So Miss McKew turns on Labor & her mentor after trashing Gillard she then trashes Rudd. Maybe labor can try to keep the lid on the poison that has riven the party but the cracks are now showing as the factional bosses freeze out members who should have a ministerial seat. The previous Labor speaker is not happy & letting everybody know about it.
This book she has written referencing really says it all about Labor, what was so clear to voters who removed them but still Labor labor under the foolish fantasy that they have changed but nothing has far as the voters can see. Still rotten at the core & looking out for themselves.
The decaying heart of Labor, the corruption at the very top of labor, is still a smell that keeps on giving. The sensational plea of guilty by the former President of Labor, the stench of Obead & Thomson & now the factional bosses cementing their places again in Labor.
Kevin Rudd trashed as Maxine McKew mauls her maker
HAVING trashed Julia Gillard's prime ministership, former Labor MP Maxine McKew has now rubbished the man to whom she owes her brief political career: Kevin Rudd.
Ms McKew, who won John Howard's seat of Bennelong in 2007, says Mr Rudd was "off his game" during this year's election campaign, advocated idiotic policies and introduced a "perverse and cruel" asylum-seeker regime that she "couldn't stomach".
The one-term MP, a former ABC 7.30 Report host recruited by Mr Rudd to run in 2007, says Mr Rudd "went off the deep end" when he announced he favoured "the idiocy" of preferential tax rates for companies that moved to the Northern Territory. Ms McKew also says Labor's "already diminished credibility was practically shredded" when senior public servants disowned the suggestion they had verified a "black hole" in the Coalition's policy costings.
And she attacks the selection of former Queensland premier Peter Beattie as Labor's candidate for Forde, describing it as one of the "worst" decisions of the campaign and saying "it looked desperate".
The bitter denunciation of a man she once lauded and the party she still supports is provided in a new chapter titled "September is the cruellest month" in her political memoir Tales from the Political Trenches.Ms McKew spent part of the election campaign travelling with Mr Rudd and his inner circle.
Ms McKew, whose partner is the former Labor Party national secretary Bob Hogg, reiterates her extensive criticism of Ms Gillard's prime ministership, dismissing it as an "experiment" that "failed" after Labor was taken to the "edges of irrelevance".
Mr Rudd's return as Labor leader in June was "a belated admission of a grievous error", she writes.
Among the many other attacks on Mr Rudd is that he was a micro-manager who created "confusion" about his political persona when during a debate he said he was an "economic nationalist" who supported revising foreign investment laws. When Mr Rudd was questioned on the ABC's Q&A about his support for gay marriage, Ms McKew says the then prime minister displayed "rudeness" to a pastor that left the man feeling "humiliated".
Ms McKew criticises Mr Rudd over his failure to develop a plan for economic reform that placed jobs at its centre.
Instead, Mr Rudd "banged on endlessly about building a strong economy", which she says was meaningless.Ms McKew lashes several other Labor figures, including former NSW Labor secretary and incoming senator Sam Dastyari for "looking after himself" by taking a vacant Senate seat on the eve of the election.
Despite her criticism of Mr Rudd, she writes that he helped Labor to minimise seat losses.But the Rudd-Gillard feud, Ms McKew writes, has led to each generating such strong "emotions and language" that in the future it "will be as reflexive as acid rising in the gullet".
