Is Rudd driven by an 'angry heart'?
I started my working week by listening to Kevin Rudd deliver the keynote speech at a health union conference in Sydney - at the very hall, in fact, where he uttered his now famous introduction to the Labor national conference in 2007: "My name is Kevin, I'm from Queensland and I'm here to help.''
The timer on my digital tape recorder, which measures such things to the thousandth of a second, says that the speech lasted 36 minutes from start to finish, but confessedly it felt longer - which is part of the reason why Mr Rudd has apparently earned nickname the "Castro of the Southern Hemisphere".
It comes from the journalist David Marr's attention-grabbing essay on the Australian prime minister - Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd. As one would expect from the prize-winning biographer of Patrick White, the essay is quite beautifully written and loaded with tart observations and telling details.
As a student at the Australian National University in Canberra, we learn that young Kevin Rudd was a leading light in a group of evangelical Christians known as the Navigators, who tried to clamp down on liquor and rock music at their college. As a Labor MP seeking to ingratiate himself on a mistrustful Labor caucus, we hear that he kept spreadsheets listing the birthdays of his colleagues' wives, as well as the names of their children. There's a lovely detail about his chief of staff reportedly keeping a sleeping bag in his office, because of his boss's round-the-clock work ethic - the chief of staff is "available fourteen hours a day, seven days a week".
The narrative arc is of Kevin Rudd's relentless drive to power, plotted from his earliest days, with the office of prime minister always the target of his ambitions. "His drive to acquire power is extraordinarily strong - the work of a lifetime - but he shows less enthusiasm to exercise it. His instinct is to hoard rather than spend." It is also a portrait of an intensely political figure, for whom decisions are based on his assessment of what is politically sustainable. In a particularly deft line, Marr observes: "The polls gave Rudd permission to sign up [to Kyoto] and say sorry."
Because of this tendency to be hamstrung by public opinion, Marr argues that Mr Rudd's spell in office has been marked by political timidity, save for his speech at Peking University in March 2008, in which he criticized China for its human rights record in Tibet. He quotes a "Labor grandee" on his intense political watchfulness: "Never forget the extraordinary caution of Queenslanders."
Various examples of prime ministerial rudeness are chronicled - the way, for example, he has cold-shouldered party functionaries who were crucial to his rise, and distanced himself from the very journalists who he once bombarded with cheery emails and text messages. Marr notes how the prime minister greatly angered his caucus by not turning up to the funeral of the much-loved former Labor minister, John Button, a key figure in the Hawke and Keating administrations, but found time that day to , who had just given birth. Marr regularly returns to his isolation within the Labor party, and his lack of popularity within it. Rudd is "a loner, but not a loner by choice". He retells the story of how Rudd created a constituency for himself outside of the Labor machine, the audience of the breakfast television show Sunrise, which offered proof of his vote-winning capabilities.
Because of his obsession with micro-management, Marr describes Rudd as "the choke point" of the government, and notes: "He responds to pressure by burying himself in detail... Rudd is proudly the prime minister of fine detail." He also quotes a lovely line from : "Rudd is starting to resemble the home handyman in a house full of half-finished jobs, while still eager to begin more."
But Marr's overarching thesis is more of a psychiatric assessment: that the Australian prime minister is driven by an "angry heart."
"He is a hard man to read," he says, "because the anger is hidden by a public face, a diplomat's face. Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is the last man you see when the anger vents. He's a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage."
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