Australian Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd is hardly the first decent Christian family man visiting from out-of-town to find himself in a New York strip club. These things happen when a man is away from his wife and family in a sinful place like New York. Rudd, a devout Anglican who cites Deitrich Bonhoffer as his hero, was outed on Sunday by News Ltd papers as having attended Scores, a Manhattan strip club, while visiting the UN on taxpayer funded business in 2003. If St Kevin, as the press have dubbed him, was perhaps entitled to feel a bit miffed at his treatment by the Murdoch press – accounts of the evening suggest that it was New York Post editor Col Allan’s idea that they go there – he wasn’t showing it.
“I accept responsibility for it, it’s my mistake” he told a door-stop press conference on Sunday. “ I don’t make any excuses for myself. I think the important thing, though, on the question of character, is owning up to mistakes when you make them rather than pretending that you haven’t made any mistakes. I’ve done that I’ve also been upfront about it with my wife and partner.”
He’d have done well to leave it there but instead he continued: “I think in my adult life I can only remember two occasions when I’ve actually drank too much and this was one of them.”
In response to this claim Australians have split into three camps: those who think he’s stretching the truth, those who hope he is and those who fear he’s telling the whole truth.
Rudd’s moment of madness has brought a slew of confessions from other politicians about visits to strip clubs, the most entertaining being by former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, now 91. In Paris in 1980s as Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO Mr Whitlam saw it as his job to take visitng ministers to the Lido and the Folies Begere, “where the exploitation of women is very tasteful”.
“Paris had real class in nightclubs,” he told The Age. “Nothing so crass as they have in New York.”
UPDATE: Rudd’s sister-in-law today admitted that she used to work as a stripper.
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