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sir prince duke alevine
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cods wrote on Jul 10 th, 2013 at 4:30pm: sir prince duke alevine wrote on Jul 10 th, 2013 at 4:28pm: Sprintcyclist wrote on Jul 10 th, 2013 at 4:19pm: Quote:.............
The truth is, Rudd was impossible to work with. He regularly treated his staff, public servants and backbenchers with rudeness and contempt. He could be vindictive, intervening to deny people appointments or preselections, sometimes based on grudges going back years.
He made crushing demands on his staff, and when they laboured through the night to meet those demands, they received no thanks, and often the work was not used. People who dared to stand up to him were put in "the freezer" and not consulted or spoken to for months.
His staff's prodigious loyalty was mostly not repaid. He put people down behind their backs. He seemed to feel that everyone was always letting him down. In meetings, as I saw, he could emanate a kind of icy rage that was as mysterious as it was disturbing.
He governed by, and seemed almost to thrive on, crisis. Important papers went unsigned; staff and public servants would be pulled onto flights, in at least one case halfway around the world, on the off-chance that he needed to consult them.
Vital decisions were held up while he struggled to make up his mind, frequently demanding more pieces of information that merely delayed the final result. The fate of the government seemed to hinge on the psychology of one man.
As I watched this unfold in Canberra, I tried hard to put aside my poor experience of working for Rudd. I had been a journalist for more than 20 years and knew that just because three people complain about something or someone does not make it true. When 30 or more witnesses complain, you can start to believe it.
I kept waiting, and wanting, to hear the other side of the story: that Rudd could be unpleasant but that, overall, he was a good bloke, or that his chaotic management style did not impair his effectiveness.
But, amazingly, apart from a handful of conversations praising his formidable intelligence, his efforts on the economic crisis and the fact that he left some ministers alone to do their work, there was no other side to the story. Hard-bitten commentators will say that character, or kindness, are irrelevant to politics; what counts is getting the job done. But you can never escape the human factor. In the first six months of 2010, Rudd's personality and government policy collided, to catastrophic effect.
People saw it coming. As much as four months before his downfall, Canberra insiders were warning that in the next few months Rudd had to land his health plan, the Henry tax review, a new plan for the carbon pollution reduction scheme after it had been defeated in the Senate, and the federal budget.
Each one was a massive operation. Each one required months of parliamentary and public battle. It was like trying to land four jumbo jets at once on the same runway, and people said it could not be done.
Some of these people were in a position to say these things to Rudd but he had stopped listening. He shut them out. While the clock was ticking and those aircraft were descending, Rudd kept visiting one more hospital, creating one more media opportunity with one more entrapped patient.
As a result, policy was neither properly prepared nor argued. Rudd focused obsessively on the health reforms, which turned out to be unimportant, and too little on the carbon scheme and the mining tax, which mattered immensely. It was in these circumstances, with the polls tumbling and mining companies' anger rising, that Gillard took the decision to mount a leadership challenge.........
.................James Button is a former Age journalist who worked for the Rudd government for 15 months. He is writing a book about the experience..... http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/time-we-heard-truth-about-... Still better than tony sh1t happens abbott as a PM. 4 DEATHS IN ROOF CAVITIES IS BETTER THAN 'SH1T HAPPENS.... WHAT A MORON...WHAT A PRICELESS IDIOT. All recommendations have been accepted. Rudd apologised. He actually used the word "sorry." Tony thinks soldiers dying is "sh1t happens." Please. And what disgraceful politics to use 4 deaths for political point scoring. For shame.
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