Lets take a waltz down memory lane shall we?
Kevin Rudd: Labor's quiet achiever PDF Print E-mail
Thursday, 30 November 2006
Andrew Fraser
As publish in “The Australian” 01 December 2006
EVIN Rudd has been climbing the "ladder of opportunity" all his life, rising from the backblocks of coastal Queensland to be a contender for the leadership through sheer determination.
He does not have the traditional advantages of a politician, the bonhomie, the good bloke over the barbecue banter, the ability to assume natural leadership.
A clue to his personality is his obvious political interest which, from a young age, was individual rather than communal. Compared with a political animal such as Laurie Brereton, who worked his way up through the ALP via Young Labor and aggressive working of the factions, Rudd has always had a cerebral interest in political outcomes.
Both Rudd's older brother, Greg, and his friend Glyn Davis, now the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne but who worked with Rudd in the Queensland government in the early 1990s, say that his main interest in politics is in seeing "how things work''.
"He's very good at breaking down a problem into smaller parts and then dealing with them individually and putting them back together again. No one in the Queensland public service had ever seen anything like that sort of very strong commitment to method," Davis says.
But Rudd has worked hard at overcoming his personal limitations, mainly through the basic work of politics, turning up at meetings of community groups in his electorate and championing popular causes.
As the member for the federal seat of Griffith in Brisbane, he rotates his "mobile office" throughout the electorate on a regular basis and takes up popular local causes such as trying to limit aircraft noise in the electorate, a big problem as most of the area is under the flight path heading into Brisbane Airport.
Elected in 1998, he has increased his margin in the subsequent two federal elections from 3.2 to 8.8 per cent, and since 2001 has been the Opposition foreign affairs spokesman, a job that often keeps him away from the electorate.
Rudd began life in 1957 at Eumundi in the Noosa hinterland -- well before the coastal resort became trendy.
His father Bert was a share-farmer, or someone who worked the land but didn't own it. Kevin was the youngest of four children -- his two eldest siblings, Malcolm and Loree, still live in the Nambour area, while his other brother Greg is a political lobbyist in Brisbane.
Greg recalls that childhood on a Queensland dairy farm was pleasant and happy until 1969 when this idyllic life was torn apart when their father died in a car accident.
Their mother, Margaret, had to put Kevin, the youngest of her four children, into a small VW and leave the farm.
"Kevin talks about it often, and I think the memory of that night sleeping by the side of the road with all of our possessions in the old vee-dub made a big impression on him," says Greg.
Rudd spent two years as a boarder at Marist Brothers College in Brisbane before returning to Nambour High, where he's remembered as a member of the Young People's Theatre, a cutting-edge new troupe that didn't use anything as mainstream as scripts. They preferred to improvise and work towards "a sort of happening".
"`Kevin had a good voice, good diction -- even then, he was always very clear -- and more than anything else, was prepared to take a chance artistically," said the former director of the theatre, Beryl Muspratt, who was a teacher at Rudd's Nambour High State School.
"It was the golden days of education. It was the Whitlam years, there were no worries about getting a job, you had all the freedom in the world to be creative, to take chances, and Kevin fitted into that a lot."
Rudd was also very keen on politics, being a regular reader of Hansard, and he joined the ALP as soon as he turned 16.
"He wasn't big-mouthed about it, but he was very proud of his ALP membership," Greg says.
Rudd finished as dux of the school in 1974, but during his time at Nambour he was a strong contrast to the school captain of 1972, one Wayne Swan.
Ashley Robinson, a former head of the Kawana Chamber of Commerce on the Sunshine Coast and another alumnus of Nambour High, says Swan was good at football and mixed with the "in" surfie crowd, the sort of boy's boy who was a natural leader in a small country town.
"Swanny was always out there. He was good at sport, a bit full of himself, but everyone knew who he was," he says. "But Kevin was always very studious. He put his head down and studied hard. He was good at debating and that sort of thing. Apparently he played cricket, but I don't remember him playing at all."
After he finished school, Rudd did not head straight to university but, following the example of his brother Greg, he hitch-hiked along the east coast before working in a Nambour music shop -- he has always liked classical music and is a fair pianist.
The tertiary institution he chose -- the Australian National University in Canberra -- was surprising, given most of the bright boys from Nambour High went to the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
"Kevin's always had an ability to look past the next step, and he was always interested in politics, and he just thought Canberra was best for that," says Greg.
While his time at ANU doing Asian studies was low-key, he made one connection that altered his life when he met fellow student Therese Rein. They married in 1981 and immediately got posted to Sweden.
The two spent most of the 1980s overseas in either the Stockholm or Beijing Australian embassies. During that period he became a fluent Mandarian speaker and his wife had two children, Jessica and Nicholas, and in the early 1990s a third child, Marcus, was born.
Rein has since built up her own job-placement agency, Work Directions Australia, which in turn is part of the Ingeus Group, which operates in both Australia and Britain. Former Queensland premier Wayne Goss, Rudd's old employer, is on the board.
While it remains a private business it has grown rapidly in the past decade. Ironically, the business has done very well out of the Howard Government's outsourcing of such activities.
As a diplomat, Rudd established his reputation as a hard worker, but the life of a diplomat was not for him. In 1988, with the National Party government in Queensland on the ropes, Rudd wrote an essay for the then ALP leader Goss on his vision for Queensland, which led to Goss hiring him as chief of staff.
Rudd -- in combination with then ALP state secretary Swan, ran what other campaign workers called a "tick-a-box" campaign - there were certain boxes that needed to be, and were always, ticked, such as ringing every radio station late at night to see whether they needed any grabs for the next morning.
When Goss was elected, Rudd remained as chief-of-staff before setting up the cabinet office in early 1991 to work policy - his true love - through the public service. The Queensland public service at the time had only worked for one party, that of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and Rudd's direct approach was a shock.
His nickname of the time, "Dr Death", summed up how a lot of Queensland bureaucrats viewed their hard-headed boss. Others recall a man who pushed himself very hard and who expected those around him to follow. Certainly, there was a high turnover of staff in the cabinet office.
This time also marked a close involvement in domestic affairs. In foreign affairs, his themes of a close relationship with Asia while maintaining Australia's strong interest in other parts of the world was already established. Domestically, he pushed issues such as language teaching in schools and better workforce training.
A redistribution allowed Rudd to enter federal politics when he was endorsed as the candidate for Griffith in Brisbane's eastern suburbs in 1996. He joined Queensland's Labor Unity faction, associated nationally with the Right, largely out of convenience, as it held the numbers in Griffith.
However, his clumsy approach to dealing with people was exposed - he famously touted for votes among branch members on rugby league State of Origin night.
The election loss of the Goss government in 1996 and Rudd's subsequent failure to get elected in that year's federal election led to a change in the way he related to people. The twin losses seemed to bring home to him that strong policy was all very well, but you had to connect with the people.
Subsequently, after he got elected in 1998 he was far more approachable personally and far better at relating to people. By the end of Monday his colleagues will have decided whether the rest of Australia is likely to connect with him, too.
KEVIN MICHAEL RUDD
1957: Born in Nambour
1968: Father Bert dies in a car crash
1972: Joins the ALP
1974: Graduates as dux from Nambour State High School
1981: Graduates from Australian National University with first-class honours in Chinese language and history
1981: Marries wife Therese
1981-1988: Diplomat in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and serves at the Australian embassies in Stockholm and Beijing
1988: Takes leave from DFAT to be chief of staff for Queensland Labor's state parliamentary opposition leader Wayne Goss
1989: Goss's ALP government comes to power in Queensland after 32 years in opposition Rudd remains as the Premier's chief of staff
1992: Appointed as director-general for the Office of Cabinet
1996: Contests the Brisbane seat of Griffith, losing to Liberal Graeme McDougall
1996-1998: Senior China consultant for KPMG
1997: Appointed adjunct professor at Queensland University's Asian Studies and Languages
1998: Wins the federal seat of Griffith
1998-2001: Chairs the ALP's foreign affairs, defence and trade policy committee and member of the economics policy Committee
2001: Appointed Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs
2003: Joins ALP leadership battle but bows out, throwing his support behind Kim Beazley
2004: Re-elected as member for Griffith with increased majority
Thu 22 Apr 2010 - 17:29
LIAR!!
...Big mistake Rudd...my family own a fair whack of the sunshine coast hinterland... and I think their kids would have recalled your ear wax chomping ass had you attended their school.
