Rudd decides to run for PM

Kevin Rudd took everyone by surprise yesterday by resigning as Foreign Minister. Two days ago Simon Crean and other prominent Labor MPs made scathing verbal attacks on Mr Rudd and he was furious that PM Julia Gillard didn’t come to his defence. So he decided to throw in the towel, and wouldn’t wait until he got home, he held a news conference in the US in the middle of the night.


Queensland MP Graham Perrett once threatened to quit if Julia Gillard was rolled as prime minister but now says he is surprised and disappointed that Australia has lost a “magnificent" foreign minister. “It's not often that we have a foreign minister with diplomatic skills, language skills and the gravitas of having been a former prime minister, which meant he was able to open doors around the world that not a lot of foreign ministers have had open to them."


So was Kevin Rudd a “magnificent” Foreign Minister? Naturally Tony Abbott doesn’t think so and in his column today, he says that Kevin Rudd was prone to “big talk without actions to match.” He also believes that Australia should have had a “Jakata focus rather than a Geneva one.”


As foreign minister, Rudd decided to participate in a minute’s silence after the death of North Korean despot Kim Jong-Il when our other allies boycotted the event. Mr Abbott believes that this and other examples like Labor’s softening support for Israel is because Labor is obsessed with winning a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.


But what does the average Aussie think about Kevin Rudd? His decision to soften John Howard’s asylum seeker policy was an absolute disaster. Julia Gillard came up with the Malaysian solution which the high court threw out and now asylum seekers continue to arrive every day.


The government refuses to bring in harsher penalties for boat people, the ones that worked for John Howard. Could it be that a tough approach on asylum seekers could be perceived by the UN as being unsympathetic towards refugees which would blow our chances for that UN Security Council seat? And we mustn’t forget the carbon tax, it was Kevin Rudd’s baby from the very beginning, he started it, Julia finished it and now we are stuck with it.


But Tony Abbott might never get to be PM afterall because Kevin Rudd has announced that he will now run for re-election as Prime Minister at a meeting next Monday. He said “I have many more calls still to make but their overall argument to me is that they regard me as the best prospect to lead the Australian Labor Party successfully to the next election, to save the Labor Party at the next election, and to save the country from the ravages of an Abbott government.”


He hit back at the extraordinary attack by Treaurer Wayne Swan last night. “Frankly I am shocked and disappointed by the tone and content of the intensely personal attacks that have been lodged against me overnight in Australia,” he said.


And then he dropped the bombshell - “If I was asked by the Governor-General to form a government, I would immediately advise an election. “We need a real change and the only way we can get real change is with a real election.”

Roll on Monday.