he
was born in September 1957. His father, a farmer, died when Rudd
was 11, which led, it is claimed, to his family’s eviction from
the farm.
With nowhere else to go, his mother, Margaret, was forced to sleep
overnight in a car with two of her four young children.
Four years later, Rudd joined the Australian Labor Party,
motivated, in part, by his family’s experience of hardship.
A bright and bookish student who studied Chinese language and
history at the Australian National University, Rudd joined the
foreign service after graduation. The role of diplomat, which took
him to Sweden and China, seemed to suit him academically and
temperamentally.
But in 1988, he decided to change paths, and became the chief of
staff to the Labor premier in Queensland. Ten years later, after
carving out a reputation as a competent if slightly humourless
technocrat – colleagues nicknamed him ‘Dr Death’ – he won election
to parliament for the Queensland seat of Griffith.
Arriving in Canberra with prime ministerial ambitions, it took him
a further eights years to become Labor leader, after impressing
colleagues with his performance as shadow minister for foreign
affairs.
A committed Christian, with a neat turn in sound-bites, he seemed
particularly well-equipped to appeal to the suburban swing voters
who tend to decide Australian elections.
Last December, he won the leadership, despite not having many
close friends in the Labor caucus and little personal following.
If there was something mechanical about his rise, there is also
something mechanical about the man. Austere, cerebral and
self-disciplined, he is easy to respect but harder to like.
“There’s a clinical side to him, and sometimes he keeps his
passion under wraps,” political consultant Bruce Hawker, who has
been a friend since the 1980s, says. “But he’s genuinely funny,
and as he becomes more comfortable in the role of leader, that
side of his personality will come out more.”
“He’s a very conservative man,” ABC political editor Michael
Brissenden says, “which is why he is doing so well against Howard.
It makes him very difficult to target. Howard is pulling the old
levers, but he is not getting the same response.”
Certainly, Rudd seems to have armour-plating in parts where
previous leaders, like the self-destructive Mark Latham, had weak
spots.
Rudd’s Christianity gives him immunity in any values debate. His
fiscal cautiousness makes it hard to portray him as a profligate
tax and spender. And his years as a diplomat lend him strong
national security credentials.
In recent weeks, the government has attacked his honesty,
questioning whether he exaggerated stories of his childhood
hardship, and even the death of his father. It has attacked his
probity, highlighting meetings held with Brian Burke, the
disgraced former Labor premier of Western Australia. But so far,
Rudd has emerged unruffled and unscathed.
“It’s rather like an artillery unit trying to find its range,”
Hawker says. “But every time they land a shell, Rudd disappears
down a fox hole. They just can’t get him.”
On this point, virtually everyone agrees.
“The learner sticker is harder to stick on Rudd than it was on
Mark Latham,” Sol Lebovic, the chairman of Newspoll, which came up
with last week’s headline-grabbing poll, says.
“And 82% say Rudd is likeable – it’s his strongest point, despite
his nerdy image.”
Lebovic says it will be an act of great political folly to set too
much store in polls suggesting Rudd is cruising to victory.
Early in 2001, Howard was arguably in a worse position but came
back to win.
And polls still suggest that voters trust the government much more
than Labor over handling the economy, which is currently enjoying
its 16th consecutive year of growth.
Labor romped home in last Saturday’s New South Wales election,
though the campaign had been fought on local issues like transport
rather than being a referendum on Howard.
Still, Rudd appeared in the final days, sprinkling his “stardust”
– as one slightly star-struck newspaper put it – on a very dull
campaign, and getting much-needed stump practice ahead of the
federal election.
Party and ideological allegiances are nowhere near as strong in
Australia as they once were, producing the kind of fluidity in
political behaviour which could see the polls quickly lurch back
in Howard’s favour.
But the prime minister is certainly in trouble, and Rudd has been
the author of much of his recent grief.
The Australian government has changed hands only once in the past
25 years. Could this year be the year when it happens again? – BBC
 
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