Thank you for your correction Foxy. The brain slipped a gear there (again). Yes, of course it was two elections that Shorten lost as leader and not three. I was thinking of the earlier Gillard and Rudd time when he was only pulling ropes backstage.
However, my basic tenet is accurate. Rudd was a good PM, a very good one. Look at his legacy: he signed the Kyoto Protocol, delivered the apology to Indigenous Australians for the Stolen Generations, got the NBN under way (not his fault if the Tories destroyed it), started the Digital Education Revolution, dismantled WorkChoices, and got our troops out of Iraq (where they should never have been in the first place. The economic stimulus packages during the GFC were a genius move and saved us from disaster. Then there was the Australia 2020 Summit…
Where he fell down was over the Resources Super Profits Tax. He should have held his ground and gone to the country over that ! The Tory press were after him because of that, and the pink batts (even though he was not to blame) were a good excuse to blacken him. The Caucus got antsy, worrying about their jobs, Gillard renegued on a deal and the kingmaker orchestrated the vote. Rudd was gone.
Yes, your claim that “Rudd was his own worst enemy” has a certain amount of evidence to support it. He suffers fools badly, and that’s for sure, especially among his Caucus colleagues – but he certainly didn’t “forget who he worked for.” He knew well that he worked for the Labor Party — but it was the Caucus who removed him, and the Caucus is NOT the Labor Party, however much they might pretend to be. It was to cut back the Caucus’s power that he changed the rules for election of the leader — although, as he will understand now, it was ultimately a vain exercise, for the Caucus still controls the leadership results.
It’s high time that power was removed entirely from the Caucus, so that the Party would vote as a whole for the leadership on a simple democratic one- member-one-vote basis. That way we might have a chance of an Australian version of Jeremy Corbyn.
As for your disingenuous claim that you “will never understand why Shorten is not liked” - just look at his whole career ! (Ask Bob Sercombe, to start with.) Shorten may be a very nice bloke personally, and a case can be made that a person with his networking abilities is needed to organise the backroom dealings, but the kingmaker should never try and become king.
Shorten’s back-room wheeling and dealing, his ruthless ability to push his own barrow over anything that’s in his path, are not qualities that endear him to the general public.
He’s an abysmal public speaker. When people see him up on a podium, they’re not listening to what he says — which is always too damn complicated anyway — they’re waiting for the next zinger (Thankyou, Mr Micallef.). In this media-managed age, Labor needs a leader whom people like, instinctively, when they see him or her on their screens, one whom they like despite the depredations of the Murdoch media. That was never Bill.
Albo was the man chosen by the membership — why? Because they’re ordinary people, and ordinary people LIKE him instinctively. Whether he’ll manage to carry it off through the next election is anybody’s guess, but he has a certain charisma which will hold him in good stead. He’ll need it, too, given the fight he’s picked with Setka — but that’s another story.
You’re entitled to your opinion that “Julia was the real deal”, however wrong it may be. I’m getting a bit tired of the old mantra that “Rudd weakened her position so much that it was untenable,” though. The fact that Julia herself only got the job having weakened Rudd’s position so much that it was untenable, is carefully ignored by you, because it doesn’t suit your narrative.
You seem to think that you’re the only one around here who understands the way Labor politics works. Sorry, pal, I’m nobody’s boss, but I paid my dues on the Melbourne waterfront as a WWF delegate, when the unions still ran the show. So Foxy in short, GAGF yourself. 
