Profile: Kevin Rudd- The buttoned-up, bespectacled politician who expects to be Australia's next prime minister: He's intellectual, fluent in Mandarin, opposes the Iraq war and doesn't fit the stereotype of the beer-drinking Aussie politician, but he could still triumph in today's election, writes Adam Harvey.
In the rough-hewn world of Australian politics, it helps if a candidate has a hard-luck story. Kevin Rudd's is harder than most. The man who is favourite to be elected today as the nation's next prime minister grew up on a sharecropper's farm in the semi-tropical Queensland hinterland. His father died after a car accident when Kevin was 11, and his mother and her three children were evicted from their rented timber cottage not long afterwards.
The Rudds slept in a car before they found emergency accommodation, and, with no savings, the politician said decades later, "my mother , like thousands of others, was left to rely on the bleak charity of the time to raise a family".
She did an outstanding job, judged by Rudd's sense of himself, and the career trajectory of her best-known child. Months of favourable opinion polls say that Rudd, now aged 50 and the leader of the Australian Labor Party, is today poised to end the 11-year rule of the conservative Coalition government led by 68-year-old John Howard.
Labor went into today's vote with an eight percentage point (46-54) lead in the polls, and pundits say that should be enough to ensure victory over Howard, who has pulled off extraordinary last-minute comebacks in the past. Labor's poll lead is on the back of Rudd's promises to pull combat troops out of Iraq, introduce more worker-friendly industrial relations laws, and end the Howard government's draconian policy towards asylum seekers, which involved, in part, detaining illegal immigrants on Pacific islands.
Unlike Labor's most popular prime minister of recent decades, Bob Hawke, Rudd is no charismatic, glad-handing man of the people. He's a nerdy foreign policy expert, a former diplomat who speaks fluent Mandarin, and who as a senior Queensland public servant earned the temporary nickname "Dr Death" for his work in cutting costs by sacking government staff. (More recent nicknames, such as "Harry Potter", refer to Rudd's bookish persona).
Australia has a reputation as a nation that reveres the larrikin spirit and common touch, as embodied by Hawke (who was a world record-holder for beer drinking), actor Paul Hogan and adventurer Steve Irwin, and condemned by expatriate writers like Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes for being anti-intellectual.
Despite this, Rudd is not afraid of appearing to be the smartest man in the room. His speeches sometimes sound like lectures, he gives the impression that he's more comfortable with a 5,000-word essay for an intellectual magazine than a five-second soundbite for the television news, and he always looks slightly awkward when meeting "real" Australians whilst on the hustings.
And while both Hawke and current prime minister John Howard were sports-mad, and particularly obsessed with cricket, Rudd has seen no need to follow the nation's leader by dressing down on weekends in a green-and-gold tracksuit.
HOWARD'S HEROES ARE conservative icons such as Churchill, Australian liberal party father-figure Robert Menzies, and the legendary Australian batsman Don Bradman, but Rudd has a more noble inspiration: German Lutheran pastor Deitrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi and peace activist who refused to stay silent during Hitler's terror, and who was imprisoned and eventually hanged by the SS in 1945, just three weeks before the end of the second World War.
"Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the 20th century," said Rudd, who is Catholic and married to a highly successful Anglican businesswoman. When confronted by complex issues, such as the rise in radical Islam and the increasing threat of religious terrorism, Rudd says he asks himself, "What would Bonhoeffer think?" On that issue, says Rudd: "Bonhoeffer's voice, speaking to us through the ages, would ask this simple, truth-based question: what is causing this phenomenon? He would also caution against inflammatory rhetoric that seeks to gain political advantage, rather than to respond substantively and find a way forward."
Rudd has an intellectual, rather than knee-jerk, approach to the age of terrorism, and his opposition from the outset to the war in Iraq is perhaps the greatest difference between himself and the incumbent prime minister, and one of the reasons why he's been polling so far ahead of Howard. Along with Tony Blair, Howard has been George Bush's greatest supporter over the war in Iraq. Bush called him "A man of steel" for keeping Australian troops on the ground while other members of the "coalition of the willing" ran for cover.
When Bush visited Australia in September, Howard echoed the US president by saying that Australian troop withdrawals would be "not based on any calendar, but based on conditions on the ground". Rudd has said that, if elected, Labor will pull Australia's 500 combat troops out of Iraq, and replace them with training and support personnel.
He's outspoken about peace, and uses his strong Christian faith (he was raised a Catholic, but attends Anglican services with his wife) to justify his opposition to the war: "Human life can only be taken in self-defence, and only then under highly conditional circumstances - circumstances which include the exhaustion of all other peaceful means to resolve a dispute; and if war is to be embarked upon, then the principles of proportionality must apply," he said. "On this point, for example, it is worth noting that Pope John Paul II did not support the Iraq war as a just war."
HIS STANCE IS popular in Australia, where protests opposing the war are held regularly, and where the close relationship with the US has been increasingly problematic for Howard. The US Studies Centre at Sydney University found 64 per cent of Australians opposed their country's involvement in the Iraq war and 48 per cent wanted foreign policy disentangled from US interests.
Opinion polls indicate that many Australians feel that Howard's support of Bush has increased rather than reduced the likelihood of terrorism, and may have contributed to the terrorist attacks against Australians in Bali in 2002 and 2005, and against the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2003. Comments by both Bush and Howard that Australia was the "sheriff" of the South Pacific sparked further anger in Asia.
And while Howard and his government are accused of being insular and too focused on the West, Rudd says he wants to embrace Australia's role in Asia.
Rudd says his fascination with Asia began when he was a boy and was given a book on ancient cultures. After attending a prestigious Queensland school (on scholarship) and graduating as dux, Rudd earned a degree in Asian Studies at the Australian National University, majoring in China and Mandarin, and he joined the department of foreign affairs upon leaving university. He was seen as a star of the foreign service, and was posted at an unusually young age to Beijing, where his Mandarin was good enough to translate at high-level meetings.
But not for long - Rudd was translating for the Australian ambassador when a sentence about close Australian-Sino relations raised eyebrows with the Chinese delegation. In textbook Mandarin, Rudd had said that Australia and China were enjoying simultaneous orgasms.
THE MISTRANSLATION DIDN'T hurt his career. He left the foreign service after eight years to join the Queensland government, where he was promoted to a department head position, before being elected to parliament in 1998, where he has gradually increased his margin of victory from 2 per cent to 18 per cent over nine years and turned his south Brisbane constituency into a safe Labor seat.
Rudd has also worked hard to improve his wonkish image. A five-year-long slot on a chummy breakfast chat show, where he participated in cooking demonstrations, answered calls from housewives, danced with the co-hosts and generally didn't take himself too seriously, helped hone the edges to his dry personality. The light touch came in handy during the one mild scandal of the election campaign: revelations that the committed Christian and family man had visited Scores, the Manhattan strip club, whilst on a taxpayer-funded visit to New York four years ago.
He quickly admitted visiting the club but said he was too drunk to remember whether he was cautioned by management for touching the strippers and asked to leave the club. "I have absolutely no recollection of that," said Rudd, "but if my behaviour caused any offence to anybody whatsoever that evening I, of course, wholeheartedly apologise."
Rudd said afterwards: "I think I'll take a belting in the opinion polls. It's an embarrassing thing to happen. But I think at the end of the day people just want you to level with them. I've said from day one since I've been in public life - I'm as flawed and failed as the rest of them."
Rudd might have his flaws, but he was wrong about the polls. If anything, the electorate appeared pleased that the ALP leader wasn't as buttoned-down as he seemed. He's still awfully square. It's telling that one of the only other controversies attached to him has been a YouTube video which shows him picking his ear, and then putting the wax in his mouth. That video was shown on Tonight with Jay Leno, and may be the only thing that most Americans know about him.
That will change, of course, if he wins today, and Rudd alters Australian policy towards the war in Iraq. Rudd also says he will ratify the Kyoto protocol on climate change, committing Australia to greenhouse targets and isolating the US as an environmental holdout.
The Howard government has claimed that Rudd's industrial policies will result in severe job losses and the end of a sustained economic boom, and his foreign policies will put the close US-Australia alliance at risk. George W Bush has made it clear that he would prefer a Howard victory, and says that it's not too late for another miracle comeback from the man who once described himself as "Lazarus with a triple bypass". Said Bush: "John Howard has been behind in the polls before and he's won." Of Rudd, says Bush, "He doesn't know me, and I don't know him, and so I look forward to sharing my views."
Given some of the knocks Rudd took in his stride early in life, a lecture from the US president ought to be a breeze.
TheRuddFile
Who is he?The leader of the Australian Labor Party
Why is he in the news?He'll be prime minister if Labor win today's federal election
Self-confessed strengths:Strong Christian faith, fluent in Mandarin, exceptional knowledge of Asia, opposes Iraq war
Self-confessed weaknesses:The married father-of-three admitted he has "flaws" after visiting a Manhattan strip club
Most likely to say:"Ni hao"
Least likely to say:"Forget the policy discussion on the future of Asean - let's go to the pub"