When I bring up the subject of Kevin Rudd’s brutal factional knifing, I am often accused of living in the past.
In fact nothing could be further from the truth. For example, let me take you back to 44BC.
This was another year when a group of factional powerbrokers decided their personal political interests would be much better served if they too knifed a leader who, despite his widely acknowledged vision and intellect, was criticised as being too imperious and autocratic.
The victim’s name, of course, was Gaius Julius Caesar, a man perhaps more pivotal in the spread of Western civilisation - and the extraordinary legal, political and economic benefits that go with it - than any other human being in history.
While one cannot suggest that Kevin Rudd’s accomplishments were in the same league as Caesar’s (Kevin himself, for example, would argue that his were far greater) there are some uncanny parallels between the two and none more so than the manner of their deaths:
1. Both men had grown up on the wrong side of the tracks, and been imbued with a sense that they must prove themselves superior to fat-bellied aristocrats;
2. Despite powerful connections, both men were regarded somewhat suspiciously by the political establishment - especially after they married rich women;
3. Both men had an outward-looking, expansionist and rather hawkish approach to foreign policy. Kevin pursued an intense campaign for a seat on the Security Council and the Libyan no fly zone, while Caesar had to make do with conquering the known world and chopping the heads off Gauls; and
4. Both were undone when their expansive reform programs were opposed by the political elite for the most personal and parochial of reasons.
It is this last fact that will do - is doing - the most damage to Australia, just as it did to Rome.
In Caesar’s case he gave land to the poor and legal rights to the entire Roman world; In Rudd’s case he saved the nation from the worst financial disaster in almost a century. Incredibly, neither feat was enough to save them from extermination at the hands of small-minded cowards.
At the time of his murder, Caesar was about to civilise the known world: Great infrastructure projects, giant ports, canals and roads, were to be established as was an incredible new library to rival that of Alexandria as a repository for human knowledge.
At the time of his murder, Rudd - just ask him - was about to save that civilisation: He wanted to deliver an emissions trading scheme that would have put enormous pressure on the US to follow suit and pave the way for a truly international mechanism to reduce carbon pollution and stop us all having to wear scuba gear in 20 years’ time.
But the small-minded and incestuous people around them - people who despite their enmity had been not punished but rewarded by each man - decided they deserved more than they already had, and sought to seize power for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal interests.
And, like all cowards, they thought if they acted quickly and in a pack that it could all be done quietly with no repercussions for their own precious skin.
But cowards are often also fools. The repercussions were swift, they were savage and they wrought havoc on countless innocents.
In Caesar’s case the entire government and empire of Rome fell apart. His assassins were ruthlessly pursued across the ancient world and slaughtered alongside the armies they raised; then his two avengers, Antony and Octavian, turned on each other in a brutal war that tore the civilised world to shreds.
And in Rudd’s case likewise the Government was annihilated by an angry public and replaced by a laughably shambolic parliament which is literally unable to function. Serious reforms have been replaced with rogue legislation lobbed at the supposed Prime Minister from fringe interest groups, be it the poker machine cap or the carbon tax.
The Government’s own initiatives - albeit idiotic beercoaster policies such as the Malaysia Solution— - are killed off in the house by the slightest tremor. And the basic administration of programs - such as NBN and solar panels - seems always to teeter on the brink of disaster.
When asked about her role in urging Kevin Rudd to dump the ETS, thus sparking the series of events that led to his demise and then execution, Julia Gillard refuses to confess her complicity, dismissing it as history.
History it is indeed, but history must never be dismissed. As the cliché warns, those who do are doomed to repeat it.
Had the Rudd plotters paid more attention to this they might have recalled that Caesar’s assassins were, to a man, viciously turned upon by the people and wiped out by their enemies. Ultimate power then went to the person they least wanted it to - a man who would rule for an age and obliterate their legacy.
Perhaps they will remember when Tony Abbott is, inevitably and overwhelmingly, swept to the office of Prime Minister at the next federal election.
Meanwhile here we are, with history repeating upon us. Like the poor Roman people, so recently enfranchised with new rights and new hope, we the citizens of Australia briefly tasted leadership until the instinctive gluttony for power of a narcissistic few left us engulfed by ruinous petty warfare.
And now we have been left with neither the government we voted for nor any government at all.
And we are prepared to flock to a man once thought unelectable, solely for the promise of a return to peace and order.
And the battered human remnants of the coup, so destroyed, will be unable to rise again.
It is a fate that ought to curse them and one they designed themselves, all for the want of a little history lesson.
What a perfect recipe for tyranny.
* For those confused by the headline, Kevin Rudd mentioned Iced Vo Vos in his 2007 election victory speech. For those confused by Joe Hildebrand, we’re sorry. There’s no explanation for him.
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