Kevin Rudd said on Tuesday, “I’m a happy little vegemite being prime minister, ah foreign minister”. 

 

The messiah from Norman Park is returning to save the Labor party from oblivion. But this leopard’s application to change its spots will not be any different from Kevin'07 or Kevin'89. 

 

Many may not remember Kevin’89 but an insider from the days of the Goss government sent me a note the other day reminding me. Change George St, Brisbane to Capital Hill, Canberra and the management style becomes disconcertingly recognisable. 

 

After Wayne Goss's victory at the 1989 Queensland election, Rudd, who had been Goss’s Principal Private Secretary, was made head of the Office of Cabinet.

 

He filled it to the brim with young, smart and ambitious types who had no experience of the world, let alone government. Rudd established his megalomaniacal style, “Rudd Everywhere”.  In the political family Rudd wants to play the part of Dad, Mum, all the kids the girlfriends, boyfriends and all the pets. Every major decision of the government was smothered in Kevin’s DNA. Cabinet submissions typically left his office bearing little to no relationship to what went in. Not only were Ministers bypassed, Directors-General of departments were redundant. The process and disastrous policy missteps were a facsimile of what he unleashed on the country 15 years later. 

 

Policy development was the near exclusive remit of middle-ranking Rudd moles in the departments, and his 80 plus string of nerds in the Cabinet Office, who ran them.

 

This policy aplomb led Julia Gillard and the caucus to force him out of the job last year.

 

There is no doubting the book smarts of Rudd but all that IQ failed to deliver results for Queensland.  A tribe of Cassius’s left a distasteful legacy for Queensland’s Rome.

 

Health spending doubled but at the end of the spree you could barely get an in-grown toenail treated. Wards closed and operating theatres shut. Nurses famously held a demo with placards that read: “Bring Back Joh.”Similar splurges occurred in education.

 

 A deputy head of the Public Sector Management Commission, David Shand, gave a notorious, revealing speech at Griffith University after the Goss/Rudd government’s first term. He mused that the aim of the government had been to get spending in both areas up to the national average. It didn’t seem to matter where the money went. The aim was to hit the national average. 

 

Does this remind you of Rudd’s embracing GFC Mark I with a US solution for a European and American problem, the application of which was misappropriated to Australia which was benefiting from an Asian boom? The result was totally and utterly clumsy and no better personified than by school halls and ceiling insulation and our current $207 billion gross debt.

 

Back to the Queensland experience. A dam at Wolffdene to supplement Brisbane’s one major source of water was canned. Instead residential developments were allowed on the site. When a drought hit the next decade the houses made the dam unfeasible and Kevin's successor, Peter Beattie, was forced to scramble to lay pipes and build desalination plants at exorbitant prices. 

 

Throughout this wheel-spinning tumult, Rudd and Professor Peter Coaldrake, head of the Public sector Management Commission, kept the public service in a state of panic. This was principally via review, after review, after useless, pointless, review. Then departments were “reformed,” then they were “reformed again,” and again.

 

The public service was totally and constantly confused, destabilised and demoralised. This perversely appeared to be Kevin’s goal.

 

Canberra might recognise the symptoms and fear a relapse to Kevin’s Palace Pandemonium.

 

There is no doubt Kevin is good at one thing, media management. The other day I opened up the Sunday Mail and there was Kevin on page 2, taking a stroll with his staffer along the boardwalk. That was it, no story; just a little pictorial icon to remind us to pray for Kevin.

 

There is a level of sympathy for how Kevin was treated and the brutal way he was dispatched. It was the Labor party that used him to gain power, and then when he no longer was of any use it was the Labor party that removed him in the middle of the night. 

 

Australia is craving a boring government that is in credit. It is not the person of Julia or Kevin that is the essence of their problems, it is their dippy policies and manic management style and until someone addresses these they haven’t addressed Labor’s problems.