I love this description of him by his own people...... egomaniac, narcissistic, disloyal psychopath.
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RECYCLED Prime Minister Kevin Rudd didn't learn a thing during the three years and three days he spent in the wilderness.
Yesterday he had the opportunity to deliver a gift to the Australian people - the gift of an election - and he squibbed it.
Instead, he used his first address on his return to parliament as Prime Minister to utter platitudes dripping with hypocrisy and cant and publicly demonstrate he has not changed.
Humility is clearly not in his complex vocabulary either in terms of what he might consider "detailed programmatic specificity" or as a "complementarity that could be developed further in the direction of some form of conceptual synthesis".
Clearly his brief tribute to Julia Gillard, the nation's first female prime minister, the woman he had brought down less than 24 hours earlier, was as fine an example of a conceptual synthetic as so many of his other arrogant musings.
Observing him standing at the Despatch Box again and musing on the need for politicians to try and be "kinder and gentler" with each other with Gillard's blood still dripping from his dagger was hard to stomach - but when he then went on to pay tribute to the woman he had so spectacularly deposed as a "standard bearer for women" - his performance lapsed into the delusional.
In Rudd's world, Gillard was a major reformer with a proud record of great achievements.
If he believed this in any small portion, he would have given her a skerrick of genuine support instead of working tirelessly over the past three years to white-ant her.
Rudd says he has benefited from the perspective of spending time in what he termed "the nether regions" and a "distant place" within parliament but whatever the beneficial effects of his period on the backbench may have been they have yet to be revealed to the public.
It is now six months since Gillard launched the longest election campaign in the nation's history - during a speech at the National Press Club. It was a huge mistake, which fed into the general paralysis of her Labor-independent-Green minority government and highlighted its serial policy failures.
That was not her intent, of course. Gillard said she believed her early announcement would permit business and consumers to "plan their year".
They people of Australia certainly did plan their year. They effectively drew the curtains on 2013. They withheld investment, they withdrew their confidence, and the economy shrank.
Gillard said it should be "clear to all which are the days of governing, and which are the days of campaigning" but, while there was a lot of campaigning, she was fighting a raging civil war within her own party that left scant time for governing.
Rudd, had he learnt anything, had he listened to anyone during his frequent trips to shopping centres around the nation over the past three years, would have understood that the millions of Australians he claims were clamouring for his return really only wanted a circuit breaker - and they saw his resurrection merely as a means to curtail the longest election campaign in our history.
But his time in exile was wasted. Nothing he offered yesterday was new. He said the hardest thing was to offer a policy plan for the nation - and he proved his own point.
He offered no policy plans.
Yet, when last he was prime minister, he changed the Howard government's successful border protection policy, which had emptied the camps on Christmas Island and stopped the boats, to an open border policy which has led to 45,000 illegal boat arrivals.
On the day before the 2007 election, he said that he would turn the boats around and then never did. He signed Australia up to the United Nations' hysterical global warming agenda and opened the door to the carbon dioxide tax through an emissions trading scheme campaign - which he then turned around and dumped.
He started FuelWatch and GroceryWatch - and subsequently dumped them as well.
He launched the pink batts insulation scheme - which cost four lives and a billion dollars to fix.
He said he would fix public hospitals or take them over - but walked away from the policy - and he promised to deliver budget surpluses over the economic cycle and failed in that, too.
After Question Time, Sky News anchor David Speers astutely observed that Rudd had slipped right back into the prime ministerial chair. Nothing had changed. That's the problem.
Three years ago Rudd did not even stand against Gillard in the leadership ballot when his disgruntled colleagues told him he was Labor's problem.
Three years on, overnight polls notwithstanding, he remains Labor's problem.
If the first Rudd government was dysfunctional, this incarnation embodies dysfunction on steroids.
We all know how disparaging those who worked with Rudd have been about his character, labelling him variously as an egomaniac, narcissistic, disloyal psychopath. That was on a good day.
It would be in his interest, and the interest of the Australian people, to keep the number of days voters must
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/why-rudd-is-speaking-out-of-his-ahem-nether-region/story-fni0cwl5-1226671026112
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