Kevin Rudd got a bounce in the polls for Labor after his knifing of former Australian PM Julia Gillard. But as the SMH reports, the lustre is wearing off:
It was brief, dignified and to the point, but Julia Gillard's statement that she would not attend Sunday's Labor campaign launch was startling, too. How quickly we move on; how quickly Labor wants us to move on.
Gillard has disappeared. She has posted just one thank-you tweet to well-wishers since being ousted as prime minister on June 26, barely two months ago. She reportedly has bought a house in Adelaide to be close to her family. She won't be sitting with other Labor luminaries on Sunday because she doesn't want to ''distract in any way from Kevin Rudd's powerful message''. She has ''fervent hope'' for a Labor victory.
There was so much left unsaid in Gillard's two-sentence statement. Was there irony lurking there, not wanting to ''distract'' Rudd, the man whose distractions all but derailed the 2010 campaign and played a sizeable role in destroying Gillard's prime ministership?
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What is Gillard thinking as she watches Labor's campaign, the dashing of the fantasy that ''the people'' just love Kevin Rudd, that Kevin Rudd alone can win this election because Kevin Rudd is a brilliant campaigner who can make us believe that Kevin Rudd offers a ''new way''?
Whatever Gillard is thinking, she'll hold her tongue for now. She may not be physically present in Brisbane, but her political ghost will be. Labor may have little choice but to pray that voters' memories are short, but it cannot erase its past, cannot pretend this election is all about scary Tony Abbott and his ''cuts, cuts, cuts''.
The central question is whether this election will turn out to be a judgment on Labor's six years of division that has overshadowed its policy achievements, or whether through gritted teeth we'll risk another three messy years because we're scared of what Tony Abbott might do.
I have been around too long to predict election outcomes, but it is looking as though September 7 will be a day of reckoning for a party that has come close to destroying itself. Labor seems so hollowed out that perhaps it had no choice but to grasp onto an American-style campaign centred around one man, Kevin Rudd, the man who more than any other contributed to the party's predicament.
Perhaps Rudd's elevation will mean that Labor will avoid the ''catastrophic defeat'' it faced under Gillard, and it will console itself with that. But there is so much heaviness in Labor's campaign, weighed down as it is by bad memories and bad blood.
Labour is in deep strife. A new poll out this morning shows Labor getting a bath in key marginals in New South Wales and Victoria. The bookies have already paid out on a coalition victory.
So will this image be Rudd's unfortunate epitaph?
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