As Kevin Rudd’s press gallery romance sours, Turnbull sharpens his knife
Mr Rudd pursed. Mr Rudd rearranged his pencils, first by height, second by colour, third by the order in which they displeased him. Mr Rudd was out of sorts.
His sermon to the UN, on the world’s crises, as they related to Mr Rudd, was not the pinnacle entered in his BlackBerry planner.
If he held the General Assembly in the palm of his hand, it was because the audience could have fitted equally comfortably into a departing cab, which, during the course of his remarks, it did. To be fair, his triumph was programmed for the UN equivalent of Try Out Night. He was preceded by the president of Burkina Faso, who spoke urgently of the moral challenge posed by climate change, and of a local epidemic of goat mange, both demanding UN funds. Mr Rudd was followed by the Sultan of Something, who equally declared a moral commitment to climate change (whether for or against was unclear) and the pressing need to obliterate Israel (less ambiguous).
Mr Rudd was therefore morally preempted, and trumped, when he promised that Australia would — to save the planet — close down, and cease to emit anything airborne except himself, on visits. True, several key headphones nodded vigorously. Privately, he suspected iPods.
Worse, his demand that the world do something about its finances went unregarded. The surviving delegates crammed the corridors instead, watching Congress do something about finances, on the Bloomberg channel.
Where were the ovations, the bouquets, the thoughtful little gifts of ethnic knives? Not in the Green Room, where he was buttonholed by Nigeria, or possibly Gabon — robe, French dental work involving rubies, lively hat — whose tip for the financial crisis was to shift the Treasury to Liechtenstein and send the younger wives on ahead.
Mr Rudd, alone, and palely loitering, deplored his loose end. He contacted his Chinese controllers from the designated subway phone booth, standing in much urine, but could not be heard because the Chinese embassy was watching the Bloomberg channel, celebrating coarsely, and may have been drunk.
Like any professional man marooned in New York, he rang an old drinking buddy his wife disdained. He needed the fiercefisted opinion of a seasoned journalist on the US presidential election, off the record, in the usual private room, at Hooters. He got it. ‘Kev,’ he was told, ‘the Democrats put up a junior senator with mob connections for the first time in 50 years. They hope this one won’t end in tears. The other mob put up Popeye and his feisty bosun’s mate. Then the whole bloody election gets decided by the punters who don’t turn up. Australia needs a system like that. No bastard like you would ever get in. Har, har.’
Vexed at his desk, Mr Rudd snapped a pencil, appalled himself, rallied, seized the omen, acted on it. Great men write their own headlines. No more WHO cALLS AUSTRALIA HOME? NOT KEVIN. Let’s have THE WEEK THAT cHANGED AUSTRALIA. Or KEVIN YOU LEGEND, even better.
Engorged with initiative, he seized the red BlackBerry and let slip the dogs of change. His ministers sat up like meerkats. Action This Day, they read. Motherhood, Infrastructure, Climate Change, One of Each, Immediate. Ministers panicked, saddled up and, befitting legend, rode off in all directions.
You can’t go wrong with motherhood, especially paid motherhood, a close second to free Breezers, he reflected bitterly, later. Paid maternity leave was a certainty. Julia waved the cheque like a starter’s flag, Australia cheered, and everyone fertile hit the sack, at it like marmosets. Then Wayne burst into the bedroom like the panto mother of the bride, with a bucket of water and a rolled newspaper, and the clarification that you can’t afford it, the cheque’s post-dated, it’s only an idea, can’t you people wait?
It was Wayne’s second personal appearance, that dreadful week. He had already used ‘infrastructure’ in a sentence, along with A$60 billion, a rock candy mountain of a figure that always impressed the groups. Unfortunately, he had to speak up over the crash of masonry, since the rest of the news was full of collapsing financial façades. Mr Rudd was initially confident that even Wayne would dimly recognise that now wasn’t absolutely the best moment to announce a borrowing binge. A vague hint of a thought of an inquiry into a mirage of infrastructure by 2012 would have done the usual trick. Nor should his encore have been to demand higher interest rates for battling banks. That man would hand out cigars to celebrate a gas leak, realised Mr Rudd. He’d never liked him at school, either, retrospectively. The hook went out and Wayne went off, abruptly, and Ross went on, to unveil Climate Change III: Judgement Day. Mr Rudd shuddered. Two years in the making, six million words in the reading, the world on the cusp of parboiling, the nation on the edge of the sofa, Mr Rudd’s whitened sepulchre showing paint damage, and out pops Dr Strangelove to tell us: Save the Planet! Eat a Kangaroo!
Then it was Sunday, another podium, a full house at last, 80,000 strong and loud, howling abuse at Mr Rudd, demonstrating that a football grand final was not necessarily the best place to appear when you have just advised the crowd to stop reproducing, hand all their money to the banks and give up steak. You learn as you go.
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