The Age
Rudd turns to the people not the party
Thu February 23, 2012 1:19pm
KEVIN Rudd is counting on the love of the people, not his colleagues, if he is to emerge victorious from Monday's leadership ballot.
ANALYSIS
Kevin Rudd is counting on the love of the people, not his colleagues, if he is to emerge victorious from Monday's leadership ballot.
As this now extraordinary and hostile spectacle plays out in full public glare, Rudd will contest the leadership when he comes home, despite his humbug about not having made up his mind.
Rudd told reporters in Washington DC this morning that Julia Gillard cannot win the next election and he can.
This is the paradox. Gillard is well liked by the majority of her colleagues but disliked by the majority of the voters. Rudd is loathed, indeed hated, by the majority of his colleagues, but is vastly more popular than Gillard among the public.
So rather than rely solely on direct lobbying of colleagues for support, Rudd has enlisted people power. Ultimately, every MP wants to keep their seat and Rudd knows the survival instinct eventually overrides personal loyalty.
Thus his appeal today to the general public from which he claimed he had received overwhelming support, is to ring their local MP and tell them to choose Kevin. Rudd's wife, Therese Rein, made the same appeal at her own press conference in Brisbane this morning.
Gillard's pitch this morning was also extraordinary. She finally expanded on what she meant in June 2010 when she said the Rudd government had ''lost its way''.
Rudd was a chaotic, difficult and dysfunctional leader obsessed by opinion polls and headlines, she said. What he lacked was the courage and the temperament to keep his head when those polls and the headlines with it went south.