Sunday Mail, Adelaide, August 1, 2010

A POLITICAL speech is supposed to be a work of persuasion to rally uncertain voters to the cause. Tone and content. Hearts and minds.


Some speechmakers are more persuasive than others. Kevin Rudd, the ominous gut’s ache behind this election campaign, was next to hopeless.

On federal election night ‘07, I was in a roomful of young journos who were relaxing with a drink after covering their very first election day.

Gathered around the TV, the anticipation was high. There was relief at not having John Howard as Prime Minister. Rarely has a new PM had a more captive audience.

Yet, Rudd quickly lost them. Long-winded and bland, his victory speech was a really enormous let down.

A speech of such mind numbing, eye glazing banality that within minutes those who were not in a catatonic stupor were heading for the beer fridge, going to the toilet or finding an excuse to leave.

There was a kind of anaesthetic effect from the way he talked. Whether this was Rudd’s fault or his speech writer’s, I cannot say, but in terms of striking the right note he was a miserable disappointment.

It set the tone for many other boring speeches to follow, with the possible exceptions of his ``Sorry’’ speeches to the Stolen Generations and to the Forgotten Australians in state care.

I heard my first live Rudd speech at a newspaper conference in Cairns in 2005.

At the time he was Opposition spokesman for foreign affairs. He told a mildly amusing anecdote about how he had become fluent in Mandarin and educated in contemporary Chinese history, only to then be sent as young diplomat to Stockholm.

Maybe Foreign Affairs’ first instinct was right, given Rudd’s reported remarks later as PM that ``those Chinese f***ers are trying to rat-f*** us" at the Copenhagen Climate Summit.

He plainly made an undiplomatic error of judgement, not in how he expressed himself, but in venting in front of a bunch of journalists.

Had we seen more of the seething, abusive and potty-mouthed bastardry that, by some accounts, is his underlying true persona – instead of the air-chopping Ruddbot lecturer – then he might still be PM.

US president Barack Obama once described Rudd as ``smart but humble’’, a person with whom he shared the same world view. Right, setting aside how to handle the Chinese.

Problem was, unlike Obama’s gift for cadence, Rudd did not have the verbal ability to cut through with the public. No, not until the very end when he had lost the Prime Ministership and, in his word, ``blubbed’’.

Some regard the Rudd coup de grace as a terrible thing, in terms of it being a shameful political murder.

Spare me. The voters were going to toss aside Labor under Rudd, of that I am pretty sure.

Obviously he did not foresee any problem in himself but, the fact was, the electorate wasn’t listening to him any longer.

People had switched off. Rudd was too boring, and moving forward he had to go.