The Secret Diary of Kevin Rudd

Well friends, once again my government is delivering on its promises. You’ve no doubt heard that I’ve set the date to say sorry to the Stolen Generation, an important event on the road to bringing us all together as a nation. You have no doubt also heard that Boy Wonder, Brendan Nelson, has demanded that he be provided the full text of the apology before deciding whether or not he supports it, I think that he’s still struggling to understand that he’s not a part of the government any more.

Let me lay it out for you Brendan, the ‘Bringing them home’ report was presented to the government that you were a part of in 1997, you had ten years to draft and deliver an apology to the Stolen Generation and you failed. This issue is no longer about you, your party or your redneck supporters, it’s now about doing the right thing.

I’ve got John Faulkner drafting a ’special’ version of the apology to send to Brendan’s Office which will basically lay blame at the feet of the Liberal Party, as they were the party in government at the time, and opening the way for all affected people to sue the Liberal party for damages, that should give Brendan something to whine about while we get on with the business of fixing all the things they broke over the last eleven and a half years.

The past few days have been pretty stressful here in the Rudd bunker, there are floods in Queensland, Nicola Roxon’s Mum hassling me about when I’ll give my Health Minister time off to get married, explaining to Heath Ledger’s fan club that a State Funeral isn’t appropriate, even if “10 things I hate about you” was a really sweet movie, and to top it all off  my first Australian of the Year  presentation is to Lee Kernaghan.

I just wanted to remind you all that I don’t personally chose the Australian of the Year, it’s left to a bunch of old farts panel of eminent Australians who go through the gruelling task of assessing thousands of nominations.

With that out of the way, it’s time to start getting ready for our Hottest 100 party. Have a great Australia Day everyone.

The much commented upon sideburns are completely gone, if I have any more hair cut off I’ll be looking like Peter Garrett. In the mean time a whole raft of important announcements have been buried, well done Australian media, you’re really on the way to emulating Fox News when it comes to journalistic integrity.

Now onto something important. I wanted to share this with you yesterday afternoon, because it is so amazingly cool, unfortunately I had to fit a trip to a barber into my schedule. Anyway, a little while after getting off the phone from the MEAA and Bradley, my ASIO contact, regarding the Crabb situation I received a call on the secure line and Bradley requested an appointment. To be honest I was pretty annoyed with Bradley as there was no way that he could have obtained the detailed information that I’d requested in half an hour, but I agreed to see him.

I was stewing while I waited for Bradley to arrive, expecting that he would be coming over to give some lame excuse about why it was inappropriate  for me to be asking ASIO to check up on people that I didn’t like. Instead, when Bradley arrived he was accompanied by three trolleys carrying file boxes which carried copies of the records of every journalist in Australia. There were even files on some of the high profile blogs and regular talk-back callers, really comprehensive stuff an absolute gold mine.

Have you ever wondered why not a single journo in Australia used to be willing to ask a hard question of John Howard? I know we in the ALP bloody well did, well here’s the answer. It seems that after a disastrous first term, where Howard was relentlessly pursued by the media, he set up a secret unit in ASIO reporting solely to him, which tracked journos private lives. After just a cursory look through the files there’s a pretty obvious pattern emerging, the more embarrassing or unsavoury someone’s private life the more sycophantic they used to be to Howard, think Ackerman, Alan Jones, Bolt. I don’t want to share the detail on the blog because a lot of it is really depraved, but we might see an improvement in coverage of the ALP pretty soon, I’ll leave it at that.

Look, I’m all about transparency, accountability and the importance of the fourth estate, but I have to level with you, most journos struggle to find their way from the non-members bar to the gallery. Working the news cycle has become a stupid game that takes almost as much energy to manage as actual governance, the hacks are essentially lazy and won’t report something unless they think there’s a Walkley in it for them.

Which brings me back to Annabel Crabb. I’ve already dealt with her Hugh Jackman nonsense, but she’s at it again today devoting an entire article to my sideburns. When I saw the article it really infuriated me, I mean I’m trying to deliver on our first term agenda and all she can raise an interest in is frivolous nonsense. So I did the right thing and called Ron Walker. I hate to admit it but I lost my cool and started ranting at him, which is completely out of character for me, but he just stayed on the line laughing at me and talking about a free press and a whole bunch of other things that he and his Liberal Party mates don’t actually believe in.

After seeing how futile it was trying to deal with Fairfax I decided to take matters in house. ASIO will be taking a very close look at Ms Crabb over the next few days, and although I can’t say too much she may be facing a disciplinary hearing from the journos’ union the MEAA.

More as this develops.

This whole saga with Dr Mohamed Haneef has been pretty embarrassing, it was a series of cock ups from start to finish and to be perfectly honest we just want to put the whole thing out to pasture. The Federal Court had already ruled that revoking Dr Haneef’s visa wasn’t performed legally, which pretty much squared things up, and we asked the Solicitor General for some advice about how best to finish things off.

Unsurprisingly, the Solicitor General let us know in no uncertain terms that we should get away from this whole sorry mess ASAP, so Chris Evans drafted a press release saying we wouldn’t appeal the Federal Court’s decision, sent it to the hacks and figures the whole sorry episode was closed.

How wrong were we? It seems that the clueless wonders who now find themselves in opposition can’t even realise when we’re doing them a favour. To tell you the truth, John Faulkner wanted to hold a public inquiry into the whole Haneef issue so we could parade that twerp Kevin Andrews around a few times and remind people that the Liberals still have him on their much heralded team, even if he is currently warming the bench. I overruled John on this one, as much as I’d like to see the Liberals held accountable for this, dragging it out only hurts our international reputation. So we did the right thing, let it die a natural death, and what did the Libs do? They demanded that we release the Solicitor General’s advice, whipping the whole thing up again.

Firstly, no-one ever shares legal opinions that have been given to them, you might as well ask Brad Pitt if you can share his wife. Secondly, what the hell do they expect the legal advise will say? Do they genuinely believe that we would act against the advice of the Solicitor General while claiming that we’re doing what he suggested? That may have been how they ran the country, but it’s not the way it’s being done now.

Hopefully some hacks will lodge an FOI application for the briefing paper so we can let everyone see how stupid the Solicitor General thinks Kevin Andrews is without it looking like we’re doing a hit job on him. In the mean time, how about we all try to get India back on side?

Can you believe that it’s only two days since I officially came back from holiday? For the past two days my office has had the feeling of a Byzantine bazaar, such has been the level of activity and the broad range of issues to be addressed, but that’s to be expected when you’re a hands on leader like I am. There’s been a sense among some of my colleagues that the hurdles we face are more numerous and higher than we anticipated, but I have offered them all the same piece of advice, “Mess this up and you won’t even get a job mopping the floor at the ACTU cafeteria.”

The only person who seems completely happy with the way things are going right now is Wayne. He’s had a lot of press lately and most of it has been quite positive, especially the reports of his meeting with the State and Territory Treasurers and Health Ministers. By all accounts it was quite successful, but then again the reaction you get when you give money to the States is not unlike that when handing out free Mars bars at a kids’ fat camp. To their credit though, the State legislators all played their roles well, without anyone deviating from the script that I had approved late last week.

One amazing thing is how quickly most of the hacks have fallen into line and started accepting our statements as conventional wisdom, it’s almost as if they are simply incapable of anything more than re-typing press releases. One of the commentators who has gone out of their way to emphasise the need for a positive relationship is Laurie Oakes, I think he’s pretty much the only person left in the Channel 9 newsroom who can even find Canberra on a map, so he doesn’t want to get anyone offside and lose access. Laurie and I have a personal understanding anyhow, it has its roots in my time at uni when I worked as a house cleaner for him as a way of earning a few extra dollars, we both have a very good understanding of what’s ‘off the record’.

There’s a queue outside my door already so I’ll sign off.

I’d just like to say a quick thank-you to everyone who sent through their best wishes to Therese yesterday. The media reports about it being a routine procedure were correct, but it’s nice to know that people care.

Have any of you seen this? Apparently there are a bunch of former Coalition staffers who haven’t received their termination payments yet, it seems that working for morally bankrupt jerks can come back to haunt you after all. I just want to reassure everyone that I am not involved in this process at all, I’m here to govern for all Australians. That said, don’t let anyone ever try to tell you that John Faulkner has no sense of humour.

Look, I know Annabel Crabb thinks that she’s pretty funny, and I admit I often get a laugh out of some things that she writes about Brendan Nelson (or Brenda as we call him in the ALP), but the comment in this story about me having a man crush on Hugh Jackman is a complete fabrication.

This is hard to write, because I really admire Hugh, but I have to be honest with you all, he’s not scintillating company. We spent the day together at the SCG because we were both invited by Cricket Australia, I only went because I felt obliged to. I mean I was in Sydney anyway, so I didn’t have much excuse and Tim Gartrell told me that Howard’s passion for cricket was one of the few things people liked about him, so I need to extinguish that by taking over the cricket loving mantle. So anyway, we’re at the cricket and at the end of the day I said to Hugh “we should share a meal sometime”, I was just being polite of course, growing up in Queensland you soon learn that it doesn’t do to be seen as being ‘up yourself’. Anyway, Hugh says ‘That’d be great” and before I’m even back to Kirribilli House Therese is on my mobile saying that Deborra Lee Furness has been on the phone organising a time for dinner.

I’m not really up with the whole celebrity thing so I called Peter Garrett and asked him to help me make things run smoothly, he suggested we invite Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban over as well so that it doesn’t look like Hugh is getting some kind of special treatment. I asked one of the guys from ASIO to get me Nicole’s mobile number and Pete set the whole deal up.

I was really apologetic to the staff at Kirribilli, we were supposed to be having a quiet time without any official engagements, but they were all really great. Apparently the Howards used to make ridiculous demands of them all the time, just for a laugh. Once Janette even told one of the staff to get her a grape flavoured Slush Puppy at 3am because she had been kept awake by John snoring off a liquid dinner with Piers Ackerman, or so I’m told.

Saturday night rolls around and Hugh is just talking a million words a minute. He’ s all ‘Australian film industry’ this, ‘arts grant’ that, innumerable mentions of his production company, it was a real hard sell. Deborra Lee looked a bit embarrassed to be honest, I think she just wanted to come for the view. I didn’t know how to get him to shut up, thankfully Pete could see my pain so he interrupted Hugh and asked him “So what was the deal with Viva Laughlan?”. That pretty much took Hugh out for the rest of the night.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Hugh’s hugely talented and his heart is in the right place, but he’s just so earnest about it all. Pete told him to get their people talking, which I think made him feel better.

The night was otherwise pretty uneventful, apart from the staff having to divert Keith away from the cellar a couple of times. I hope that he sorts himself out before he becomes a father because parenting is a tough job.

So that’s the truth Australia, Hugh Jackman; great to sing show tunes with, not so much fun over dinner. We’re just friends.

Well I guess that it’s time to really gear up for this Prime Minister gig. Unlike that treacherous loser Latham I have no desire to keep a personal dirt file wrapped up as a diary, to be sold to the highest bidder after an abject failure, instead I want to share my own personal thoughts with you people out there in voterland one to one with this humble blog.

Unlike the Kevin07 stuff this will be a lot more personal, hell I haven’t even told Tim Gartrell that I’m writing it yet, he’ll probably throw an almighty hissy fit about it (he’s such a control freak). I’d like to share some reflections on the campaign, and also let you in on my thoughts about day to day stuff. This will be a tell all behind the scenes look at governing Australia unlike anything that has come before it.

I hope you enjoy it with me.