Jew World Order

The Minister for Foreign Affairs Kevin Rudd. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen
Source: The Advertiser

ON Tuesday, 12-year-old Eloise Walker of Hobart wrote a report about Kevin Rudd’s visit to her school the day before.

Grade 5 and 6 students had asked him questions, including whether he would like to be prime minister again, the schoolgirl from Princes Street Primary wrote.

“He said he would rather stay in the job he is in now because he can travel to help people who are in that situation of not having enough food or water.”

As she was writing these words, Rudd was attending a private meeting across town, which he had requested, with the editor of Hobart’s influential The Mercury newspaper, Garry Bailey.

He is also understood to have made tentative inquiries about meetings this week in Melbourne with senior figures at the Herald and Weekly Times, which publishes the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Herald Sun. However, no meetings took place.

He has also been in much closer contact than usual with senior figures at Brisbane’s Courier Mail in recent weeks.

“The texting finger is back in action like never before,” one senior News Limited figure told The Weekend Australian.

Seeking to have private face-time with the editors of major metropolitan newspapers at a time when leadership speculation about Rudd is gathering pace is unusual behaviour for a man who tells children he wants to remain Foreign Minister in order to help the poor.

But then his frenetic schedule in the 11 days since he returned from New York has hardly been designed to quell speculation that the former prime minister is running an undeclared campaign to reclaim his old job.

The Foreign Minister is suddenly Mr Local, visiting shopping centres, schools, outback towns and hospitals. Along the way, he has read books to children, traded jokes with comedians on the Ten Network and been mobbed at schools in images that have been broadcast across the country.

It’s a look which is helping re-ignite the cult of Kevin at a time when polls show Labor’s primary vote under Julia Gillard is cellar-dwelling at 26 per cent. According to Rudd’s backers, it is all a media invention designed to fuel a non-existent leadership tussle.

“This really is the most ridiculous story,” one Labor staffer sniffed when asked whether Rudd’s exploits in Brisbane, far western NSW, Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney since early last week should be viewed through the prism of leadership ambitions.

But in Hobart this week, where a community cabinet meeting was held, Rudd approved a program that was destined to lure cameras on to him at the expense of his cabinet colleagues, including Gillard. On Monday, he invited photographers to record a visit to Princes Street Primary in Sandy Bay, where he talked about “Australia’s place in the world”.

School principal Sue Scott said she had been asked by Labor senator Carol Brown if the school would be interested in hosting a visit by the Foreign Minister. When Rudd arrived to speak, she asked whether he would also be willing to say hello to younger students as well.

“He . . . said, ‘My word, I would’. He did high fives with them. He asked them what grades they were in and looked every child in the face and said hello. He was very impressive.”

The dominant media image of Rudd that day was of him giving high fives to adoring children.

The following day, Rudd met with The Mercury editor, who had met with the Prime Minister the previous day. He declined to comment on the meetings.

Following this, Rudd agreed to have a Mercury photographer trail him as he visited Eastlands shopping centre. As a spokesperson for the Foreign Minister explained it: “(Rudd) attended a mobile office with (MP) Julie Collins and answered her constituents’ questions on foreign affairs and Australia’s aid program.”

The following day’s story in the Mercury headlined “Kevin 11 rolls though town” had more pictures of a smiling Rudd high-fiving toddlers and with his arms around families. Rudd’s spokesperson insists it would be wrong to interpret his visit there as anything more than routine business.

The following day, Rudd was in Melbourne inviting media to a church in Tecoma near the Dandenong Ranges to launch a fundraising initiative to ease suffering in the Horn of Africa. The sitting MP, Laura Smyth, says she had invited him several times previously to her marginal electorate of La Trobe.

That evening, Rudd was a guest on the Ten Network’s 7pm Project and the next day he attended a UN forum at Deakin University on intercultural relations, before meeting with the Georgian Foreign Minister and flying to Sydney to deliver a lecture for the Qantas Foundation on Corporate Social Responsibility.

Asked why Rudd was giving such a lecture for Qantas, his spokesperson said: “As the minister responsible for foreign aid, it is appropriate for Mr Rudd to speak at this event, as corporate social responsibility efforts by Australian companies are an important part of Australia’s relationship with developing countries.”

Rudd watchers say his schedule since he returned from a visit to the UN in New York early last week has been carefully framed to broaden his popular appeal and capitalise on polls that show him streets ahead of Gillard as preferred prime minister.

As soon as his jet touched down in Sydney on September 29, he drove almost 500km to the western NSW town of Condobolin to open a new indigenous learning centre.

It was during a local radio interview en route that the jet-lagged Foreign Minister made his much publicised gaffe that he was “a very happy little vegemite being prime minister”.

Rudd used his Condobolin speech to discuss the impact of his apology to the Stolen Generations as prime minister and to canvass indigenous issues outside his portfolio. The Rudd camp dismisses any notion that this was a carefully staged plan.

Two days later, Rudd received national publicity as he read to toddlers at the Queensland State Library in Brisbane.

His office says he was invited by the library and was happy to attend the event, which was in his own electorate.

The following day, Rudd had morning tea with staff at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in his electorate to support organ and tissue donation.

So does this all add up to an undeclared leadership campaign, or just a very busy program for a hyperactive Foreign Minister?

Says one Labor staffer: “Kevin is now being maligned for doing his job in the country, instead of being maligned for doing his job outside it.”

But Gillard supporters are watching his movements with growing unease and at least one cabinet minister has privately expressed fury.

When asked directly yesterday if he was undermining Gillard, Rudd said he was doing everything possible to prevent Tony Abbott from becoming prime minister.

“I’m working hard with my Prime Minister and . . . with my ministerial colleagues to do that, because Australia would change radically,” he said.

“That is what I’m about.”