When will Rudd return?

Bligh: "That's him, that's Campbell Newman over there". Rudd: "You mean that little runt? I can play him on a break."

The recent Australia Day kerfuffle in Canberra was not Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s fault. I’m sure she had no prior knowledge of - nor did she authorise – her adviser to stir up the aboriginal tent embassy protestors into an ugly mob that resulted in some dramatic, if not outright bizarre & embarrassing, footage of the PM being dragged, manhandled and groped by an AFP ‘minder’, who thought he’d find his 15 minutes of fame by acting as though someone had pulled a gun on his boss. They hadn’t, and I suggest that the PM (and Tony Abbott) could have merely walked to their cars surrounded and flanked by security, instead of the rather unedifying manner in which they were forced to look like prized scaredy cats … to the whole world.

Anyway, the upshot of it all is that it did Gillard’s re-election prospects no favours whatsoever. By contrast, Abbott actually suffers no such blemish, as it has emerged that a PM staffer did ‘the dirty work’ and that Tony Abbott’s words had in no way inflamed the protestors . Julia Gillard just can’t take a trick and seems to stumble (literally in this latest incident) from one disaster to another. Rightly or wrongly she is increasingly perceived as ‘dead person walking’, in a purely political sense of course.

The other thing that is becoming increasingly obvious is that Kevin Rudd, the man she unceremoniously deposed as PM just prior to the 2010 election, will at some stage make a challenge for the leadership. It’s now a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’ Rudd will seek to get his old job back. And he seems to have picked the perfect vehicle in joining Anna Bligh on her Queensland re-election campaign, as this Age article points out:
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KEVIN Rudd will use the Queensland election campaign as the springboard for a renewed push to wrest the prime ministership back from Julia Gillard, Labor Party insiders predict.

The Foreign Minister, who represents the Brisbane seat of Griffith, promised he ”will help any campaign that they want me to” during the election, pitting Labor Premier Anna Bligh against former Brisbane lord mayor Campbell Newman, now Liberal National Party leader.

Labor insiders say Mr Rudd’s involvement in the campaign for the March 24 election is designed to boost his profile, highlight the disparity in popularity between the former and present prime ministers, remind his caucus colleagues how crucial Queensland is in the next federal election – and stoke leadership tensions.

… Mr Rudd isn’t expected to make a move on the leadership until after the poll, which Labor is tipped to lose badly.

The most recent Newspoll put it 12 percentage points behind the LNP on a two-party-preferred basis. ”If the result is very bad in Queensland for Labor, it will put enormous pressure on Julia Gillard,” a senior party figure said.

Okay, words from “insiders” (faceless people) don’t amount to much, but I’d suggest they’re probably spot on in this case. Think about it: Rudd is a Queenslander - the first ever Queensland PM – and didn’t they react violently (in voting terms) to Gillard’s knifing of him in the 2010 election? If it hadn’t been for Queensland, Labor would clearly have been returned in their own right with no reliance on the Greens, Windsor, Oakeshott and the flakey Andrew Wilkie. No need for a carbon tax. No need for pokie reforms and no need to break the deal and, once again, appear two-faced and untrustworthy. Rudd would be now heading for a 3rd term in my opinion.

And despite the Queensland opinion polls that put Anna Bligh well behind her LNP opposition, I reckon Kevin Rudd can make a difference and at least help to close the gap on Campbell Newman, the would-be-Premier who is not even a Parliamentarian yet – a weakness both Bligh & Rudd are sure to exploit. Bligh may well lose the election but either way I reckon Rudd will come out of it a winner.

And, it’s for that reason that my prediction on the question posed by the heading to this post is this:

Kevin Rudd will challenge Julia Gillard for the leadership sometime in April this year. And he’ll win. 

What do you think?

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