Rudd a blip in the history books?

MARK COLVIN: So how will Kevin Rudd be remembered?

He rose spectacularly to become one of the most popular prime ministers in Australia's history but his demise has been as abrupt and dramatic.
But why? And how will history regard him?

Jennifer Macey reports.
JENNIFER MACEY: On paper, Kevin Rudd certainly achieved a lot. He won a massive swing towards Labor in a federal election that knocked the incumbent prime minister John Howard out of his own seat.

He signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

He apologised to the Stolen Generations.

And he oversaw a response to the global financial crisis which cushioned the country from a surge in unemployment.
But is that how he will be remembered?

PAUL WILLIAMS: I think Australians will remember Kevin Rudd fondly, but I think both party members and party voters and the electorate generally will see Kevin Rudd as another Labor experiment that didn't just quite come off.

JENNIFER MACEY: Dr Paul Williams is a senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University in Brisbane.
PAUL WILLIAMS: Obviously Kevin Rudd scored some early runs on the board and he did attract enormous public support and high public opinion ratings in the early days of his prime ministership, indeed up until about six months ago.
But I think the electorate will remember Kevin Rudd as the Labor experiment that didn't work, because he was really out of the box of Labor leaders, he didn't come to Labor with the same Labor pedigree, or trade union background that so many other Labor prime ministers have had.

JENNIFER MACEY: He says Kevin Rudd will now be wedged in history between one of the longest running Prime Ministers John Howard and the country's first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

PAUL WILLIAMS: People might actually draw parallels between Kevin Rudd and Labor's other big trier, Ben Chifley, the post war prime minister in the late 1940s, because Ben Chifley also was sandwiched between two big prime ministerships of John Curtin, the Labor prime minister during the Second World War and of course the longest serving prime minister, Robert Menzies.

So, I think that in the longer term that Kevin Rudd might not get quite the space in the text books that otherwise he might deserve.

NORMAN ABJORENSEN: I think that Rudd has all the makings of a relegation to the footnote of history.

JENNIFER MACEY: Dr Norman Abjorensen is a political analyst from the Crawford School of Economics And Government at the ANU In Canberra. He says there were some notable highlights.

NORMAN ABJORENSEN: I think the high point, well certainly the steering of Australia through the global financial crisis; and that's something he can rightly claim. The other highlight too was the apology to the Stolen Generation; he rose to new heights of eloquence and graciousness with that particularly speech.

Unfortunately we never saw that side of Kevin Rudd again. There were high points and a gradual then suddenly a very abrupt decline and he's gone.

JENNIFER MACEY: Why do you think that happened?

NORMAN ABJORENSEN: A simple explanation is that he lost the confidence his most important constituency, that's the Labor Party itself. Kevin Rudd never saw the need to build a support base in the party and it became clear when he started to falter that no-one was going to rush to his defence; if he fell over, no-one was going to pick him up.

JENNIFER MACEY: Dr Abjorensen says his drop in popularity among the electorate began when he delayed the introduction of the emissions trading system earlier this year.

NORMAN ABJORENSEN: When he abandoned it for the life of this Parliament without I think any plausible explanation, people abruptly loss confidence and you can trace his rapid decline from that event.

JENNIFER MACEY: There was also the issue about his personal style and his approach to governing the country.

Dr Paul Williams again:

PAUL WILLIAMS: Same sorts of paralysis by analysis I think they said about Wayne Goss in the early and mid 1990s. The same sorts of problems that crept into the Goss government in terms of being a very dry, sterile, process driven government, could easily be described of the later stages of the Rudd government.

Had Rudd stayed on as prime minister, I'm sure those problems would have only become exacerbated.

MARK COLVIN: Paul Williams from Griffith University in Brisbane ending that report by Jennifer Macey.