Who is Kevin Rudd? By The Spectator.

Kevin Rudd is in the news because Donald Trump, in an interview with Nigel Farage, said about Kevin — who is Australia’s ambassador in Washington: “I heard he was a little bit nasty. I hear he’s not the brightest bulb, but I don’t know much about him. If he’s at all hostile, he won’t be there long….”

So, who is Kevin Rudd, PM of Australia from 2007 to 2010?

Kevin Rudd won the 2007 election by pretending to be a ‘fiscal conservative’ on the vacuous slogan of ‘Kevin 07’ and the premise that he would be ‘Howard-lite’, ie. a younger version of John Howard, his popular conservative predecessor.

As soon as he got into power, Mr Rudd set about dismantling our successful border policies (sound familiar?), ditching offshore processing, temporary protection visas and boat turn-backs. As was entirely predictable, this swiftly resulted in an unprecedented flood of illegal immigrants pouring onto our shores (sound familiar?). Indeed, within three years the number of asylum-seekers arriving by boat increased from 148 in 2007 to 6,555 in 2010, costing the Australian taxpayer billions of dollars. Well over a thousand asylum-seekers perished at sea in leaky people-smuggler boats. Kevin’s border policies were later abandoned.

A climate cultist (he proclaimed climate change to be the ‘greatest moral challenge’ of our times), Mr Rudd’s brilliant idea to stop the oceans from rising was for the taxpayer to subsidise the installation of foam insulation throughout Australian roof cavities in order to lower the need for heating or air-conditioning. These ‘pink batts’ ended up costing the lives of four young workers electrocuted in rooftops. This policy was also soon abandoned.

Mr Rudd then set about saving the planet with an emissions-trading scheme which he himself later abandoned.

In the face of a cost-of-living crisis, Mr Rudd, along with his laughable sidekick, currently our Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, dreamed up fanciful schemes such as GroceryChoice and FuelWatch to assist uninterested consumers. Both schemes were soon abandoned.

Mr Rudd’s answer to the 2008 sub-prime crisis was to pour taxpayer dollars into school halls and covered playgrounds. This scheme was later abandoned.

Mr Rudd then dreamed up a Resources Super Profit Tax, a 40 per cent tax on mining profits – mining being the backbone of the Australian economy. This scheme was abandoned.

Mr Rudd boasts of his ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’ — a futile exercise whereby the federal government formally ‘apologised’ for the fact that in previous generations disadvantaged Aboriginal children were sometimes taken from their parents and placed with white families or missionaries. (Much the same happened to many poor white children, too.) This pointless virtue-signalling ‘apology’, now revived every year as ‘Sorry Day’, has made it extremely difficult for at-risk or abused Aboriginal children these days to be removed from their black parents and put into white foster homes because this would be ‘racism’ and ‘a second Stolen Generation’. The apology, which has almost certainly done more harm than good, was one of the few things Mr Rudd committed his government to that wasn’t, alas, abandoned.

Mr Rudd himself was also abandoned by his own Labor colleagues, one of whom described him as a ‘psychopathic narcissist’.

Perhaps, Mr Trump, you could do all Australians a very big favour if you do win back the presidency — and keep Kevin precisely where he is.