Griffith

Note: Kevin Rudd gave his first interview since losing the leadership last night, which Leo Shanahan looks at in the next post. With Labor struggling in Queensland, I spent the first few days of this week in The Sunshine State talking to voters in the seats of Griffith and Longman, and trying fruitlessly to interview the former PM. The anti-Labor sentiment in Rudd’s home state was identified by Newspoll yesterday and is born out in the piece below focussing on Rudd’s seat.

There are no posters, no balloons, no “Vote One” vans, no army of volunteers handing out leaflets for the candidate. On the day I arrived, even the street leading to the electorate office had been shut down, after a bizarre accident where a man suffered a heart attack, and while the ambulance was tending to him, a truck came around the corner and smashed into the back of ambulance.

The electorate office is stuck between a Blockbuster video store and a pet shop and it has a small yellow sign out front which reads “Kevin Rudd: Standing up for the Southside.”

It’s a lowbrow setting for a man who just four weeks ago was running a nation but who now, adding injury to insult, is not even in his electorate office but at home recovering from an operation on his gall bladder.

Continue reading "Looking for Kevin in the State that’s ditching Labor" »