It must have been a difficult day for Kevin Rudd and his family yesterday when Julia Gillard won the leadership battle with a convincing 71 votes to 31. He took a chance and lost his dream job of Foreign Minister and from now on, he will be sitting on the back bench, where many of his supports believe he doesn’t belong.
It’s a bizarre situation – here we have a former Prime Minister so much more popular with the Australian people than either Julia Gillard or Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, but his party won’t have him back under any circumstances. I still haven’t heard a plausible reason why they decided to dump him as PM, there were no obvious problems from the voter's point of view, and it’s quite likely he could have won the next election as leader. But it's history now and Mr Rudd left the meeting with supporters Kim Carr, Alan Griffin, Ursula Stephens, Maria Vamvakinou, Laura Smyth, Chris Bowen and Doug Cameron in tow.
Anthony Albanese is still haunted by the coup and said so. He rang the PM and told her he felt compelled to vote for Kevin Rudd in the leadership ballot and offered her his resignation. She refused to accept it. Fighting back tears, the Minister for Infrastructure said he thought the way Kevin Rudd was deposed was wrong and the only way he could register his dissent was to vote for him in the leadership ballot. He said he was raised by a single mother who told him to always do what he thought was right, no matter what it cost. He said ''It was wrong that a first-term, elected prime minister, is deposed without warning and under the circumstances in which it was done.”
Kevin Rudd promised the PM his "absolute support" and vowed he wouldn't challenge her again under any circumstances.``I dedicate myself to working fully for Ms Gillard's re-election as the prime minister of Australia,'' he said. ``I will do so with my absolute ability dedicated to that task.''
No comments:
Post a Comment