Earlier this year it was mentioned on Insiders that Piers Akerman had had a dinner with Kevin Rudd.
One assumes that Kevin thought he could gain some advantage by breaking bread with one of the nation's biggest Howard supporters, but it has been clear for months that it was wasted effort.
This weekend, Piers explains in very clear terms that he does not trust Kevin one iota:
....I have the gravest concerns about his fitness to head a political party, let alone run this nation.My main concerns about his character relate to what I perceive to be an unalloyed ruthlessness, a lack of his loyalty to anything but his own short-term political ambitions and his projection of a carefully constructed image that has little or nothing to do with Rudd the man.
While I generally don't pay all that much attention to Akerman, that little summary of The Problem with Kevin seems fair enough.
Akerman is merely describing a politician. Those same words apply in spades to John Howard - especially as he hangs on to leadership for no apparent reason when his front bench is, as he constantly reminds us, so talented.
ReplyDeleteI think you would be wise to continue to pay little attention to Akerman who seems to have gone off the rails about Rudd with the conspiracy theorists.
Geoff
Geoff, to be fair to Akerman, his next paragraph after the part I extracted was this:
ReplyDelete"Of course, all politicians exhibit these traits to some degree.
They wouldn't make it through the first pre-selection meeting if they did not, but these qualities drive Rudd as they drive no other politician in Australia today."
As for Howard hanging onto power, while he does not cite it as his reason, he can justify his decision by virtue of polling which did show he had a substantially better chance of winning than Costello.
Further on Akerman gets to the nub of his problem with Rudd which is over the Heiner affair.
ReplyDeleteAll the rest is just negative conservative spin of Rudd. I wouldn't trust a ratbag like Akerman to know what a friend was let alone assess if Rudd has enough of them.
The Heiner stuff strikes me as bizarre and is only being rehashed now as a smear. Admittedly elsewhere The Australian has not held back in its criticism of Akerman over this obsession.
I come back to my point. Akerman's and to a certain extent your criticiam of Rudd seems to boil down that he is a politician. He gives me the creeps but only as much as Downer, Costello, Nelson, Gillard et al do.
There is a long history of deceit coming from the current occupants on matters of great importance that make it hard to get upset about the stage managing of Rudd.
Geoff