Keen students of Australian politics will recall that just prior to the Kevin07 election that saw him triumphantly elected as Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd was “outed” for having been taken along to a New York club frequented by scantily (ahem) clad ladies, some four years previously, after a late night dining and drinking too much.
Sources close to Mr Rudd told wellthisiswhatithink that the delivery of "Stop Work Choices Now, Protect My Penalty Rates" t-shirts were just running a little late*. To the best of our knowledge, no one in this photograph is Kevin Rudd.
Some reports claimed Rudd was asked to leave by the management after inappropriate touching of the dancers … although Rudd strenuously denied that component of the story, whilst admitting he’d been there, which he regretted. Presumably that was after he’d seen how much they all spent on champagne.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/kevin-rudd-hits-a-strip-club/story-e6frewt0-1111114215510
And as this report reveals, other Aussie pollies took the opportunity to fall over themselves to confess that they, too, had seen naked young ladies cavorting around on a stage at one time or another. Usually when they were young, callow yoofs who should have known better. And as nipping into a lap dancing club when sloshed is, frankly, a virtually universal Australian experience, at some time or other, this was hardly a great shock to anyone.
http://www.news.com.au/top-stories/im-not-captain-perfect-rudd-says/story-e6frfkp9-1111114215400
Now, though, when we are reliably forecast to be within somewhere between 1-3 weeks of Rudd challenging the woman who deposed him as Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to get the top job back again, he is again in the news for the “wrong” reasons. This time for dropping the “F Bomb” (and some other choice phrases) a few times during the recording of a message in Chinese.
The video – unbleeped – is here, and I think it’s truly hilarious. Go on, click it, you know you want to.
Of course, people have immediately leapt on to the internet and airwaves to accuse someone on Gillard’s side of leaking the out-takes to damage Rudd. But Prime Minister Julia Gillard denies her office leaked the video, which also shows a frustrated Mr Rudd slamming the table.
It was anonymously posted on YouTube over the weekend.
“There have been some assertions today that somehow this is connected with my office. That is completely untrue,” Ms Gillard told reporters in Darwin on Sunday.
“My office did not have access to the material people have seen on YouTube.”
Mr Rudd said the video was embarrassing, before he flew to Mexico for a meeting of foreign affairs ministers from the Group of 20 nations. His careful remarks included:
“Anyone who’s got a touch of suspicion about them would say that if this was done, somewhat embarrassingly, a couple of years ago and it suddenly emerges now, then obviously it’s a little bit on the unusual side,” he told Sky News.
But I wonder at the motives of whoever posted it, to be honest.
Those with long memories will recall that the almost universal reaction from the citizenry of Australia to news that Rudd had been to a strip club after chugging back a few too many tubes of the amber throat charmer** was “Bugger me, he’s not a desiccated calculating machine who talks in pointy head gobbledygook after all, he’s actually just an ordinary bloke like me. You know what? I’m even more inclined to vote for him now.”
And yes, he duly went up in the opinion polls, and on to win a huge victory against incumbent John Howard, who even lost his own seat in Parliament, the only sitting Prime Minister ever to do so.
So I suspect the embattled current PM or her staffers might have had nothing to do with the latest leak at all. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she is right now heading back to her hotel room in Darwin (where she has been commemorating the 70th anniversary of the bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1942) to have a lie down with a nice cup of tea and an aspirin, cursing and swearing to herself and anyone who would care to listen, somewhere along the lines of “Fuck me drunk, the fucking Milky Bar Kid has gone and fucking done it to me again.”
Sadly for her, though, none of her advisers would be smart enough to release footage of her incoherent rage.
(*This is not true. I made it up. I know that’s hard to believe.)
(**I do not know for sure that Kevin Rudd was drinking Fosters. I just hope, that in his role as a dinky-di Aussie, that he was.)
Well, This Is What I Think 