Kevin Rudd

This New Zealand election has already surprised observers by being less predictable than anyone would have imagined. An unexpected coalition outcome would be a fitting conclusion to it. […]

Sometimes Australia seems an odd country indeed. Kevin Rudd’s elevation to the Australian Labor Party (ALP) leadership last week after three years spent undermining his own leader, colleagues and political party, is the latest astonishing development. […]

Rudd’s second premiership may turn out to be short-lived because Australian Labor, divided and exhausted, lies in tatters. Only someone like Rudd could not care about that. After all, he never cared for anyone or anything other than himself. The kindergarten of Australian politics has finally turned into a farce. It is the Australian people who will have their say on it in the forthcoming elections. […]

IN his masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek considered the follies of mistaken policies to conclude: “We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.” If only Kevin Rudd heeded this advice, his much-televised apologies for the government’s insulation fiasco and other policy blunders would be more credible.
[…]

The Catholic Church has long put the obstacle of the advocatus diaboli in the path of sainthood – someone who argues the devil’s case against the canonisation of a prospective saint. What the Catholic Church had not yet introduced, though, was an advocatus Australiae, an Australian gate opener to heaven. […]

Committing $100,000 of taxpayer money to saving each job in the car industry was already a prodigious waste of money but this will look cheap compared with the cost of nationalising Holden. In time, Australians will come to rue the day Rudd decided to treat the car industry as an issue of systemic significance. […]

So is Australia really just a warmer version of England, as the immigration officer suggested to me 10 years ago?

Probably not yet, if simply for the fact that in the past decade Australia has avoided the worst mistakes made in Britain. But if Rudd continues his New Labour-like policies, Australia may well become another Britain, if only without the snow. […]

For Australia’s mayors and shire presidents, Christmas came a bit earlier this year—on 18 November, to be precise. But Santa Claus did not come to town. Instead, the towns went to Santa, played by no other than the prime minister himself. Kevin Rudd clearly enjoyed his new role, handing out a total of $300 million in pre-Christmas giveaways at the inaugural meeting of the Australian Council of Local Government in Canberra. […]